Blockchain … what happened to it?

In recent times there has been little talk of that ordered and encrypted list that is the blockchain, with the sole exception of those who continue to throw money on us with cryptocurrencies (many) and those who continue to earn (few). On the other hand, the buzz of those who claim to use it to "decentralize" the web has increased.

And with this we are ridiculous.

Take for example the fediverse: in that case we are actually decentralizing the social network. We are doing it because the database on which https://boseburo.ddns.net runs is on a small computer, bought for this purpose, which hosts it. Since I ordered a cronjob to clean up the database by deleting any data older than three days, I decide what to keep and what not.

And since I intend to clean the database completely every year (basically I will reinstall the instance completely, keeping only the users), the database is actually decentralized. It is true that the zuckerberg of the situation could also make a crawler to take all my posts (in this sense I prefer scuttlebutt, which only has clients without a web interface), but would not be able to know who has read them. What browser he used. He would not be able to run a javascript on every user's computer, which tells him everything on the computer and on the IP and on the geographical position, on the WIFI, of those who read the posts.

Now let's compare with a social that runs on blockchain. It would be "decentralized". Indeed! Strange, because actually the blockchain is one, only one data structure. Oh, sure: you also have a copy on your computer, but this does NOT mean that it is "decentralized", at best we could say that it is extremely replicated.

What freedom and what control do you have over your data? Well … none. A blockchain is immutable. You cannot, as I do, clean up the database of data older than three days. You can't clean it up every year. Your data will remain there forever.

And would this give you "control" over your data?

Now you will tell me, all in chorus: "but the data is encrypted". Aha. In an IMMUTABLE blockchain. Do you know what that means? It means that if by chance someone finds an attack on that particular encryption in use on that particular blockchain, ALL your data becomes public in a single day, and you have no fucking way of removing them from there. The blockchain is immutable, remember?

And therefore, if someone had built a blockchain using Dual_EC_DRBG, to say, you would soon find out that it has an NSA backdoor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

And you are putting all the data in the same basket. Not bad, as decentralization.

The blockchain cannot decentralize anything. But absolutely nothing. It is a single data structure, a linked list https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_concatenata with an encrypted hash. But this does not change the fact that all data is in the same structure. Decentralized a cock.

The fact that everyone has a copy does not decentralize anything at all, at best.

And this is the problem: when you sell something for what it is not, when you say that such technology does something that in reality it cannot do, you are burning yourself. We are preparing for the moment when people will no longer believe you, since you have betrayed all the promises you have made.

Added to this is the hypocrisy of those who spoke of "coins that are not controlled by an elite of financiers", when all cryptocurrencies are controlled by the "whales", that is, by those financiers who buy a sufficient quantity of money at the beginning.

The beauty of the world of technology is not that lies have short legs: the problem is that the legs are so short that people still remember the crazy promises when they are discovered to be false.

Of course, there are many possible blockchain applications. As there are arrays, FIFO queues and any other data structure. But there are not all those revolutionary promises with which a plethora of new priests has tried to be accredited.

Do you remember that plethora of self-styled blockchain gurus, who explained it in a deliberately incomprehensible way, in order to make the ordinary mortals believe that they are the priests of an initiatory knowledge hidden? Interviews with Bitcoin "experts"?

Where are these people now? You can find them here:

I have often mentioned this curve in the past, but actually made a mistake. I made the mistake of not explaining one thing well enough. The fact, that is, that it is a HYPE curve.

The word HYPE is the key to this chart.

If you do not understand that HYPE in Italian means "frame", you cannot understand that that curve does not tell you what to hope for or what to invest in, but it tells you what is overrated.

At this moment, therefore, one of the most overrated technologies is 5G, together with Biochips. But we always talk about overrated technologies.

Here, the blockchain has been at the top of the curve for a long time.

The trouble is that it never ended up in the productivity plateau.

To be precise, the situation of the frame is this:

And here's what happened to the blockchain gurus.

Source: https://keinpfusch.net/blockchain-che-fine-ha-fatto/