He's not disputing that smart people work on it, or that there aren't variations on Bitcoin, and so pointing those things out doesn't respond to his article.
You can disagree with him as you can disagree with anything, but if you want to support the argument that it's "awful", you'll need to do better.
Maybe the OP could have written a post in 1990, 17 years after the first handheld mobile phone prototype, about the tech "still having not reached mainstream consumers, therefore being a failure."
The OP seems unaware how fast Bitcoin is growing. Not mainstream yet, but it's growing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin#Growth
Similarly, where is that short-term growth coming from and how would you distinguish it from a speculative bubble? Lots of companies reported amazing growth from 1995-2000, too, but anyone who looked at their fundamentals couldn't justify it.
Bitcoin is no exception. It may survive, but the story about mobile phones (and any tech that succeeded) is irrelevant here. We can have this discussion when and if it is a consumer success.
What we actually see: 370 BTC a week on LocalBitcoins, which is negligible in the context of the country.
The closest to a verifiable claim: that miners who were stealing electricity were arrested. Of course, stealing the electricity has long been a favoured Bitcoin mining strategy.
Immutability causes bitcoin to have no counter party risk, just like gold. It has limited supply, similar to gold. Along with all the other money-like properties of gold.
Yet it is far more portable and accessible.
Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait.
Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo?
Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.
What a ridiculous argument. With blockchain really just becoming interesting over the last 2 years, you think banks, many of which use systems 20-30 years old (bonds are still primarily traded over phone) are going to switch over to it immediately. Give me a break.
> Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo?
International bank transfers can take days, have large transaction fees, and have a non-trivial amount of book keeping error. Whenever those same transactions could take 30 minutes with no human oversight I'd say the speedup is much higher than 10x. With that, it seems like you're more interested in making claims without being properly educated on what you're talking about.
We could make a million of such transactions per minute using $1000/month hosted server. We have the technology.
The problem is legacy infrastructure and the fact that banks benefit from high fees on international transfers.
There is at least one successful business (transferwise) that makes international transfers much cheaper and faster using terribly inefficient work-arounds.
If banks were at all motivated to fix the issue, they would, using Java and a database. They don't need blockchain (which, btw, is slower to settle a transaction than updating a record in a database).
Whatever problems you may have with international bank transfers, they work: every business in the world relies on them. For all the supposed benefits of blockchains, no blockchain solution can make that claim, or any claim close to it.
It is not like the problem hasn't been attacked many times from different angles.
But I agree with you that "Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem" assuming you're talking about the hijacked usage of "blockchain".
> Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait.
I think this is exactly the point. Banks trying to employ their own blockchain is the same as companies trying to employ "Intranet" when the Internet first came out. It won't work.
I'd say that bitcoin has already succeeded, just not for the use cases that the author cares about.
It's not a matter of caring. He points out that whatever uses blockchain has (or hasn't) proven successful for, don't amount to a significant economic (or social) contribution. He's talking about objective quantity, not subjective quality.
S/he never said all implementations are slow, just that most are (which is true if you count all those toy implementations done by hackers who did it just for the learning experience; I alone contributed two).
Your "obvious use case" is not obvious to me. Nor are the foundations of your argument, that oversight and regulation drags viable banks down so much they need blockchain support to "save money". As you pointed out later in this thread, they are decades behind anyway.
OP's point is that s/he does not see the same traction other (failed) technologies had. I agree. You disagree. So we agree to disagree. But that does make the OP's opinion or your arguments any more/less valid.
Their best properties and the banks' needs are not aligned. When you add in stuff the banks need like forcible retraction of transactions, and transaction fees, you have essentially destroyed blockchains. The moment a major bank releases production ready blockchain of their own it will be such that most will not get any real value out of it.
What they are doing (not what they are saying) is that they are trying to figure out how to hug the blockchain technology to death.
That's probably giving them too much credit for awareness of what they're trying to do. What I suspect they're doing is trying to get a handle on the hype about the glories of immutable, cryptographically secure storage technologies promised by blockchain, having conversations with blockchain startups consisting mostly of mutual misunderstanding and then hiring IBM or Accenture because they say "blockchain" a couple of times at the beginning of their presentation and then spend the rest of their time talking the bank's language and proposing to solve problems they already know banks actually have (not using a blockchain) in ways which don't create bigger theoretical problems.
[yeah, the people who definitely are doing the hugging to death are the mainstream IT consultancies that know that "blockchain" is the new "cloud" for sales hype to get people to rebuild a system that was only put in a couple of years ago. But I bet some of their middle management believes they're actually embracing the technology too]
1. There are not only brilliant people leading these projects (Vitalik on Ethereum in particular), but blockchain is a huge passionate discussion amongst the SWE communities I find myself in.
> for example the laughably slow transactions-per-second of most real-world blockchain implementations.
2. Is he/she just talking about Bitcoin? Apparently one means 'most'. There are plenty of plans around scaling in various tech: Raiden for Ethereum is an interesting example for smaller transactions.
> I could maybe get past the socio-political issues, the misguided notion that in civilized countries, you can route around the legal system with “smart contracts” > I still don’t think the world needs it.
3. Doesn't go to support their arguments at all. A simple and obvious use case here is: banks dragged down by capital obligations from Dodd-Frank regulation are looking everywhere for cost savings.
Blockchain is interesting to everyone because there are fairly easy to get involved in financial instruments associated that have been doing very well lately. With that, there are plenty of nerds investing a lot of time into technologies to make these networks truly useful.