[gnull]

Can anyone elaborate on this? Cryptography course at my university covers blockchains and we were never made aware of this. And academic community in general seems to be unaware, not a single blockchain talk I attended drew attention to this.

[fl0id]

elaborate on what specifically? There are plenty of academics talking about blockchain = bad. If you took a CS course, likely people were invested themselves or do not see it that way, f.e. if they either care about making money or a libertarian idea of freedom which sees government as bad, and needs 'uncensored' money.

[gnull]

I took courses with focus on theory, performance and security of blockchains. I never cared much about the practical situation, and all those things Drew criticizes blockchain for. Blockchain is a cool thing from TCS perspective — end of story for me.

I'm actually teaching a course in Cryptography right now that touches blockchain a bit. And I asked this question with a practical purpose to know if there are any warnings I should give my students about practical implications of the technology.

> elaborate on what specifically?

> plenty of academics talking about blockchain = bad

Elaborate of what is "bad" specifically, and suggest any specific trustworthy academics who made any statements like that.

[wrs]

From an academic cryptography perspective, blockchains (as opposed to just Merkle trees, as found in lots of useful things like Git) are an interesting and valid solution to the problem of constructing a shared distributed ledger with no trusted party.

From a non-academic perspective, the trouble is there are few or no real-world problems for which such a thing is the best solution (judged by logistical practicality, performance, or ethics).