I can confirm from my own experience that reading pop-sci books about blockchains--although they sound really cool and do provide motivation to look further into the tech--doesn't give you any confidence about the technology itself.
There's no shortcut, if you want to be more "enlightened", you should stop reading medium blog posts or pop-sci books and start looking into the protocol itself, run a node yourself, and try stuff out. When you do so, you'll get the "enlightment" you were looking for.
Which is what? That the blockchain is a solution in search of a problem? There is very, very little reason to use a cumbersome data structure when better ones exist (eg: just a regular database, or something like git). Worse, the only way the blockchain gets all it's supposed valuable attributes is when you provide a financial incentive to mine. Aka -- bolt a "currency" on top of it and then go market it to tons of rubes so you can convert all of the generated tokens into cold, hard fiat to pay your bills. Without the "currency", who will pay miners to trustlessly verify all the transactions? The parties running the service? If so... since you seem to trust all them to pay the bills.... why not just use a database instead and save some substantial fiat?
The whole bitcoin/blockchain "movement" is just pure hype. It's people at the top of the pyramid hyping a worthless technology in order to cash out their tokens before the whole thing collapses in on itself...
That said, you're free to believe what you want to believe.
Just one thing though, everything you said above I heard hundreds of times before, and there are good explanations for them. I just don't have time to argue here because these are things you can find out on your own if you put your mind into it. (To be honest I don't think I can convince you no matter how I try unless you open up your mind, so I won't try)
Anyway, if you don't care, that's fine too. It's not like not believing in cryptocurrency will doom your future. You'll do fine. And even if the whole thing fails, I'll do fine too. But it's always good to have an open mind about things you don't yet completely understand and try to learn. ("Thinking that you understand completely" doesn't count as actually completely understanding)
No, no it wasn't. Close to light speed communication provided about 10 orders of magnitude faster/cheaper communication than before. I cannot even fathom how someone would not immediately realize how that massive increase in communication would not be useful.
Contrast this with blockchains which are practically 10 orders of magnitude more COSTLY since every node has to process every transaction when you could just do that on one server (hence why bitcoin transactions cost 2.5 Billion dollars a year to process a fraction of what Visa can process).
Just like you cannot fathom how Bitcoin can be useful in February of 2018, 99.9% of the world population couldn't fathom how Internet would take off back then when it launched. That was why it was not mainstream for a long time until it took off.
The dotcom bubble was fueled by speculation in how useful the internet would be. Granted, it busted but many companies survived it and some are now the biggest companies in the world.
> That was why it was not mainstream for a long time until it took off.
Internet growth has been incredibly fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
I can see some utility in blockchains. However, my main point is that the economics of them make them terrible for 99.99% of problems.
Internet: 10 orders of magnitude faster/cheaper communication than before.
blockchains: 10 orders of magnitude more COSTLY.
Then we're talking about different things. My comment was specifically in response to "Internet was a solution searching for a problem".
Your point actually supports my comment because like you said it's terrible for 99.99% of problems, which means it may be great for 0.01%, which means it's a solution that's solving only a small problem for now, and looking for more problems.
Eh, the history of ARPANET involved practical use cases (i.e. communication between specific institutions and ballistic missile defense coordination) from the start [1]. If one includes circuit switches, i.e. the telegraph/telephone system, as a blueprint Internet then the practical application reaches back earlier.
Do you not see any value in decentralization? In theory with blockchains, you could replace giant companies with open-source programs that pay for their own server costs with transaction fees, without taking any profit margin off the top. That would be very interesting for stuff like cloud storage and social networks. You can argue it's overly idealistic and may not work out, but you can't pretend there's no value in decentralization
Do you think these applications are viable if the token has significant monetary/speculative value attached to it?
I understand the technology perfectly well. I read the Cryptoassets book to try and undsetand exactly that: the value of them as 'assets'. I came away exceedingly underwhelmed.
But I have never seen a single person who truly "understand the technology perfectly well" say it's underwhelming.
Most of those who actually dug deep enough to "truly understand" do see the limitations, but because by that point they understand the potential, they see the limitations as problems to solve and opportunities to take.
It is those who only scraped the surface that say it's "uninteresting", "underwhelming", etc.
Ancient people thought they "understood the world perfectly well" and thought it was flat. Suit yourself.
This is tautological, so i hope you’re aware of how logically useless it is. Either you haven’t seen much, or you define away any disagreers as people who don’t understand.
I'd say I've noticed an inverse correlation - people who don't understand the technology see it as this amazing thing, the kind of people who know their hash functions are a bit skeptical.
The biggest problems with Bitcoin (specifically) are: 1) it is not necessarily a store of value and 2) it fluctuates too much.
If someone can solve these two problems then we will have an extremely powerful cryptocurrency.
Venmo. Zelle. During banking hours: e-mail my banker, wire transferred within minutes.
If you accept the limitation that the receiver can be anywhere in the world, but must be from the US or have an US bank account...
"Blockchain" is probably fine. I suspect that it will eventually get some nice implementations where you want to be able to attest to integrity over time/space where multiple trusted parties evolve and change. A "distributed digital notary" if you will.
Cryptocurrencies as currently implemented (bitcoin and ilk) are eventually going to die for lack of a use case.
Problem 1: Most people like centralized authority of money. Most people like being able to get back their money when things get "stolen", for example. And people like reputation systems so that they don't get scammed (ie. illegal drug market).
Problem 2: Fees suck, but they're invisible to most people. Merchants hate fees, but you need users before that gets moving. We're also seeing that cryptocurrencies have non-trivial fees, as well. Funny that.
To be fair, traditional fees keep falling and some of that is probably due to cryptocurrencies. But some of that is simply trying to ward off the rise of a single digital purchase standard which would disrupt all of the incumbents. The payments space is a no-holds barred fight to the death and the incumbents would rather die than let anybody else get a foothold.
Problem 3: Cryptocurrencies aren't sufficiently anonymous. There is a use case for genuine anonymity. However, the current cryptocurrencies fail to be truly anonymous at blockchain as well as reality. Keeping your operational security sufficient to stay truly anonymous is damn difficult and having to go through an exchange doesn't help. Cryptocurrencies really need a decentralized exchange, but I'm not sure how that would even work. And, even if it did, since nobody could charge fees, nobody would have any incentive.
So, cryptocurrencies are mostly useful for people who fear central authority, are possibly concerned about fees, and only need to remain "semi"-anonymous. That pretty much describes petty criminals and mid-tier corrupt party bosses and ... not much else.
Monero is the go-to privacy coin. Unfortunately, I am not as experienced with privacy/security, but it appears to be good enough for many. Perhaps someone else can speak to its efficacy?
Finally, there are decentralized crypto exchanges. None that take fiat in (AFAIK) but there are definitely decentralized exchanges. Don't know of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure they're just a quick google search away.
Those are the things that stuck out to me about your post.
I think it's good to take a look at both sides of the story but the only way to find the truth is going deeper and learning the protocol yourself and form your own "sovereign" opinion, which is what I did after getting frustrated with tons of conflicting opinions online, which by the way turned out to be mostly propaganda to preserve their own crypto-wealth as I started learning more about the landscape.
Based on my somewhat brief experience as a crypto investor it hasn’t given me great hope of it solving corruption...
Immune systems will develop I believe.