Libra Shrugged
Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain
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I could fill this card easily in a day, standing by the coffee machine at work. What I would really like to know is if blockchain has any real life uses beside cryptocurrencies and their marketing. I hear lots of promising claims, including aiding humanitarian crises in Syria, Iraq and Afganistan but all these contain phrases like “may”, “could”, “is working on”, so to my non-native ears none of it has ever happened (yet?). Is blockchain a viable solution to anything at all or has the world gone mad?
tl;dr no, and not as mad as it was about blockchain in 2017. “Could” is a word meaning “doesn’t”.
Blockchain is almost exclusively used for more mundane data integrity and file versioning in the form of git. The largest blockchain company in the world (in terms of numbers of blockchains) is GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft. Trustless transaction ledgers are just a completely idiotic use case for Merkle trees.
(I like to refer to GitHub as “The Blockchain Company” as a joke, though.)
Electronic voting for example, results could be transparent while preserving vote secrecy. If digital art picks up (other than the silly images that even kids could do, and actually did as a 12 years old made quite some money selling some whales), there is value in NFT. Decentralized money (I had money frozen by my bank in 2008, it still haunts me). If electronic voting on a public ledger could happen fairly easily on a private blockchain, for the rest the tech is simply too complicated and risky. Decentralization, beside scaling issues, comes with a huge cost, which is personal responsibility. Too many people are not ready for that. CBDC won’t eliminate the currency debasement issue, but at least the counterparty risk will be eliminated. So there are some applications to blockchain. But far, far less than maxis pretend, that’s for sure. They just need that “blockchain solves this” to justify higher and higher prices.
100% of your examples are “blockchain could” – which is another term for “blockchain doesn’t.”
I could make up endless hypotheticals off the top of my head too, but then I’d be one of the people the bingo card is about.
In my day, it was the SQL bros, then the Java bros, then the Git (and ZFS) bros. “Databases can do this; databases can do that!”
1995:
1
1996:
2
3
2011:
4
The last decade’s worth of getting paid for JOI hasn’t *entirely* rotted Scott Adams’ brain:
5
I recommend the Mauve(TM) Blockchain.
I dunno… blockchain, viz. git, has been wildly successful, even if I’d hesitate to call it “revolutionary”. The biggest blockchain company in the world is Microsoft, due to their ownership of GitHub, though I don’t think anyone has run a public transaction ledger off of git yet.
ZFS has also been a modestly successful blockchain, but it has unfortunately been even less revolutionary than git has. In order for ZFS to be revolutionary, it would have to be in constant use on at least one ubiquitous computing platform. My understanding is that even cloud providers tend to use less robust means of database propagation, while the rest of us have to jump through technical hoops in order to use ZFS in a consumer setting.
retrospectively claiming everything with a Merkle tree in is a “blockchain” is AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
I would hope for more of an “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH” than an “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH”.
“If your problem is solved by an append only data structure it should already be in your .git archive”
-Me