This month I want to highlight an article, The technological case against Bitcoin and blockchain, by Luke Plant. Luke presents a well-sourced lesson on the intention behind blockchain, Bitcoin, and other decentralized technologies and products. He makes the case that every technological goal is not being met. Decentralized proof-of-work transactions are in fact centralized, only with a small number of less-trusted parties than our current systems; blockchain is intentionally costly to interact with to disincentivize fraud, which makes it unscalable for large-scale use; the list goes on. This article is long, but easily digestible, and well worth the read.

https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/the-technological-case-against-bitcoin-and-blockchain

“Blockchain technology is a train wreck. For its intended purpose, whether we think about it as money, payment or banking technology, it’s beyond useless — an unbelievably inefficient non-solution whose most impressive features are things we don’t want, that also gives us huge downgrades in every aspect that we do care about…The problems with it are not fixable bugs, they are deep design flaws. The only possible way you could claim this was a technological revolution is by noting that the word ‘revolution’ doesn’t indicate which direction you are going.”