How is blockchain technology going to change the world?

Blockchain technology is only useful for cryptocurrencies, NFTS and the gambling economy they generate.

As a software engineer aware that my skill set can atrophy pretty quickly on the IT market if I don't actively learn new things, I started to study what blockchains are and how they work. If you are passionate about tech and problem solving, your first reaction when seeing the underlying system is "that's really clever". For many in tech, myself included, there is a sort of epiphany when finding ingenious solutions to difficult problems.

I then wanted to create a program that used this clever new technology. But there was a big hiccup. I could not find any convincing use case for it, whatever scenarios I could come up with there was always a better alternative.

In the end, the only way I managed to devise a use case was when I started thinking backwards, by looking at the characteristics of the blockchain development services and devising features and requirements based on them. But that lead to an app that no one would ever need because it's the literal definition of having an answer in search of a problem.

That's because the blockchain is, without getting into the tech jargon, a database that is immutable, distributed, decentralized, append-only that operates in a trustless environment. Let's see how often these characteristics are needed:

As someone with one foot in the software development sphere and another in the hacker space, I need to elaborate on the last point. People working in cybersecurity are taught very early in their careers to be suspicious of all the data coming into the systems they protect and thoroughly vet it using multiple lines of defense. But that's not the world of the blockchain. Metaphorically, the world the blockchain models is this:

while the real world of cyber threats looks like this

The first picture represents the anarcho-capitalist fantasy of the blockchain, while the second one represents the real world, where people cooperate and work side by side and use multiple layers of defense to guard from attackers. Notice that the cybersecurity guards throwing rocks at the hackers who try to storm the citadel do not need to guard against each other, nor are their only defense a pair of guns.

The blockchain only makes sense in the mind of rabid libertarians who fear the "central authority" and only protects against forgeries, which constitute a tiny fraction of real world cyber threats. It does this by metaphorically putting everyone in a mecha suit:

The result, predictably, is a clunky, slow, incredibly expensive and wasteful system that still lacks many, many, many basic features that we've come to expect. The only way to get these basic features is to fall back on trust, which basically eliminates the need for the blockchain in the first place. Because the world, even in tech, works on trust and that can't be programmed away.

But the blockchains generates tokens that investors can then gamble on while companies can use coins as unregulated stock (what goes by the name ICO, initial coin offering). So there should be no surprise that the financial industry throws billions of dollars at things that label themselves "blockchain", despite the fact that "out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017" and when a project is successful, it actually has little to do with blockchain under the hood.

Blockchain has been hailed as a revolutionary technology that will solve, among other things, poverty, cancer, pensions, economic crisis, fake news, the unbanked, automation, human suffering, elder care, lack of diversity in tech, borders, supply chain transparency and trust in governments, among others.

The fact that so many "leaders" in the crypto sphere can say this, many of them quite honest in their conviction, goes to show how utterly delusional they are and how little they actually know of the real world. Naturally, they should not be trusted with anything more valuable than a bag of potatoes.

If you want a taste of the level of cringe in the crypto bro culture watch the intro to the BlochchangersHackaton of 2018:

Whenever you hear someone praising the blockchain, be suspicious. They’re either fervent believers or are selling something.

Editor's Takeaway

At Dunitech Soft Solution Pvt. Ltd., we believe in leveraging technology where it truly adds value. Blockchain has its place but is far from the universal solution it's often claimed to be. When evaluating any tech, keep your eyes open and your skepticism intact.