Blockchain technology may be crappy now, but let’s see how it develops…
Blockchain technology may be crappy now, but let’s see how it develops going forward.
A couple of days ago Kai Stinchcombe wrote a very emotional post titled Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future basically telling the world to grow up and through our blockchain toys away.
His This is such a bogus “analysis” it’s ridiculous. Normally analyzing start with examining the facts and producing a set of conclusions from this examination. The author started with his very emotional conclusion and proceeded to fit the facts into it. We have developers in Eastern Europe and we pay them in Ether or Bitcoin and we pay no transaction fees. I buy coins on Gdax by leaving limit orders, these orders are executed with no transaction fees, it is free to send coins from Gdax, so yes it works!
And the examples? Really these are the best use cases for crypto? Buying books is not a very good example, what would be a good use case involving books is lending ebooks or selling used ebooks. Each book copy could have its own address and transfer of these addresses can be tracked efficiently. The best use cases for crypto at this point are either sending money and ICOs.
And please do not bring up the “criminals” that are using crypto. Criminals are also using cell phones and emails let’s ban those to make sure we stop all criminal activities. A first real use case for the internet was pornography, should the internet be shut down???
The notion that any solution that has any components of the “old way” of doing business is somehow invalid is ridiculous. It makes virtually any business invalid. Stop the press, don’t use Amazon anymore, after all, credit cards and post office existed before Amazon. Any new business, any innovation usually consists of 9 “old way” components and one or two “new way” components. Innovation is incremental, there are always old components in any invention or new business model.
What about novelist having to write its own smart contract??? Really? Why stop there, let the novelist run this or her own printing press or paper mill. No, they cannot rely on any service providers. Yes, smart contracts are buggy and complex, expensive to write and audit, so what these are the up-front fees. It was a lot more expensive and time-consuming for Uber to write their software then setting up a small car service/black car shop, but the incremental cost of hailing a cab went down significantly. The same logic works here, no ordinary consumers should be asked to write their own smart contracts or wallet software. People, companies will provide layers of abstraction leaving people with the ability to do everything they do faster and cheaper. The fact that some of these new services run in blockchain should be irrelevant to the end user. In fact, crypto revolution will succeed when people stop seeing the blockchain layer powering a myriad of new businesses.
So, let’s not be emotional examining new technologies or business models. Sometimes people use new “cool” staff just because it is new and cool and there are plenty of people that are adding crypto to their business names to get some money from the investors. 90% of ICOs will fail or failing already but none of that means that blockchain is bad or that it has no application in advancing humanity. How many companies that raised millions of dollars during the dot-com boom are still here? Does it invalidate the internet? I don’t think so.
