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

Household computers were a thing in science fiction long before they were possible and I don't recall anybody doubting you could eventually transmit movies over the internet in a reasonable amount of time.

Then you continue with the usual hand waving when people point out weaknesses in the bitcoin architecture. Because the last thing we want is for the hype to die and the speculation to crash, am I right?

>If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train.

You can do things programmatically without using the blockchain. Actually nowadays I'm pretty sure that for the vast majority of transactions online no human is the loop.

>- low tx rate? not for long

What makes you say that? If you think about segwit/lightning and friends I'll wait until I see them working in practice. I'm still skeptical that these solutions will manage to reach high amounts of transaction without losing the decentralized nature of bitcoin.

>- high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake)

You make it sound as if proof of stake was actually a thing. Has any serious blockchain successfully implemented PoS at this point? I know many people are talking about it but it's still very much theoretical as far as I know.

>- high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this.

I don't understand this argument. Nodes and miners are two different things. If you do serious transactions on the network you should run a full node. Are you saying that people who run full nodes should invest in a mining rig to offset the cost? What if they live somewhere electricity is not cheap enough to turn a profit?

>- no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow

Yeah by using a... trusted third party. How would you scale this? Well, I can think of a way, you could set up organization who would take a small fee to act as trusted third parties. With a high enough volume of transactions these organizations would have a low incentive of cheating for any given arbitration since loss of trust would mean the end of their business and they could be sued. They could also offer loans and other things the blockchain can't provide on its own. You know, like a bank.

>If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes.

The bitcoin network takes its cut as well and these days it's not exactly cheap. And what do you mean by "selling you out behind the scenes"? Privacy issues?

And that's how those (trustless) decentralized ledgers should market themselves. It only needs to come down to that one simple thing: they increase the surface on which supply and demand can interact. The resulting friction generates wealth.

Lots of markets remained untapped because of that third-party need. Forgive the punctual essentialism, but increasing "capitalism"'s reach to those uncharted territories is good. In fact, it is precisely why I think it will take-off: the derived utility from an economic point of view is too high to be ignored.

Sometimes you don't need it to be trust-less or permission-less because some industries only have a handful players who already trust each other. That's not the full picture.

Obviously, there's an efficiency trade-off. But, don't make the mistake to throw the baby with the bath water. No system is perfect. No complex system behaves like it should. Bitcoin is imperfect. There are lots of bullshit and koolaid. Nonetheless, I believe the trend since Satoshi, with the long historical line of research he has built upon, published the Bitcoin paper is clearly upward. It should continue. Satoshi was the spark. Now (r)evolution will be incremental.