[slfnflctd]

To me, the biggest question seems to be whether distributed trust and/or consensus is best served by blockchains, or if we've already established safer and better ways of doing this in prior systems that have been around longer. For now, industry is overwhelmingly sticking with the latter. After all, we've been contemplating and refining trust & consensus systems for the entire history of civilization. It all comes down to relationships and reputation in the end-- and even blockchain tech itself seems to need to deal in those terms (at least at higher levels).

I wouldn't rule out there being certain use cases where blockchain may turn out to be the best way to go, but at the moment that doesn't appear guaranteed to be a huge or lucrative field by itself (and yes, you can say the same about solar in 1975 or websites in 1995, but that proves nothing as there were many more ideas with similar uncertainty around them that failed alongside those). Meanwhile, the intense amount of speculation going on just smells wrong to a lot of us in light of the dearth of clear applications or industry uptake. Personally I'm skeptical, but undecided. It's mainly the speculation that gives me the willies.

I agree the author should have discussed these issues more.

[erickj]

There is absolutely snake-oil and speculation slithering amount the beneficial projects.

Far too many people see this as a quick way to dup others and make a quick buck, because that has been profitable so far. However that in itself doesn't diminish that decentralized distributed consensus is a new class of tool that did not exist before Bitcoin. And while Bitcoin is a very inefficient implementation as we're learning, there are now new protocols with far better efficiency guarantees than proof-of-work