This article is trash -- just look at these assertions:

>The overwhelming consensus among programmers and technologists is that blockchain is completely useless technology for anything but speculative digital gambling on tokens.

Many Bitcoin skeptics are advocates of blockchain -- so I don't see a consensus here.

>Ok, so what do we even mean when we say “blockchain”. The answer is really that nobody knows, it’s not a term that has any precise definition and it really depends on who you talk to and the context.

Blockchain is useful and afaik does have a working definition -- it solves a very real problem of how to prevent bitrot in the long term storage of data for example.

Blockchain is merely going through the GamerGate moment now, that's why you're seeing so many articles all at once trying to bash it. From all angles

Central banks want to keep control on money. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-IZZxyb1GI) They will crush any entity who will threaten that.

Central banks are all working on CBDC (Central bank digital currency). The day they will be ready, I can suppose they will eliminate the threats.

Since no one has mentioned cert transparency yet: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.03914

”The utility of a term of art for any piece of software that includes two of the most common concepts in computer science (hashing, linked data structures) is just bad classification. This includes such a vast category of software to make the term meaningless...”

”For the last 10 years a whole cottage industry has arisen trying answer the question: Is blockchain useful for anything but gambling? After about $30b in sunk investment and a 0% success rate the industry finally has the answer: NO”

On the contrary, DLT, or distributed ledger technology, is a new kind of primitive and extraordinarily useful.

See https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/

Consider the contrast in that overview with what’s usually bucketed as blockchain.

In short: "I dont have or see a use for X therefore X must be completely useless to anybody"

Also its DLT not blockchain there are DLTs without chains of blocks, without PoW/PoS etc.

Seriously though https://fishtoaster.com/images/Blockchain.png

The daily crypto FUD piece. I look forward to these.

Imagine if in 1975, the editor of your local news paper said that solar cells are the worlds least efficient energy source ever invented and they were the technology industry's greatest failure. Or in 1995 you read the same article about websites... now remove all journalistic integrity and quality from those misinformed articles and you have what this post is about.

This is an editorial fluff piece with a very poor core argument. I'm very surprised has risen this high on HN, usually the opinion pieces here have far better formulated arguments.

e.g. "Ok, so what do we even mean when we say “blockchain”.The answer is really that nobody knows, it’s not a term that has any precise definition and it really depends on who you talk to and the context. (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1363418896301228033)"

The irony being... the author also never bothers to spell out /which/ blockchain he is ranting against.

Again, he get's sidetracked on his own strawman argument of what a blockchain is...

"Now some introductions will tell you a blockchain is a data structure from computer science which consists of a linked list of blocks which are iteratively hashed so that subsequent blocks depend on the hashes of previous blocks. (7/)However the utility of a term of art for any piece of software that includes two of the most common concepts in computer science (hashing, linked data structures) is just bad classification. (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1363418896301228033)"

He entirely misses the point that the novelty of what a blockchain is, isn't a fancy linked list, it's a mechanism for distributed consensus. Where by distributed computing algorithms from Paxos -> RAFT and private implementations of distributed databases like BigTable, Dynamo, Cassandra, and now next generation iterations like Hazelcast, Redis Grid, Spanner, etc... have enabled the greatest leaps in computing scalability of the past 10 years. However these are all privately maintained databases.

The "blockchain"... whichever implementation to which you refer, must be defined in its usability as a trusted distributed database. The mechanism of the datastructure to represent it is the least interesting or novel part of the technology.

The rest of the author's "points" regarding utility and energy consumption are equally misinformed and poorly formulated.

All in all the author just doesn't seem very informed of what blockchain is beyond the sorts of talking head gossip you'd seen on CNBC. His own limited imagination into the possible uses are akin to people from 1995 who couldn't imagine why websites would be so big or that solar panels would ever be efficient enough to generate energy.

Right alongside with giving computers more than 16K RAM.

I am amazed - is that the same category of people who said "the Internet" isn't going anywhere?