Decentralized Woo Hoo

Normally when we use the phrase "conflict of interest," we use it to imply a conflict between parties. One of the parties in your account is the blog author and/or their company; who is the other? The cryptocurrency community? They aren't a party in the traditional sense, and the concept weakens further when we consider the press campaign among cryptocurrency fans to rebrand their schemes as transaction substrates.

Framed as such, this seems more like an impassioned technical rebuke from an informed individual than a "conflict of interest."

Can't wait for the day when crypto becomes a footnote in history and the Deepak Chopras of this world are resigned to obscurity where they belong.

this guy automatically associates for me with crypto-fudster and of course the very next post of his i see is more "criticism" of crypto.

not that there's nothing to criticize crypto projects for, but this particular argument is very meh. projects that advertise as being decentralized but aren't will eventually collapse. projects that advertise as decentralized and do attempt to be decentralized - are solving some truly hard problems, both technically and socially. something to learn from, not dismiss hand-wavingly.

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games.

However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals is not the same as "decentralization" but more about a concept where you start from a decentralized and open base (blockchain) and build structures atop that base that are appropriately balanced between centralized and decentralized.

This is all very ambitious and may fail utterly and completely. But if it does succeed there will be a period where people have wild ambitious visions about what could be while the technology progresses to actualize those visions at what appears to be a slow pace.

To provide a specific ambitious vision: you could have a world where appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract and everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status. Actually creating a system that allows for this and doesn't have tons of other problems will take time.

I will add my own: cryptocurrencies are useless without a legal framework, which requires a central entity with power ensuring that there is fairness, i.e. the government. Change my mind.

P.S. Banking will also still be needed.

In any case, these are social issues and Decentralized Woo Hoo is a great name for it, as decentralization does not solve any of these issues. There is value to "digital cash", but not in the capacity that all these projects claim.