This is usually where the bitcoin adherents start referring to corruption and the ilk to explain why government can't be trusted. But Schneier has the rebuttal: we know damned well from experience that you can't write bug-free, secure code. Bitcoin requires hidden trust in the programmers of the software, and in the community to move forward on decisions, and history has borne out that this trust is misplaced.
Blockchain isn't trustless, it just replaces trust in a system that is designed to efficiently enforce sanctions against those who violate trust with a system where every participant is responsible for policing trust individually.
Personally I put most of my money in my bank, because this is who I trust. I tend to trust European banks more than American banks as well because I've heard horror stories here of people being impersonated and banks refusing to refund such scams.
Ideally, if everyone's bank would work on a decentralized network (that works, is bug-free, scales, has high-throughput, etc.), banking throughout the world would be a simpler experience. Decentralized and centralized at the right places.
What are your thoughts on stuff like the many blockchain real estate related projects? e.g. "tokenized real estate" "100% liquidity" etc etc.
Although I can't say if it was just that or whether I simply exhausted the pool of those that harassed me by trolling them back. Here is some fun I had: I made an extra 400-600 every other month by emailing people who spammed me with ICO crap. They always first connected on LinkedIn then exported their data to mailchimp abusing the Mailchimp ToS (and back then upcoming GDPR too) I sent them a requests for immediate removal from their system and an invoice. This required a little research on my part on the type of spam e.g. by filtering for those in my legal jurisdiction and getting names of people involved in their scam ... The invoice was a modest fee just above €100,- to reimburse me for my time wasted. I also attached all smtp headers, accompanied by a strongly worded letter that it would be handed over to my lawyer if the money wasn't paid within 7 days. The invoice came from an EU based Ltd operating under the same jurisdiction (no point in going after companies weak EU jurisdictions with very long legal process, ... but France, Germany, Holland, etc worked well). Only 2 of the spammers didn't pay up immediately and they got referred to my lawyer which then ensured I got the money within a month and without further fights. It did cost me around ~30-40 mins in time spent (some considerably longer but this was on average) to prepare the invoice and do the actual research on the people behind the corp (little bit of social engineering with those that seemed to be faceless and dangle some investment did the trick). It wasn't really a way of earning money but I enjoyed the extra thrill and exposing these idiots. Good times and great fun to waste a little bit of my time with figuring out how they worked (or how big they were compared to how big they claimed their operation was on social media ...)
But if you look underneath, you will see that the academic community has been at work and a lot of research about byzantine agreements is coming out. It's quite the exciting field actually if you can segregate the noise from the actual good stuff.
* you need to trust the paper behind the consensus mechanism
* you need to trust the people who have implemented the client, and trust them to maintain it
* you need to trust the TLS connection you use when you download the client. Meaning the whole CA system
* you need to trust your own machine, when running the client
* you need to trust the first peers you connect to when you join the network
* after you're connected to enough peers, you can usually feel safer. But you'll still have some out-of-band comparison to do between your chain and other people's chains.
2. supply-chain with blockchain = scam to me. I'd be interested in hearing about a real use-case, but when you're trying to bridge the gap between reality and the blockchain, then it usually doesn't work well.
3. Here is my mental model of consensus and why it can be useful: we have protocols that work well when everyone is honest. They mostly break when malicious peers start appearing. Consensus is the cryptography field of study that attempts to solve this issue. You need a good chunk of people to be honest when you run such a protocol in a "public" setting. We recently discovered, with bitcoin, that financial incentives work well. So now we have:
* financial incentives can help us make public consensus protocols work
* research brought us good consensus mechanisms that we can use in more private settings
The technology works well when you think of banking. Many banks want to cooperate in the way they exchange money between them, but they don't necessarily trust each other, or their security. So they form a protocol using a consensus mechanism.
Now, a cryptocurrency is exactly the same thing, but in a way where anyone can connect directly to the backbone of these banks' infrastructure. You will necessarily have plenty of issues stemming from that: what if you lose your money, get it stolen, what if the exchange you use get hacked, etc. But the benefits are still pretty awesome: you are not going through a bank, you are directly connected to the system.
Just my 2 cents.