| Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train. - low tx rate? not for long
- high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake).
- high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this. not everyone needs to run a full node (but anyone can).
- no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow. openbazaar does this very nicely If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes. |
That’s the intellectual blind spot which is making this so hard to understand: you’re invested in the technology and want to see it succeed, which means you’re inclined to minimize every downside and boost every possible use without asking whether something is better in addition to being possible.
Being old enough to remember when the internet was starting to go mainstream, there were op-eds like that but they got plenty of pushback because there were so many new things which you could do on the internet which were either impossible, unaffordable, or too cumbersome before. Yes, a modem connection was too slow to play a movie but you could read newspapers around the world, send email to anyone and have it arrive in seconds, download software or photos instead of having to drive to the store, research and trade stocks, chat, etc. and there was a clear path for technological improvements making that experience better over time. The average person could easily see things they’d like to do and the costs were getting more approachable every year.
In contrast, we have a ton of blockchain hype without a single legal use which solves a problem normal people care about better than existing, well-tested technology. There’s a lot of “that’ll change once these fundamental design flaws are solved in a way we don’t yet know how to do” hype being peddled by people who stand to profit if everyone buys in but, as during the dotcom bubble, that should inspire more rather than less skepticism.