Re:IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing – ...
by SkyMarshal on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @01:58PM
(#26017611)
> Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do.
> Sales people in this case meaning the entire community.
Not the Bitcoin community, but certainly most of the others. The Bitcoin community has been pretty clear about Bitcoin's use case since the beginning - inflation-proof digital money - and as long as it remains constrained to that scope then that's actually something it can do.
Bitcoin's programmability was deliberately limited to prevent overloading the network and compromising or diluting its core use case. That also prevented the community from advertising it as a general purpose computing platform and panacea for all the world's ills. That's something all the other blockchain communities have been doing, not Bitcoin's.
Re:IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing – ...
by acdha on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @03:33PM
(#26018743)
Yes the Bitcoin community, more so than most others because it's built on a deflationary model which heavily favors early adopters. One of the major reasons it's failed on its goals to be a currency is that the deflationary model encourages passive speculation holding it rather than using it, but that only works as long as new money is being pumped into the system. Even cursorily following the topic will show many examples of advocates making unrealistic promises which make little sense from the perspective of building a healthy community but are entirely understandable when you realize that they are hoping to see a personal windfall from everyone they convince to use it.
Sales people in this case meaning the entire community. Bitcoin’s design meant that anyone who buys in later will be making money for early adopters, and that gave everyone a strong conflict of interest clouding their technical judgement. Subsequent blockchains might not have copied the exact deflationary model but the get-rich-quick-without-contributing-anything mentality has become universal.