This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”.
Of course the combination of signed transactions, common visible ledgers, introducing computational challenges to forgery, resiliency through consensus (kinda)… all the bits and pieces can be remixed into really interesting ideas.
Bitcoin, I still don’t get. More public, slower, more expensive, no fundamental utility, and still subject to nation-state interference?
> This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”.
That's because they have no idea what they're talking about. At a certain point you have to ask yourself why Bitcoin is worth $2T and no enterprise blockchain has ever taken off. How many years more of this trend is required to prove the "technologists" are wrong? It's already been 16 years.
And while I don't believe in appeal to authority, it's worth mentioning that I have been working in this field for pretty much my entire career and TA'd the first Stanford CS course on blockchains and crypto currencies in 2015. I very much know what I'm talking about and the people at Vanguard are blindly parroting what Deloitte and McKinsey are telling them about "blockchain".
It's all down to how money is issued. The tokens we have to work for are created effortless by bankers from nothing whenever they issue a loan, and then they charge interest on them. This value of the new tokens they create is sucked out of the ones in your bank account, pension etc. It's theft and it's about 7% year.
Gold didn't have this problem because it's issued through proof of work - you have to put in N kgs of gold worth of work to mine N kgs of gold. But it's a rock and in today's world we need a digital form.
Of course the combination of signed transactions, common visible ledgers, introducing computational challenges to forgery, resiliency through consensus (kinda)… all the bits and pieces can be remixed into really interesting ideas.
Bitcoin, I still don’t get. More public, slower, more expensive, no fundamental utility, and still subject to nation-state interference?