
Schneier on Blockchain, and Trust - jajag
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_good_reaso.html
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mikelockz
His statements about trust in "institutions" misses the mark for me. Deutsche
Bank has been convicted and fined repeatedly for money laundering. They have
neither reformed their operations not been penalized enough to impact their
business. Same for all the other large financial institutions that caused the
2008 collapse. No figureheads or executives were punished financially or
criminally. Another example would be the Equifax hack that stole the private
data of 143 million Americans and again no civil or criminal penalties for the
people responsible.

These companies are too big to fail and don't respond to market forces. They
have captured the government regulators and create barriers to entry for
competitors.

For many people there is no "institutional" trust as Schneier describes. There
is forced institutional interaction, mostly likely because it benefits the
government to monitor individuals. Perhaps cryptocurrencies are a fad, but I
doubt his conclusion that there is no utility value in a "trustless" system.
The current system is broken and nobody is fixing it.

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whoisninja
he's spot on about private blockchains

he's also spot on about Ethereum and other alts

he's not absolutely right about Bitcoin. If there's a hard money that is
better than gold, and that's backed by electricity --- it solves lot of
problems dear sir ! please try to understand that aspect. For the love of
technology and logic.

Please read Bitcoin Standard once, of course it is massive experiment that can
fail but saying that it is useless dis-credits the efforts of many bright
computer scientists working in this field. Yes 95% is scam and most are
conmans, but that is true with any greenfield area. AI must had, security must
had scams.

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redis_mlc
Just to head off the pro-Bitcoin trolls ...

> For many people there is no "institutional" trust as Schneier describes.

Nobody thinks of the banking industry as a role model. But everybody relies on
going to the ATM for successful withdrawals. That's the trust that Schneier
was referring to, not your personal spirit quest.

> Equifax ...

is not a bank.

> massive amt of electricity used in gold mining

Gold is a rare element, with tangible uses.

> Please read Bitcoin Standard once ...

Nobody denies the mathematics, so mentioning the math is just a red herring
used by apologists - "if you only knew what I know"

> so many banks employing millions of people and using so much computation to
> print money out of thin air

Most large banks are run on a single mainframe computer (Tandem or IBM) with
low-power terminals at branches. That mainframe consumes about as much power
as one mining rig.

Source: worked at a national-level bank in their data center.

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whoisninja
and.... there's massive amt of electricity used in gold mining(and toxic for
environment for how it's done) and so many banks employing millions of people
and using so much computation to print money out of thin air (debt issuance,
fractional reserve, derivatives, fiat-backed by just trust on your govt,
artificially low interest rates, modern monetary theory - you name it) it is
not sustainable dear sir.

Forget Bitcoin and crypto and tech, have you ever thought about that problem?
It could very well be one of the biggest mess our society is in at a global
scale.

