Blockchain: what's not to like?

That’s a loooong read, but looks interesting!
I’ll have to find time for it…

It’s a hack job on Blockchain. Enough to know the well known issues of blockchain, but misses out on major advances in the tech already and many projects ongoing to improve it e.g. Ethereum sharding .
I would draw no conclusions from that post.
It’s like when people attacked the ‘cloud’ when it first proposed and now the vast majority of software is SaaS from the cloud.

Here’s a summary for you, my take anyway:

  • Bit coins, or any alt coin require a constant speculative investor ‘input’ to support payments to miners, o.w price will collapse
  • Proof of work is environmentally very wasteful,
  • ‘Off chain’ pump and dump schemes and other collusion schemes are hard (impossible?) to police,
  • Private keys not safe anywhere on a network, need a hardware wallet
  • Already have experienced capacity problems in Ethereum network,
    and finally
  • smart contracts and DAOs are in essence programs written by humans with bugs in them, exploitable bugs that have led to a lot of people losing cash already.

I linked it as I enjoyed reading something contrarian, other than the blockchain PR which you get in the newspapers.

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Yes, a contract and code is only as good as the people and logic behind it along with it’s validation. But once it’s solid the beauty of blockchain is that it is virtually unbreakable. No government or 3rd party can step in and reverse the contract in fully decentralized blockchains such as Ethereum. It’s all fully transparent. The contract cannot be interfered with.

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I have invested (speculated) in probably 20 or 30 blockchain projects over the last 1.5 years.
I have seen the good and bad, lost money, made some of it back. Seen some teams progress quickly , others can’t even make 1/5 of their commitments. It’s just like any other software development but the wild west in terms of financing and speculation.

There are very solid teams and consortiums behind IOTA, BTC, ETH, NANO, LTC, XLM , XMR XRP in the top tier.
Many of those projects have been around for years already and showing very steady progress.

The contract cannot be interfered with. The rules of the network can :slight_smile:, google Ethereum hard fork.

Yeah I know they can fork. But it’s rare, vast majority moved to the new fork of Ethereum supported by the Ethereum foundation and Vitalik Buterin. They have good governance and plan for roll out of ETH 2.0 next.
I’m still a big fan of Ethereum and have been since my first post on it back in 2017. The massive bust allowed me to invest quite heavily into it now, so that’s one silver lining.
But as I said pretty much all the others in that list are SOLID above. I wouldn’t even class them as speculative as they have a lot of development already. IOTA is the main one waiting to prove itself as it needs to remove the co-ordinator.

What's not to like

I lost the money I got for selling my car by getting in in early January 2018 ;_;