Technology

TL/DR: I think blockchain(s) have limited, niche use cases and we shouldn’t dismiss the technology entirely but I think the hype around it was misguided and its misuse has caused more problems than it’s valid use cases have solved. (There’s also a Luddite commentary.)

I’m not against alternate currencies or air travel. I have a ton of airline miles, in fact, which proves both of those things.

I’m certainly not a Luddite in the fear of tech sense. (Though, I do think the original Luddites are more sympathetic and interesting than we give them credit for. The first ones were skilled craftsmen who were just as mad that the automated products were shit quality made in horrific working conditions by people paid sub-poverty wages. So, their initial issue wasn’t automation writ large so much as “automation that only benefits the owners of the machines while customers get worse products and workers get sub-poverty wages.” It’s kind of where “A.I.” is now: low quality writing/art/video for cheap that’s only making a few people richer.)

As for blockchain, I don’t have a problem with it existing. Append-only digital ledgers already existed when public, decentralized ones came out in 2008/2009. There’s some real, but niche use cases where you’d want that ledger distributed and public with no central authority. I’m typing this on Lemmy; so, I’m not clearly not against decentralizing things just for the sake of it. But the proof of work version obviously doesn’t scale well if it uses more power than mid-sized countries. At this point, the tech isn’t that new and hasn’t really improved anything spectacularly. And it’s got some debt to repay for its use in money laundering and enabling ransomware attacks and shit like that. So, my hostility to blockchain isn’t the neutral technology component so much as misuses of it by people.