Re. Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "John Levine" <johnl () iecc com>
> Date: May 5, 2018 at 1:49:22 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
>
> In article <9676F745-D55E-43BD-B93A-C3CDAD921F57 () gmail com> you write:
> > Comments welcome djf
>
> Well, gee, everything he says is self-evidently true.
>
> Bitcoins remind me of a story from the late chair of the Princeton U.
> astronomy department.  In 1950 Immanuel Velikovsky published "Worlds
> in Collision", a controversial best selling book that claimed that
> 3500 years ago Venus and Mars swooped near the earth, causing
> catastrophes that were passed down in religions and mythologies.
>
> The astronomer was talking to an anthrpologist at a party and the book
> came up.  
>
> "The astronomy is nonsense," said the astronomer, "but the anthropology
> is really interesting."
>
> "Funny," replied the anthropologist, "I was going to say almost the
> same thing."
>
> Bitcoin and blockchains lash together an unusual distributed database
> with a libertarian economic model.  People who understand databases
> realize that blockchains only work as long as there are incentives to
> keep a sufficient number of non-colluding miners active, preventing
> collusion is probably impossible, and that scaling blockchains up to
> handle an interesting transaction rate is very hard, but that
> no-government money is really interesting.
>
> People who understand economics and particularly economic history
> understand why central banks manage their currencies, thin markets
> like the ones for cryptocurrencies are easy to corrupt, and a payment
> system nees a way to undo bogus payments, but that free permanent
> database ledger is really interesting.
>
> Not surprisingly, the most enthusiastic bitcoin and blockchain
> proponents are the ones who understand neither databases nor
> economics.
>
> R's,
> John



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