http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-521_en.htm

Quote: “Technologies like blockchain can help reduce costs while increasing trust, traceability and security”.

Let’s tackle this one by one.

Blockchain

Firstly, they failed to recognize that invention was never about the dumb blockchain data structure, which simply serves to batch transactions. It was always about decentralized cryptocurrencies — digital scarcity, censorship resistance of financial transactions, and seizure resistance of ownership.

Reduced costs

Secondly, decentralized systems (what they mean with “blockchain”) are more expensive and less efficient to run and maintain than centralized ones. The “reduced costs” point is completely misguided. Related invention was never about cost minimization.

Traceability

Thirdly, they quote traceability as a benefit. Traceability is actually a major design deficiency in classic blockchains and in fact an existential threat to most cryptocurrencies. That is because traceability allows for transaction grey-listing and red-flagging. This destroys fungibility and so utility.

All major blockchains aim at opacity, with Monero already being opaque, Ethereum seriously considering zkSNARKs and Bitcoin community researching ways to cut down on traceability with Lightning Network, ZeroLink, Confidential Transactions, MimbleWimble, etc. The desired situation is that it is up to individuals to reveal whatever they see fit.

Increased trust

Finally, they view “increased trust” as a benefit, while the whole point of related inventions was to build trust-minimized systems.

Now, they might mean increased trust in the system as a whole, not individual parties. But consider that: who admits participants to permissioned network? Who decides on upgrades? Who has power to reverse unwelcome or erroneously recorded events? These are all done by central bodies that participants need to trust. These trusted parties are security holes.

Enterprise blockchains obfuscate the trust model. Distributed network alone is far not enough to make the system decentralized. Enterprise blockchains are inherently centralized.

EU Commission is brainwashed by enterprise blockchain vendors

Honestly, I can’t blame EU Commission too much. I guess it must be really hard for non-technical clerks to get to the bottom of this while being bombarded by IBM, Accenture, Microsoft and tens of other vendors with their enterprise blockchains bullshit.