I disagree. Blockchain and crypto currencies that use PoW are a terrible invention. Bitcoin mining alone is now using more electricity than Ireland, and this figure is only increasing even more. In an age where the global effects of climate change are becoming more and more apparent while still too little is done to mitigate it, maybe we should not exacerbate the problem even further This applies especially to something like crypto currencies that, so far, provide very little in terms of tangible societal benefits.
We could of course discuss PoS solutions, but those have their own drawbacks, and that still would not change the fundamental fact that crypto currencies and blockchains have yet, after roughly a decade, to find any kind of non-niche use case. Google needed far less than a decade to become the dominant search engine. Netflix did the same of video streaming. Modern smartphones exist for about as long as Bitcoin, and they have become globally ubiquitous. So how good can the blockchain really be?
sorry, but blockchain should be compared to internet, not google & yes packet-switching took a decade to become TCP/IP and took more than 2 decades, to become the internet. Bitcoin should be compared to google.
No it's not. Blockchain was created to solve a very specific problem, "how to achieve consensus on a distributed ledger without trusting any participant" and it did so with great success. It is the thousands of startups that try to apply this solution without having this exact problem.
> how to achieve consensus on a distributed ledger without trusting any participant
The problem is that that is just a solution in disguise as a problem. Why do we need to achieve consensus on a distributed ledger without trusting any participant? It works, I think, for bitcoin because the ledger is an end unto itself and didn't have to interface with any existing system (no existing accounts/items/entries to assign to existing owners).
> Credit card fraud and chargebacks online are brutal, and can sink many innocent and legitimate online small businesses.
Unless you're talking adult businesses, gambling or one of the other industries with known issues with card fraud and/or excessive charge-backs, they aren't a significant problem for legitimate businesses at all. Even a 1% charge-back rate is unusual enough that card providers will flag the retailer for investigation.
On the opposite side of the coin the same reversibility is also great for fighting fraud from scammy sellers. For consumers anything interacting with real world items really needs to be reversible or scammers will have a field day with it and damage the brand.
It's ironic how the blockchain claims to let you do all these things without trusting any of the participants, yet it attracts some of the most untrustworthy participants the world has ever seen.
> It's ironic how the blockchain claims to let you do all these things without trusting any of the participants, yet it attracts some of the most untrustworthy participants the world has ever seen.
Hmm. Ironic or just expected? Individualized trust isn't required, but trust in the system is required. Honor among thieves is what makes the system work, so to speak.
So you're saying the Bitcoin Foundation should let anyone like Brock Pierce be the director, because the Blockchain globally and completely eliminates the need to trust anyone, and EOS shouldn't have parted ways with Brock Pierce, and should hire even more untrustworthy people, because the Blockchain makes it perfectly safe and wise to work with untrustworthy people?
Black is white! Good is bad! It's wonderful for scammers to be in charge! The Blockchain is the solution to everything! You can trust the Blockchain so much, that you don't need to trust people any more! Nothing could possibly go wrong! No snake oil! You're the snake oil! ;)
I didn't say any of those things even remotely. It kind of feels like you've imagined both sides of an argument in your head, and are projecting the other side on me.
The only thing I'm saying is: If I'm a known con man, and I'm trying to do a deal with another known con man, I'd like to have a platform that supposedly doesn't require me to trust a con man.
I never said anything about whether blockchain can or cannot do that, never said anything about globally eliminating the need for trust, nor that blockchain is a solution for anything, nor what is "safe and wise".
I'm not even a proponent of blockchain...I can just see why some types of people are attracted to the advertised benefits.
No, it's not. The problem is clearly laid out in the Bitcoin whitepaper. The problem was known long before the solution.
The root problem is how to make functional and secure trustless money which doesn't rely on third parties. Decentralizing the control is the best solution known to date to remove trust from the system. This introduces the problem of ordering distributed events in a trustless environment. The solution to that is the timestamp server proposed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. That timestamp server is what has been rebranded "blockchain". It's useless for 99% of things it's proposed to solve, but it's the only known solution the original problem.
You may not need it, but I am thankful that it now exists.
You may be happy with centralized services such as banks and credit cards. But those institutions are vulnerable to intimidation and so proved unsuitable for pot growers in Colorado and for Wikileaks.
In the cases of Wikileaks and Colorado pot farmers, they angered a government, even if many other governments (and the state of Colorado) supported them. So it's not about being some bad-ass who fights all forms of government. It's about pushing the boundaries enough that somebody powerful may choose to intimidate your financial provider. Given the number of powerful entities in the world with conflicting world-views, if you're doing anything interesting, you may run afoul of one of them.
Even if you personally will never use trustless money, having it exist in the world is making you a little bit more free.
It does make the world a little more free, and I have some sympathy for some of those causes.
It also seems to come at a great price, in terms of pollution and energy waste. Your right to buy heroin, or child pornography, or organically grown cruelty-and-cartel free marijuana is great, but your externalities are horrific.
This video does a very good job explaining what exact problems you would face if you tried to create a decentralized payment system and how bitcoin solved these problems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4&vl=en
Yea exactly, there is only one problem it really solves, and it's already found it. Currency (and sure some stuff that touches it like smart contracts) is the one use case where all the blockchain's properties are useful. Everything else, just use a public/distributed cryptographic ledger, save yourself a ton of money. Use technology that's worked for 30 years.
We could of course discuss PoS solutions, but those have their own drawbacks, and that still would not change the fundamental fact that crypto currencies and blockchains have yet, after roughly a decade, to find any kind of non-niche use case. Google needed far less than a decade to become the dominant search engine. Netflix did the same of video streaming. Modern smartphones exist for about as long as Bitcoin, and they have become globally ubiquitous. So how good can the blockchain really be?