Re: <nettime> Josh Hall: Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead (Guardian)

[Carsten Agger <agger@modspil.dk>]

On 03/02/2018 09:17 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> That article is technical nonsense. 'Blockchain' that has PoW 
> consisting of 1.6 second of handset CPU is trivial to fake. And where 
> is the consensus? Car does the same? Or is car running 500KW GPU 
> cluster doing hash verified by ... who? Cheap PoW ("Proof of Work") is 
> contradiction in terms.
>
> This is actually a good illustration of utter bullshit that passes for 
> 'technology'.
>
> We need blockchain powered nettime! BLOCKTIME!
The good thing about the Blockchain-based dystopian visions is that they 
won't ever actually come to pass. Blockchain is impractical and useless 
from a technical point of view. It's pure hype and nothing more.

On the other hand, the bad thing about the Blockchain-based dystopian 
visions is that everything bad that you could conceivably do with a 
Blockchain you could do better and much more efficiently with an 
ordinary database.

So there are definitely reasons to worry about the future surveillance 
nightmare, but Blockchain is not one of those reasons, because it won't 
ever make much of a difference in the technological sense. Its hype 
might, but Blockchain itself is useless outside the realm of 
cryptocurrencies. I say that as someone whose background is in 
technology, specifically computer science.

Best
Carsten
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