A blockchain is a way to reach a decentralized consensus, but the devil lies in the details. Who gets to take part in this consensus? On what criteria? Most blockchains are vulnerable to 51% attacks, rendering them quasi-useless to actually distribute trust.

Consensus can also be achieved by trusting a 3rd party in a certain context. Funny that's precisely what BTC people are doing with their exchanges, with Lightning, and even with Bitmain & Cie owning the majority of the network.

Also, you should know historically the luddites were artisans who destroyed the machines (introduced by the bosses) that ruined their lives and work conditions. They were not loonies opposed to any form of technological progress. In that sense, maybe some of us from HN are in fact luddites, because we want the machine to help, not to ruin society and the environment.

Most (software) engineers understand rather quickly that blockchains are a wasteful solutions to problems that are already solved by other methods.

That's not true.

Blockchain tech is unrelated to bitcoins/crypto's.

Just like Stackoverflow doesn't correlate with the value of the .Net framework or HN doesn't correlate with the value of the ARC programming language ( since it's build on that tech)

It's an example of the tech, but the value of blockchain does not have a correlation with any of the 8000 implementations as crypto.

Additionally, the implementation of El Salvador uses Lightning network and since that obfuscates transactions off-chain to a centralized authority. It's not what i'd call blockchain anymore.

> Blockchain tech is unrelated to bitcoins

Yes and no. The latter is built from the former. But the former is ensured to build wasteful tech. I explain the difference between consensus and gossip in an article about decentralized forging, if you're interested:

https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/

I don't think decentralized tech ( = blockchain) applies to Bitcoin anymore in El Salvador.

Eg. With the lightning network

There's a lot of very pro and very anti blockchain people here and I'm not even sure which are the majority.

Yeah, the blockchain-related discussions become highly polarized. This one has been removed by mods rather quickly.

Because it is over hyped by coin owners who want you to buy coins and make them rich

Yeah, pro-coiners probably fail to realize, if they've put their money in it, that means they've bought the hype. And people don't like to believe they're stupid, but since they also have a confirmation bias, they also look for proof that they're right, and all the stories from random websites saying "Crypto is the future!" remain in their minds, while all the skeptical articles, they just say "Pah, another luddite!" and dismiss.