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> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted. What if a group of trusted organizations run a blockchain together?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
"A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are securely linked together using cryptography."
So, yeah, git and mercurial are "dangerous nonsense".
But of course they're really talking about cryptocurrencies and smart contracts, right?
So why not put that in the title?
> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted. What if a group of trusted organizations run a blockchain together?
The author cannot see value in self-sovereign, censorship resistant, permission-less monetary systems, fine, however, to claim "crypto" is dangerous nonsense because "fraud" is ridiculous.
> As code is written by humans, it’s seldom actually infallible.
Absolutely true, it doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be good enough. With over a decade as a high value target, most serious crypto projects have proved their code is the latter.
> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted. > More precisely: The trust in institutions controlled by humans and bound by established laws and rules is instead replaced — by unconditional trust in the infallibility of code (“in code we trust” is a popular phrase in the scene…
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted. What if a group of trusted organizations run a blockchain together?
The first argument boils down to "I need a central entity to fix mistakes". That does not necessarily apply to everything. An immutable ledger sounds like something that could be useful. Myself I can't think of any uses besides crypto, but the fact that I can't find any use for a technology myself doesn't turn it into "dangerous nonsense"
> But even if all code was without mistakes, blockchains can’t do anything against threats like scams, fraud, hacking of devices with keys for the blochain or just plain old typos in a coin transfer.
I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds was ever a goal, you certainly never hear it as an argument.
> Normally, cases of fraud or mistakes could be rectified or reverted by the bank or similar institutions after a review of the situation by humans. However, in the world of blockchain there is no human supervisory authority.
This is a well-known, probably inevitable effect of what is probably the main point of using blockchains. Clearly people feel it is a price worth paying.
I do agree that 99% of blockchain usage is pointless at best, but that is really a different question. It can be used for storing and (slowly) transferring value in a decentralised way, and that is really the main idea.
> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted. > More precisely: The trust in institutions controlled by humans and bound by established laws and rules is instead replaced — by unconditional trust in the infallibility of code (“in code we trust” is a popular phrase in the scene…
As explained in the text: the point isn't that these problems aren't solved by blockchain, they're amplified. E.g.: scams existed without blockchain, but now they're forever and permanently engraved into the blockchain. Code was always flawed, but now a bug isn't just a bug, it's a bug in a smart contract with potentially disastrous consequences that can never be properly fixed.
You surely can't expect to author perfect code and set it in stone.
The first argument boils down to "I need a central entity to fix mistakes". That does not necessarily apply to everything. An immutable ledger sounds like something that could be useful. Myself I can't think of any uses besides crypto, but the fact that I can't find any use for a technology myself doesn't turn it into "dangerous nonsense"
What does turn it into dangerous nonsense is the "solution looking for a problem" phenomenon, fueled by techno-libertarians and more so plain greedy people, looking for a way to justify and entrench the mostly useless technology that makes them rich.