
Blockchain is a useless technology - jakarta
https://glennchan.wordpress.com/2018/02/20/blockchain-is-a-useless-technology/
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AndrewStephens
Not sure why this was flagged. It seems a pretty well-thought out, non-troll
argument even if you don't agree.

Personally I think that bitcoin-style blockchains are pretty useless outside
of some very specific cases. Consensus between parties that don't trust each
other is pretty much what our entire system of banks, governments, and lawyers
(when things go wrong) was created to deal with. Replacing all that with an
simplistic algorithm is the worse case of Engineers Disease.

I know that a some people have made a lot of money from bitcoin - good luck to
them. And bitcoin does have some value if you want to move value around
without those pesky government controls. But I don't see how the whole system
will not just fade away once the smart people have extracted all the money
from the suckers.

But I don't have any bitcoin, feel free to ascribe this comment to sour
grapes.

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tigershark
If you didn’t notice a lot of people on HN are heavily evangelising bitcoin.
Probably as you say they have made millions on the shoulders of other people.
Flagging anything that may deflate just a bit the bubble is part of their
modus operandi.

~~~
ttoinou

       on the shoulders of other people
    

... that have contracted with the systems voluntarily

~~~
nosuchthing
...under false marketing pretense & propaganda

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Sangermaine
This reminds of an article from a few months ago:

>Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-
with-...](https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-
case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100)

Blockchain technology seems to be the ultimate case of a solution in search of
a problem. I'm sure there are some niches where it maybe useful, but the hype
around it is so absurd it borders on the religious. How often do you see
comments here, for example, professing faith in its glorious, inevitable
future? It's sometimes like talking to a fervent Christian about the Kingdom
of Heaven that will come when Jesus returns.

~~~
ttoinou

      I'm sure there are some niches where it maybe useful
    

Like a worldwide instantaneous transfer payment and a currency competing with
an over-regulated financial system and central banks ?

What a small niche indeed.

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tigershark
Like a broken payment system that takes hours for a confirmation, north of 50$
of commission even if you are transferring a single cent, instantaneous theft
of hundred of millions USD and countless hard forks? I would say I’m very,
VERY lucky of not being part of this small niche that apparently burns more
electricity than me, my children, my grandchildren and so on until the 50th
generation and over...

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ttoinou
Talking about blockchain here, not bitcoin (which already have really good
competition)

    
    
       that apparently burns more electricity than me, my children, my grandchildren and so on until the 50th generation and over
    

So you are going to get ride of every electricity consuming technology you
have and get back living in a cavern ?

Have you computed the amount of electricity consumed by the actual financial
system, payment systems and banks ?

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xt00
Blockchain's primary utility is in creating what initially was a complicated
way to allow people to convert money into another currency that was easy to
transfer around the world and use in ways that people would not want to use
real fiat currency for. Without that utility, the whole thing would be a
boring article somebody wrote back in 2008. Without the obfuscation of
blockchain and mining and distributed ledger and all that, if people in china
said "hey I want to convert my RMB into something called magic money that
allows me to move 1 billion RMB into another country", the government would
block them. But when they did it with bitcoin nobody initially freaked out
because they were confused.. so eventually blockchain will be improved and as
it improves it will become more centralized, more reliable, and less
anonymous.. no big surprise this has happened many times before in the various
era's of the internet...

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rosser
> _Blockchain 's primary utility is in creating what initially was a
> complicated way to allow people to convert money into another currency..._

Blockchain's primary utility has _nothing to do with money_. An attempted
alternative to fiat currency is just an easy, obvious application of the
distributed ledger/consensus capability that a blockchain offers.

This myopic focus on "blockchain == cryptocurrency" misses _so much_ of the
point, it would be laughable — if it weren't tragic.

~~~
pwinnski
It was incredibly myopic of Satoshi Nakamoto to start with a white paper
titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" for sure. That
Nakamoto guy missed _so much_ of the point.

Or maybe people want the point to be something other than it was.

Yeah, that's the laughable part.

~~~
rosser
You're confusing _Bitcoin_ with _blockchain_. The former is a specific
implementation — the first, yes, but that doesn't limit its other uses — of
the latter. The latter is an abstraction that has uses far beyond _mere
money_.

 _That 's_ the myopia. If you (the general you) can't see the difference, I'm
not the one who's short-sighted.

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xt00
Totally agree that they are separate things but I’m talking about how the
technology was immediately leveraged.. for example if we were talking about
how roads can be used for lots of things other than allowing cars and trucks
to drive fast.. Blockchain is infrastructure, so without a use for the
infrastructure it’s just boring new tech.. I mean maybe an example of what I
mean by boring new tech is like a new programming language.. “Blap programming
language allows you to write everything as a monad! All monads all the
time!”... that kind of thing.. it’s like ok some new infrastructure but what
does it allow me to do with it? That’s what I’m talking about.. I think
Blockchain is super cool and I love the distributed nature of not trusting
people, but I am concerned that the history of other technologies that are
cool initially because they are decentralized will end up being controlled by
people who benefit from the tech the most and people that benefit are likely
to be subject to scrutiny by various governments.. so that’ll end up screwing
everything up.. so that concerns me..

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tyrust
The author should consider replacing "blockchain" with "Bitcoin" in their
title. They spend the entire time talking about Bitcoin and do not make
mention of any of the (many) alt coins that are attempting to solve various
subsets of the problems they present.

None of their criticisms of Bitcoin are novel.

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readams
None are novel, but it is a good summary of all of the problems. And there
aren't any good answers to these criticisms, so they're worth repeating.

~~~
tyrust
There are plenty of answers to the criticisms. For example:

    
    
       * fast payment confirmation and network capacity - for BTC, the Lightning Network.  Plenty of alt coins have solutions for both of these
    
       * overhead that does not cost billions of dollars a year - there are alternatives to PoW
    
       * account security - paper and hardware wallets
    

Cryptocurrency is not without its problems, but you can't just list them all
and conclude that the blockchain is useless. Especially when there are plenty
of applications being used right now.

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helthanatos
Applications such as money laundering and getting uneducated people to invest
in a "currency"? It doesn't seem like the supporters of Bitcoin have much
reason to support it

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seanalltogether
Blockchains are very inefficient if the ledger can be controlled by trusted
sources. Git for example is far more efficient at managing local copies of
object state and history. Most organizations have no use for trustless data
structures, so I would agree that blockchains have limited use outside of pure
p2p anonymous networks.

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debt
"I just don’t know when the bubble will pop."

I've been wondering this as well. Surely someone must have a rough idea when
Bitcoin will tank.

I mean like a Big Short-style idea. I understand people are straight _pumped_
about bitcoin but I don't care about those people; I want to know when Bitcoin
will pop.

There must be someway to figure this out.

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trophycase
It just isn't going to happen man. Sorry to break it to you.

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debt
Sell now and maybe you’ll get out ahead. ;)

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trophycase
The article just seems to be willfully ignorant. Blockchain has already proven
itself useful to the millions of people who have bought things off of darknet
markets. He tries to make the argument that the ability to fork the protocol
is essentially the same as having a centralized third party control the
protocol which is just astoundingly wrong.

He basically completely ignores the idea of a blockchain as a way for non-
trusting parties to quickly and easily agree on truth but then makes the
argument that since the _smart_ tech companies AMZN, FB, and GOOG aren't
offering blockchain services, that the technology must not actually have any
real use cases, another ridiculous point.

~~~
briankelly
> idea of a blockchain as a way for non-trusting parties to quickly and easily
> agree on truth

Truth of what exactly? It would seem like many useful applications require
off-chain oracles which completely subvert the point of the block chain. The
only truths I can think of that two non-trusting parties could agree upon is
are outputs of deterministic algorithms (i.e. math/logic/hard truth), which
has to be utterly useless to the real world, except maybe to harness idle
computational to compute prime numbers, PDEs, etc. (i.e. still pretty
useless). I'm clearly missing something if all of the hype is warranted and
would appreciate if you could point me to any resources/examples that cover
this.

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ShabbosGoy
> A company’s stance on blockchain can also serve as a test of a company’s
> management. In my view, companies pushing blockchain technology (e.g. IBM,
> Microsoft, Intel, Oracle) are disconnected from customers’ actual needs and
> have mediocre management. Companies that don’t talk about blockchain (e.g.
> Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple) are more likely to produce sensible
> technology that will work in the real world.

And yet, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel are solving their customers’ needs
on a daily basis. Could it be that blockchain tech is in its infancy like the
Altair was at Xerox PARC?

I’m not sure what repulsed me more: the author’s smug attitude, or the trash
design of his blog riddled with ads.

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taoistextremist
I don't agree that distributed ledgers are a bad idea, though ones that can be
controlled by large amounts of computing power might be. In general, though,
something that doesn't rely on central trust to accurately record something
seems like a really good idea, to me. I'm more interested in applications in
civics such as voting, though. I don't know whether blockchain is the best
solution because AFAIK it would be difficult to anonymize individuals, but if
a workable solution could be made this could renew public trust in
historically corrupt institutions around the world, and steel other ones
against becoming corrupt.

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rrggrr
Anyone who has to deal with UCC1 filings at the State & County level can point
to a blockchain use case that is a killer app. I've approached a few of the
ICO's on this use-case without interest.

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thisisit
I am sure there will be people who will comment about how bitcoin =!
blockchain. This is one of the biggest issue in cryptocurrency space. There is
no branding. I think someone might start a coin called Block Chain or
blockChain just to muddy waters.

Still it will be interesting to see a survey - Maybe Coinbase can run it on
their platform on what a novice cryptocurrency investor thinks blockchain
means. Is it a coin or bitcoin or technology?

I also find the betting against cryptocurrencies using AMD a fascinating
hypothesis. Any traders on this forum have insights on this?

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mattbeckman
Blockchain tech is more than just Bitcoin.

To ignore that at this stage in the game makes me think the author is a trader
looking at the tech from an investment perspective.

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kylell
on the same page with banks faking Libor, his main argument is governments can
ban banks working with bitcoin and everything is dead in the water, first of
all, a global enforcement of it must be done, seconds there are even
constitutional rights here at play, and you can buypass banks all together,
and in Japan is legal tender.

If bitcoin can challenge banks & money printing machines even a little then it
kind of achieves its goal, and I think is happening already otherwise you
won't see so much bad press, don't tell me bankers are just trying to inform,
they are really worried about me losing money speculating on bitcoin, they
didn't cared when they crashed the economy in 2008, also I saw a news story
the other day, the poland central bank or so, paid 30k euros to a famous local
youtuber to trash bitcoin.

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spelunker
> Disclosure: I am short a company (not mentioned in this article) that hypes
> its ‘blockchain’ solutions. Short AMD. Long FB and GOOGL.

Is the author short Riot Blockchain? Because that's an easy one to short.
Maybe Long Blockchain Corp? Kodak?

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bitwize
I heard Bitcoin described as "an environmentally unfriendly way to hate the
government". I think that about sums it up.

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slilo
Spoiler: it's not.

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data_spy
Nice opinion piece from a nobody. Lost credibility from me when his about me
page was filled with ads.

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fortylove
Maybe you see something else, but I see 1 fairly standard side ad and 2 pretty
small ads at the far bottom of the article.

I wouldn't call 3 ads on a 3.7k word article "filled with ads".

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davesque
For those who didn't make it to the bottom, the author is short on AMD's
stock. AMD stands to benefit from the activity of crypto currency mining.

~~~
fortylove
So the author who finds blockchain useless is willing to put money where their
mouth is?

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davesque
Yes, and they also have a financial incentive to downplay the tech which
people should know _before_ reading the article, not after.

