Blockchain?
I have opinions about a number of blockchain-based things:
- Bitcoin: Irredeemably awful. Built on a massively inefficient standard that, by the nature of Bitcoin, cannot be improved. Wastes enormous amounts of energy, is not even good at making transactions. Please let it die already.
- Cryptocurrency in general: Useful mainly to criminals. Pumped up in value by speculation and money launderers. A bubble waiting to burst.
- NFTs: oh sweet heavens why. Just. Why. A pump-and-dump scheme inflated by money laundering. Pretends that it represents “digital ownership” of a piece of art or other digital good (often used without license from the creator), actually represents nothing. Terrible.
But the concept of blockchain -- a distributed ledger designed to prove that transactions took place without requiring a centralized system -- I do not have a strong opinion on.
The concept of distributed ledgers, as opposed to centralized systems, has some obvious advantages. A centralized system is easier to hack and to deceive. A centralized system is more vulnerable to failure. Distributed systems are more robust. I like decentralization as a concept; it’s one of the reasons I prefer Mastodon to Twitter.
I don’t know if the inefficiencies that make cryptocurrencies waste such massive amounts of electricity are inherent to blockchain. I do know that Bitcoin is far, far worse in terms of how much power it requires to execute a transaction than later cryptocurrencies. I’m not aware of any cryptocurrency being as energy-efficient as a typical bank transaction.
I tried to find out if there’s something about blockchain that makes it necessarily energy-intensive, but it’s hard to know what to trust in the sea of information from sources I’ve never heard of before. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to be, and that most of the power consumption from cryptocurrencies is due to crypto mining and that kind of "mining" is not required for blockchain applications that don't use cryptocurrency. But I’m not positive.
My instinct when I hear that a company intends to use blockchain for some purpose is to cringe. Announcements like this are made by PR people who don’t understand what blockchain is, to reporters who also don’t understand what blockchain is, to be read by consumers who -- like everyone else -- don’t understand what blockchain is. There may be real engineers behind the project who have a good reason to use it, or it might be that upper management heard that blockchain is trendy and they feel compelled to jump on the bandwagon. Who knows?
I’m also always a bit intrigued when some company says they want to use blockchain for a product that is not cryptocurrency or NFT. Because there are some cool things about distributed systems and I want to hear about people using them for something actually useful for a change. -_-
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