Caught this last month via social: "The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet"
https://lasindias.com/blockchain-is-a-threat-to-the-distributed-future-of-the-internet Basically, the idea seems to be that, because the blockchain in Bitcoin and friends inevitably gets too big for the plebes to actually manage themselves, it ends up putting control of the whole system back into the hands of the few giant players who actually can afford to manage that much data. Which for finances means it starts out looking like `a way to destroy Wall St.' but ends up just creating a different `Wall St.'; and the more things we rearchitect around blockchains, the more things end up controll centralised in the hands of a few big players, e.g.: blockchain-based e-mail would ultimately mean that you can't just buy a domain and a server and a network connection and start sending e-mail, because it ends up being trivial for the superpowers to prevent anyone from receiving your e-mail. That the idea of the blockchain was to have reputation-based authentication of whatever was running on top of it, and that such a thing was a Good Thing because it meant that MitM-ing anything actually required compromising a so many independent nodes in the network..., but really it wasn't "so many" but rather "such a large portion"..., and that as the total number of independent players is pushed down, the "so many" figure actually becomes small enough for the `impossible' attack to be closer to trivial. The Blockchain Internet Killswitch. At least, that's how I'm reading Manuel's argument. Here's some discussion via ycombinator...: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11708226 -- "Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))." _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/