Schneier on Blockchain, and Trust

His statements about trust in "institutions" misses the mark for me. Deutsche Bank has been convicted and fined repeatedly for money laundering. They have neither reformed their operations not been penalized enough to impact their business. Same for all the other large financial institutions that caused the 2008 collapse. No figureheads or executives were punished financially or criminally. Another example would be the Equifax hack that stole the private data of 143 million Americans and again no civil or criminal penalties for the people responsible.

These companies are too big to fail and don't respond to market forces. They have captured the government regulators and create barriers to entry for competitors.

For many people there is no "institutional" trust as Schneier describes. There is forced institutional interaction, mostly likely because it benefits the government to monitor individuals. Perhaps cryptocurrencies are a fad, but I doubt his conclusion that there is no utility value in a "trustless" system. The current system is broken and nobody is fixing it.

he's spot on about private blockchains

he's also spot on about Ethereum and other alts

he's not absolutely right about Bitcoin. If there's a hard money that is better than gold, and that's backed by electricity --- it solves lot of problems dear sir ! please try to understand that aspect. For the love of technology and logic.

Please read Bitcoin Standard once, of course it is massive experiment that can fail but saying that it is useless dis-credits the efforts of many bright computer scientists working in this field. Yes 95% is scam and most are conmans, but that is true with any greenfield area. AI must had, security must had scams.

Just to head off the pro-Bitcoin trolls ...

> For many people there is no "institutional" trust as Schneier describes.

Nobody thinks of the banking industry as a role model. But everybody relies on going to the ATM for successful withdrawals. That's the trust that Schneier was referring to, not your personal spirit quest.

> Equifax ...

is not a bank.

> massive amt of electricity used in gold mining

Gold is a rare element, with tangible uses.

> Please read Bitcoin Standard once ...

Nobody denies the mathematics, so mentioning the math is just a red herring used by apologists - "if you only knew what I know"

> so many banks employing millions of people and using so much computation to print money out of thin air

Most large banks are run on a single mainframe computer (Tandem or IBM) with low-power terminals at branches. That mainframe consumes about as much power as one mining rig.

Source: worked at a national-level bank in their data center.

and.... there's massive amt of electricity used in gold mining(and toxic for environment for how it's done) and so many banks employing millions of people and using so much computation to print money out of thin air (debt issuance, fractional reserve, derivatives, fiat-backed by just trust on your govt, artificially low interest rates, modern monetary theory - you name it) it is not sustainable dear sir.

Forget Bitcoin and crypto and tech, have you ever thought about that problem? It could very well be one of the biggest mess our society is in at a global scale.