In theory it was all supposed to be easy and great: decentralization, autonomy and transparency. However upon implementation a dirty truth is revealed: Blockchain technology only improves the performance of machines and not people.
In this post @BlockRush will analyse whether or nor Blockchain technology has gone from innovation to pointless distraction.
1. Decentralization
Decentralization - the primary selling point of Blockchain technology has done more to spread confusion than peace. For one thing, people confused it with democracy.
After years, it is now that people have learned that Decentralization is not Democracy.
Consider these facts:
- Over 60% of Bitcoin's mining power is locked in China making the network subject to the whim of the miners and Chinese government.
- Ethereum decentralized yet not democratic. The minority of investors who own a majority of the network dictate for it.
- Steem is decentralized yet hosted on the centralized Amazon and among a few randomized "witnesses".
- Presearch is a Blockchain powered search engine yet they only thing decentralized is perhaps their tokens as they only serve up search results from the centralized Google and other social media sites.
What is the use of decentralization if a system is still autocratically controlled?
2. Autonomy
Let's face it, the autonomy thing is not working. Instead of having a single centralized command and conquest station which would have made progress easy, the Blockchain industry has become another Libya where progress has come to a standstill as there is no unity governance front but several autonomous self governing fronts and sections.
As we speak, there is absolutely no cohesion in the Blockchain industry. Consider:
Every single developer, institution or company wants to build their own Blockchain instead of joining an already existing Blockchain network. The result is that every single day we have new Blockchain networks springing out of forks and clones and there is absolutely no inter-connectivity between any two Blockchain networks.
One would expert that even the already existing and established Blockchain networks would have unity among them but this is not the case. Everyone is against the other as investors are against developers and users are against exchanges.
Bitcoin miners, developers, users and investors are all so against each other that they would rather split the network than come to a consensus, after the Bitcoin Cash split we have another split in November and now there are even rumors that Bitcoin Cash could split.
Ethereum has already split and Steem would have split over a million times already if not for the clause its founders put in its code to prevent Steem from splitting.
Its not a battle of the fittest; its an issue of each man for himself, God for us all. Believe it or not; unity is strength as divided we fall. The Blockchain industry is not neutral to this reality.
3. Privacy
Facelessness is another high selling trick of Blockchain technology that is not selling very well. Despite the fact that people are aware of the reality that governments and corporate giants are spying on them - that has not caused them to adopt Blockchain technology.
It turns out that people simple do not care much about their privacy. Most people have nothing "confidential" to hide from the NSA, CIA or Facebook except for pornography. Most civilians have nothing in their inboxes and drives other than videos and picture of moments shared with family and friends as well as a few work related files - there is not much to hide.
The alt coin ZCash which boasted of anonymity thought it would take the world by surprise, however it got its worst surprise not by the fact that few people used it, but that of the few people who even used it - any of them barely used its anonymity feature.
An overwhelming percentage of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency users use centralized online and exchanges which take ways their privacy and autonomy. Almost all the exchanges and wallets we use comply with AML and KYC policies yet we use them because no one cares that much about privacy.
Yes, people do not care about the NSA, CIA or anyone else spying on them. The only ones who are actually trying to hide something are those who want to hide their millions from the unforgivingly notorious IRS - or those upto to some grave mischief.
If you want more confirmation of this; you should see the face of now exile self-sacrificial whistle-blower Edward Snowden after he found out that his liberal American society did nothing to protect him. What an irony that the most fascist nation on Earth is host to an anti-fascist privacy whistle blower while the so called "liberal" American side cannot even support Blockchain ICOs.
However, no one wants to pay 50%+ of their earnings to some tax man to feed their most hated bureaucracy: the government. Its no surprise that almost all the top corporations in the world including Google, Apple and even Facebook use offshore headquarters setups to deduce their taxes under the name of tax avoidance(not evasion).
Recently, even three of the world's top footballers: Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo, Barcelona's Lionel Messi and Brazilian football star Neymar have all been found guilty of defrauding the state millions in taxes.
Bottom line, common people do not care about their privacy being violated since they have nothing to hide from the government or anyone else - excerpt for taxes. Tax avoidance and evasion may be the only motivation for people who want to use crypto-currencies for private transactions.
4. Transparency
Transparency was one of the selling points of Bitcoin, however it turned out to be another underused feature.
Consider this: when you visit a crypto currency exchange and see the block explorer revealing the lastest transaction activities, it feels great right? But what does that do?
- Does that make your transactions any faster?
- Does that reduce the cost of your transactions?
- Does that make your transactions any more credible than those on Paypal or Visa?
- Do you even understand what those data are?
- Do you even need to see that data at all?
5. Speed
For any digital system to be able to scale up to support millions and billions of users who generate trillions of transactions, it would be need to be very fast.
Already, several centralized digital system such as Facebook, Google, Visa, Mastercard and domain systems are doing fine. However Blockchain technology has promised to be faster and more powerful.
Has this promise being realized? NO.
- Bitcoin confirmation times have always been slow and now there are reports it takes days!
- Ethereum is becoming congested already and simple cannot handle the load on its main net - even though nothing major has been built on it yet.
- Steem is doing well but only because we have less than 200,000 members and support only text - images are hosed elsewhere and videos are not supported. Again not everyone is actually posting at every minute.
Blockchain, Blockchain, Blockchain; and here we still are with nothing but confusion, segregation and greed. But who are we to judge? Blockchain is still very young perhaps with time humans will learn to better adapt to this wonderful technology.
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