My views on blockchain / bitcoin

Going from abstract to concrete:

  • Private currency: good. I would love to have lots of them, just as I love both gold and silver.
  • Blockchain: not so good, more of a solution in search of a problem. The only advantage it has compared to an append-only database is decentralization… and I don't see a need for that. I would much rather have many private currencies. Also, in practice most coins are actually centralized, or at least a very small oligarchy.
  • Bitcoin: nah. Really bad. Incredibly slow to initialize, slow transactions, easy to control by a sustained state-level effort, very low cap on number of transactions per second, plenty of bugs, hard-forks which means the code is actually controlled by a small group (which in turn means that I can't trust that the currency itself is decentralized)… nah.

In conclusion, I like the initiative, and I'm 100% behind the idea that we need to separate states and money, but we're nowhere near yet.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Bitcoin was a great proof of concept, but the next gen of cryptocurrencies need to be better, more transactions per second and more privacy. What do you think of grincoin?
7:54 PM
Marcel said…
Grin looks interesting on a superficial read; it remains to be seen how practical and useful it will be in reality.
8:09 PM
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