There is a piece of incendiary clickbait going around entitled Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future.

The author has not only failed to understand the vision of blockchain technology, they have not even tried.

I believe that the author Kai Stinchcombe, will one day be remembered as the 2018 Paul Krugman:

Right here in the opening paragraph:

Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions.

What a broad generalization with nothing backing it up… at all. no data. no studies. No apples to apples comparison thought experiments even.

In fact, I would assert that there is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

Ummmm…. remittances anyone?

In the traditional system, once you pay you’re hoping you’ll receive the book, but once the vendor has your money they don’t have any incentive to deliver. You’re relying on Visa or Amazon or the government to make things fair — what a recipe for being a chump! In contrast, on a blockchain system, by executing the transaction as a record in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone, the transfer of money and digital product is automatic, atomic, and direct, with no middleman needed to arbitrate the transaction, dictate terms, and take a fat cut on the way. Isn’t that better for everybody? Hm. Perhaps you are very skilled at writing software. When the novelist proposes the smart contract, you take an hour or two to make sure that the contract will withdraw only an amount of money equal to the agreed-upon price, and that the book — rather than some other file, or nothing at all — will actually arrive.

This (envisioning that the consumers are actually writing the software for escrow) is a straw man example. clearly thats not the direction the space is going

Another example: the purported advantages for a voting system in a weakly-governed country. “Keep your voting records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone” sounds right — yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to independently verify that his vote has been counted?

Another straw man example. Author is just taking cheap shots, and either doesnt understand the ecosystem, isn’t trying, or both.

Even the most die-hard crypto enthusiasts prefer in practice to rely on trust rather than their own crypto-medieval systems. 93% of bitcoins are mined by managed consortiums, yet none of the consortiums use smart contracts to manage payouts.

This is a valid criticism of Bitcoin, but not of the Ethereum (or other smart contract) space.

As a society, and as technologists and entrepreneurs in particular, we’re going to have to get good at cooperating — at building trust, and, at being trustworthy. Instead of directing resources to the elimination of trust, we should direct our resources to the creation of trust — whether we use a long series of sequentially hashed files as our storage medium or not.

Hey look, something i agree with — good thing live blockchain projects are already doing this! If the author had bothered to do any thoughtful or even handed research at all, they’d know that blockchain projects just move around who you trust, not eliminate trust entirely (a common misconception).

Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers’ interest because trust is actually so damn valuable.

No shit. You took 400 words and 11 minutes of each readers life to get to the point where people who actually understand blockchain already are.

This article has some sparse analysis’ of specific blockchain experiments that have failed (and good learnings from them to boot), but the authors tone is incendiary and not thoughtful in any way. I dismiss it out of hand as clickbait, and not a criticism of the entire ecosystem or its potential.

I encourage you to do so too.

Get back to BUIDLing!