Ask Lemmy

I dont trust crypto stuff bc it's essentially gambling, and any non-crypto use is worse than just an encrypted text file.

About 7 years ago we had some very expensive consultants, hired by clueless management, do a presentation to our marketing team.

When that consultants declared that, "we see the future of the web centered on blockchain", the two of us who were developers shared a mystified and slightly horrified look.

Fortunately, the consultants went away after extracting their $200k and providing our director with some glossy reports. They did have a few useful suggestions that we implemented, but on the whole they were never mentioned again.

I mostly hate that people don't use an article before the term or correctly pluralize it. Saying "we want to use blockchain" is like saying "we want to build house". You want to use a blockchain/use blockchains/use blockchain technology.

I don't hate the technology itself. I hate what the applications of the technology have brought us.

Don't hate it.

A blockchain being essentially a public ledger.

It's a good concept that will doubtlessly have several if not many practical uses. I think any hatred it gets is just because like every new thing hucksters try and brand it as the cure to all ills to make a buck.

I don't hate it. It's technically interesting.

But I do see a lot of people applying it to things that really don't need it. I think a lot of people saw Bitcoin and decided "I'm going to go make something that uses blockchains". That's a solution-in-search-of-a-problem, whereas you probably want to start with a problem and then look for technology that solves the problem.

I don't think that blockchains are a very practical solution for all that many problems.

The reason I am generally skeptical of the technology is the same reason I’m not going to try to give you a definition.

I’ve never seen it solve a problem or be proposed as a reasonable solution to a problem. What happens instead is that someone says “could we do BLOCKCHAIN for this, it’ll make it way more modern” and the subset of people that want to look really forward-leaning and cool say “YEAH”. If that subset of people is loud enough, a lot of money gets spent and a bunch of implementers have to figure out how to jam in something they can say is blockchainy… leading to a proliferation of definitions.

The results have been universally more expensive applications with fewer helpful features. I don’t like “blockchain” because everything that touches it gets worse.

A loaded question is a form of complex question that contains a controversial assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt). Such questions may be used as a rhetorical tool: the question attempts to limit direct replies to be those that serve the questioner's agenda.

Blockchain is touted as an immutable ledger of transactions visible to everyone.

The only proper use case I can see for it is audit logs where you never want to loose what transaction happened. That being said, we have existing technologies which provide this at a smaller footprint.

If you are gonna downvote, say something

Ok. Others have already said what I think better than I could. This is just a courtesy comment.

Okay, fine, thread. But why do you have such an emotional, lose-your-shit response if you merely think it's not a very useful technology? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I also think there is more going on that is not acknowledged.

Nothing was ever made better by the usage of the blockchain.

As a technology it's nothing special, a solution looking for a problem.

As a speculative bubble and tech industry gold rush it was outright destructive.

Of course, unless it makes a comeback somehow, the days of blockchain as a tech industry gold rush seem to be over. Now the samesuch grifters are pushing AI (ANOTHER solution looking for a problem) where it don't belong instead.

I don't hate the technology itself. What I hate is the whole grifter culture surrounding it. For example there are dozens of examples of people promising some game using the blockchain, touting it as "the future of gaming" or "the metaverse", creating a token, making millions from it and then delivering nothing, or a barely changed UE template. On the other hand, there are few if any examples of projects using a blockchain that are actually useful, at least for anything besides basic monetary transactions.

So whenever I see a project mentioning the blockchain, the scam alarm bells go off in my head and my skepticism rises 1000x.

It's all the scams, crypto-bros and stupid, unnecessary "use-cases" that it got applied to, just to make someone a big pile of money. Also: I didn't get rich.

I think some of the downvotes are from the very biased phrasing of the question. You've managed to phrase it in such a way that Blockchain bros and their detractors can both respond strongly in the same direction.

I suspect a more neural phrasing would not illicit such widespread dislike.

I had to download like 60GB worth of blocks over about 2 weeks a couple months ago, just to confirm I'm indeed broke and nobody takes Zcash anymore anyway.

The only thing it scales well at is needlessly sucking a stupid amount of power. The chains are huge and full of spam. Nobody can afford the gear to mine anymore so we're back to the rich elites making more money.

Downvoted because of the biased question. Its phrasing is presumptive (that everyone hates blockchain) rather than directed (to people who do hate blockchain).

I don't hate blockchain, but I can see why other people might.

Blockchain's more or less only use is in cryptocurrencies (yes there are theoretically other usages, but let's be honest it's a drop in the ocean). The #1 cryptocurrency can do about 10TPS (please don't even mention all the broken L2s), the #2 is "just about to revolutionize the world with smart contracts" for almost ten years already (so far the most revolutionary thing is monkey jpegs), then there are a few stable coins which aren't even really a cryptocurrency at all, and thousands of literally memecoins.

Real cryptocurrency (XMR and maybe BCH) can and is used as currency (I pay for lots of legal stuff like VPN/VPSs/domains with XMR), but not many people are interested in that I guess.