In defense of cryptocurrency

A flat fee isn't necessarily cheaper. A $25 fee on a $1 transaction is equivalent to a 2500% fee.

In which case the entire blockchain thing becomes redundant.

I appreciate the article but it's still disappointing to run into a typical misconception about Bitcoin from someone claiming to make a technical defense of cryptocurrency. He states that Bitcoin is now not so decentralized, presumably because of the concentration of mining power. This is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralization means with regards to proof of work. What it means is that there is no central authority that can reverse or change transactions, add taxes, only operate from 9 to 5 on weekdays, etc. The protocol defines the behavior, not a centralized org, and it is perfectly decentralized. Anyone can add a mining node, because the protocol itself is decentralized. Having a smaller group of mining pools doesn't change this core characteristic of PoW blockchains.

Your response is so full of gaping holes it's kinda crazy. I'm not sure I can even begin to address them.

> I think you've overlooked this in the grandparent, because you've probably never had the experience of going to a low-tech county property registrar's office to pull a record.

No, I haven't overlooked this at all, in fact it's bang on with what I'm trying to get you to understand - that pulling a record can be made faster with a better system, yes. But for some reason you're insisting that only a blockchain can fix that, which is just nonsense.

> If minting officially signed records is as cheap and easy on-chain as it looks like it's going to be, it would be silly not to use the technology, even if you think government should have been the entity to build and maintain it.

You're glossing over the massive effort to bring such a system into place for the land registry in the first place, and reducing the entire problem to record signing. The signing of a record is the most trivial part of the problem. In a DB-driven centralised solution it would be actually free.

So I'll repeat myself here - you're trying to address a bureaucratic issue with a data structure, you're choosing one data storage scheme over another as if that makes the difference, when the difference that leads to the speed gains in the proposal is legislative change and modernisation, not a specific storage scheme.

> It removes the "who has to build and maintain this DB and keep access to it forever" step

It does no such thing, as the data structures and smart contracts specific to land registration will still have to be created, and updated as needs change over time, the human-usable interfaces to those will still have to be created, probably involving API servers and web UIs in the exact same way as any other solution. Someone has to build all this. Someone has to run the infrastructure regardless, and those people will want paying somehow. The fact you can abstract some parts of it away through a blockchain doesn't remove the need for that payment, perhaps in the form of transaction fees, for instance, or rent seeking on these tokens you mentioned earlier.

> Literal teenagers can buy and sell pictures of apes easier than I can prove to a mortgage company that I own my residence.

Umm, so? I mean, Ape pictures are again, trivial, land registries are not, and the proof you want could be an entry in a land registry database just as easily as it could be an NFT. (As it could be for that ape picture, and as it usually more or less is anyway, due to centralisation of API-provision...)

> When the intern at a county clerk's office somewhere in the middle of the country says "hey boss, let's mint NFTs for these records, it costs about a penny each and I can set up the computer to do it as a summer project", that's about the threshold we need for widespread local government adoption.

And that intern is going to know how to implement all the smart contracts around property transfer correctly, taking into account all the legal regulations, edge cases, boundary definitions (and disputes), court system oversight and the million and one other things that are implicit in that proposition?

Seriously? You genuinely think the hardest and most complicated part of transfer of property ownership is the bit where you need to sign a record?

Because that's all you're talking about solving here, and even that isn't something a blockchain solution can do any more easily than any other solution.

All of the benefits of moving to a blockchain that you list are possible, probably with lesser effort and lower complexity, using other systems. None of it is because of blockchains, all of it is process modernisation that you feel you can just gloss over because blockchain.

The article basically says that crypto currency currently is a huge scammy mess with lots of unsolved problems - BUT those problems are solvable in theory. It then spends most of it's paragraphs explaining what some of those solutions could look like, before finally admitting that even with those problems solved, crypto currency might not actually improve on any of the problems that existing non-crypto payment systems have.

Am I missing something?