There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

If you're a technical person, you don't need to trust Blockchain technology; you can verify that it works on your own. If you're not a technical person, you can find independent technical experts to verify it for you.

Much of the value of a cryptocurrency can be attributed to the fact that it's difficult to coordinate a large number of people to agree on changes. Also, because most blockchains are public ledgers; it's impossible to manipulate them behind the scenes without raising alarms.

On the other hand, fiat money is constantly being secretly manipulated. There is very little transparency and much of the new fiat money which flows into the system has to pass through big financial firms/gatekeepers who get their cut of the new money supply. Big finance firms have had many decades to figure out how to game the fiat system and there is no doubt that they've been successful at it.

Cryptocurrencies have the potential to greatly improve the financial system by making it simpler, fairer and more transparent. When anyone will be able to launch their own cryptocurrency, we will have a chance to free ourselves from the coercive influences of debt, venture capital and corporations.

I quite like technologies / ideas / concepts like Merkle-Trees, DHT's, P2P and have them on my CV. Those companies that know what they're doing engage me on these topics. When somebody talks about blockchain I usually leave the room though. When I was still on LinkedIn I made the mistake to have blockchain in addition to those mentioned above in my profile and got bombarded with ICO scams and people adding me with "blockchain" in their titles. (the type that used to do SEO or growth-hacking before but have no idea about anything). Removing blockchain from the list dramatically reduced these requests.

Although I can't say if it was just that or whether I simply exhausted the pool of those that harassed me by trolling them back. Here is some fun I had: I made an extra 400-600 every other month by emailing people who spammed me with ICO crap. They always first connected on LinkedIn then exported their data to mailchimp abusing the Mailchimp ToS (and back then upcoming GDPR too) I sent them a requests for immediate removal from their system and an invoice. This required a little research on my part on the type of spam e.g. by filtering for those in my legal jurisdiction and getting names of people involved in their scam ... The invoice was a modest fee just above €100,- to reimburse me for my time wasted. I also attached all smtp headers, accompanied by a strongly worded letter that it would be handed over to my lawyer if the money wasn't paid within 7 days. The invoice came from an EU based Ltd operating under the same jurisdiction (no point in going after companies weak EU jurisdictions with very long legal process, ... but France, Germany, Holland, etc worked well). Only 2 of the spammers didn't pay up immediately and they got referred to my lawyer which then ensured I got the money within a month and without further fights. It did cost me around ~30-40 mins in time spent (some considerably longer but this was on average) to prepare the invoice and do the actual research on the people behind the corp (little bit of social engineering with those that seemed to be faceless and dangle some investment did the trick). It wasn't really a way of earning money but I enjoyed the extra thrill and exposing these idiots. Good times and great fun to waste a little bit of my time with figuring out how they worked (or how big they were compared to how big they claimed their operation was on social media ...)

I think it's nice that people can make a choice. I can definitely see how people from different background, communities or countries might have more trust in a decentralized system.

Personally I put most of my money in my bank, because this is who I trust. I tend to trust European banks more than American banks as well because I've heard horror stories here of people being impersonated and banks refusing to refund such scams.

Ideally, if everyone's bank would work on a decentralized network (that works, is bug-free, scales, has high-throughput, etc.), banking throughout the world would be a simpler experience. Decentralized and centralized at the right places.

No need to be so passionate about it. It may not change the world but it's a very cool technology.