Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

I had to stop reading at:

"In 2009, an anonymous hacker (or group of hackers) going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto unveiled the first entirely digital currency"

In what sense was Satoshi a hacker? Even the modern use of "hacking out code" is a stretch here.

Also, it clearly was not the first digital cash. e-Gold and many others predate it.

What's wrong with writing in plain english? Reading that link, I can't help but get the feeling that either a lot of copy-paste from marketing pages has happened, or the author thinks marketing-speak is an acceptable way to explain things.

- There are newer blockchain dApp platforms that are WAY faster than Ethereum (i.e. EOS, Quantum...)

- Proof of Work isn't the only consensus algorithm, there are ones with lower computational costs, such as Proof of Stake

- See IPFS, and there are other distributed storage solutions

- One can add new ledger entries that refer to previous ones, to correct them

Aside from transparency (and note that privacy is also an option on some blockchains), the main benefit is that smart contracts can eliminate the need for 3rd parties, but still provide trustworthy transaction settlements. Third parties such as the Uber organization, or a bank. The tasks they perform can be provided automatically via programmable transaction handling on the blockchain (smart contracts). Another benefit of distributed software is that it is more resilient (in theory - the global architectures are still being developed), no central point of failure or high-value target for attack.

There is no reason to use blockchain to implement every single piece of software. Blockchain's primary utility is as a cryptocurrency. There's a lot of profit being made off people's ignorance and everyone I see pushing this agenda are people who have no idea how software works and are not qualified to speak on the matter.

People have a problem: the software they have is not solving their problems very well. Before it was Oracle, then SAP then more recently IBM Watson and now it's blockchain.

A lot of business people don't realize they need to work closely with programmers to achieve their goals. The companies who know this are operating at global scale have nothing to do with blockchain in their architecture.

I know very massive entities with huge budgets in my region that are suffering intensely from their lack of a proper software engineering team. They don't even realize it so instead they just hire more manpower to deal with their bad backend systems. Oracle, SAP, and IBM just sell them garbage that solves 30% of their problem while introducing more problems and now they're eyeing blockchain cause they don't know better.

Even as a customer I recently had to convert my SIM card from post paid to prepaid with a telecom provider having revenue measuring in the billions. I go there and their system is down. Twice. They tell me this happens several times a week and have no idea when it will come back up. Ten employees that cannot do their job. I managed to catch them when their system was up and it took about an hour convert my SIM, and I had to wait there the entire time.

I feel that it's a failure for the people in charge to discern something that is going to solve their issues something that isn't. Most people just either accept the lowest bid RFP from a Banglore team or pay millions just because of the name behind the company.

This is a bit of a rant but I'm sick of how crappy everything is and a lot of this is very easy to fix. My credit union's website back in 2007 for a city in California was more useful and easier to use than what I have to deal with now from a bank with a yearly revenue in the hundreds of billions.

This is the whole misguided overenthusiasm we have seen with BTC as well. Blockchains do change something fundamental: the ability to provide for the aforementioned services in case:

- You want to stay anonymous

- You can't trust a third party

I would argue that a functional society would not need any blockchain services as it would provide the necessary privacy defenses to do anonymous transactions and the means to enforce trust.

In the same fashion, it was argued that BTC would be useless in a correctly functioning banking ecosystem.

What these systems offer is not something impossible to do otherwise, it is a lower bound on the services a society can provide (assuming internet and computers).

If tomorrow a country has a Zimbabwe moment, people will switch to BTC. If taxis end up being to corrupt, an etherum service can take the relay.

A lot of the blockchain enthusiasts are anarchists or libertarians. They assume society is already failing or on the verge of collapse. They often fail to see that not everyone is in that mindset.