Patrice Riemens on Sat, 3 Mar 2018 09:24:36 +0100 (CET)


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


On 2018-03-02 22:27, Carsten Agger wrote:
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.


And then, cryptocurrencies don't make very much economic sense either. Their only merit is have bootstrapped rethinking money and currencies - even though not necessarily in the 'right' direction.

On a more general plane, dystopian visions (whether Blockchain-based or not) and surveillance nightmares unfortunately represent the entropy state of social systems, and can only be avoided with a lot of consciencious, collaborative efforts - exactly what the current dispensation actively discourages ...

Have a happy week-end!
p+7D!
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