.

@Laurelai It amazes me how emotional people get about blockchain. I have yet to see a sober evaluation of blockchain tech that concluded that it was never useful.

@seanl @Laurelai I've yet to comprehend just what magic it's supposed to do anyway. what problem was a "blockchain" supposed to solve

@kara @Laurelai It's a means of achieving a single agreed upon ordering of transactions without needing a trusted third party. That way, if someone tries to spend the same money to person A and person B, there's an algorithmic means of determining which is the valid transaction.

@kara @Laurelai There are lots of criticisms like "it's not really decentralized because of pool mining" and "it's easy to attack because you don't really need a majority of hashing power" and "it'll destroy the planet because it uses too much energy". The first hasn't been a problem in practice; the incentives for miners are "better" than the incentives for central banks. For the second I say "well then feel free to go make your billions breaking it".

@kara @Laurelai Bitcoin has the largest bug bounty in history by several orders of magnitude. And the third one I've addressed before but it boils down to the fact that the electricity must be paid for by some combination of transaction fees and block rewards, so it has to grow far more slowly than the transaction rate in the long run, but that there will also be technological advancements to reduce it.

@kara @Laurelai Of course, I was extrapolating a lot from one image. 99.9% of the time if someone is asking if they need a blockchain the answer is indeed "no". And if they're a startup it's like 99.9999% of the time.

@kara @Laurelai There's a second really interesting application of blockchain for which nobody has come up with a better solution, which is assigning human-meaningful, globally unique names to things. For that you either need a central or hierarchical authority or a blockchain.

@seanl @kara Cryptocurrency is ridiculous from an economics perspective, like literally pants on head.

@seanl @Laurelai more or less my feeling. cryptocurrency merely slaps a bunch of mutually incompatible layers of tech over existing media of exchange, it's basic useless

@kara @seanl And it lacks a central issuing authority that can issue it and create a demand for it via taxation. cryptonerds need to learn MMT

@Laurelai @kara People have used stones as currency. I think people overestimate the need for a government to create a demand for a currency via taxation. People will use cryptocurrency because it will allow them to bypass the traditional payment providers and banks and the censorship that they engage in.

@seanl @Laurelai @kara
I'm with Sean in that it's a damn clever solution to the problem of replicating a physical transaction (I give it to you, I don't have it any more) without having to trust a central authority; computers couldn't do that! I can see why people are drawn to it.
What a shame it doesn't appear to scale. I really like the idea of digital cash. But bitcoin now requires a central server and folk are saying it was "always for investment". It wasn't.