DEV Community

Cover image for Bitcoin Blockchain Bullshit?
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Posted on • Updated on

Bitcoin Blockchain Bullshit?

American Chopper Senior and Junior have strong opinions about BBB - Bitcoin, Blockchain and the Bullshit around it.

Is Bitcoin a real currency?

Image is too small to be readable? Click on it

Background: people don't wake up every morning wondering if the euro or the dollar are up or down. Instead they try to produce things of value, and use a currency to exchange it against something else. The currency itself is not the end goal.

Blockchain over-engineering?

Image is too small to be readable? Click on it

bbb blockchain

See:

Bad Central Banks?

See Crypto-anarchism - Wikipedia

Burning precious limited resources?

Bigger images please?

I'm a backend developer so I don't understand CSS and why the images are so small currently.

Here they are in full resolution

Top comments (29)

Collapse
 
crankysparrow profile image
crankysparrow

β€œCoronavirus is also decentralized” is my new favorite argument against crypto bros πŸ˜‚

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

It's funny because it's true, being centralized or not is neither good or bad.

During the middle ages, you had your money as gold and silver in your pockets, lots of violent thiefes were around to steal it from you, possibly murder you, but hey, everything was fully decentralized!

Collapse
 
crowdozer profile image
crowdozer

imo it makes the most sense to avoid calling them "currencies" at all. like sure they might tick the boxes for literal definitions (divisible, fungible etc) but at this stage i think most have given up on being digital cash. even bitcoin, the "peer to peer digital cash" is now trying to be... digital gold? and ethereum is more of a trustless computing platform. most of the "popular" alts are trying to do their own thing too these days, with the exception of stablecoins and memecoins which are.... yeah

a proof of stake system is far more analogous to a % share ownership in a technology than it is a currency... hmmm but what would you call that? a crypto-share wtf? 😁 πŸ˜…

i don't really understand why crypto is so polarizing to people, it seems like a dire desire to say "I told you so" from everybody involved. so exhaustingly tribal πŸ˜₯

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Really interesting comment thanks

i don't really understand why crypto is so polarizing to people

I think it's because it's many things at the same time

  • a technology subject to the Garner cycle of hype and to what Joel Spolsky calls "architecture astronauts"
  • an ideology - central banks and governments are Bad
  • a promise that you can get rich quickly - it's the far west, no government to prevent you to sell illegal drugs or worse, steal other people's resources from coins to gpg keys to computing resources to electricity to many other things
  • plenty of shady investors who wants to do the kind of non regulated shadow banking that made the great depression great
  • lots of dishonesty to convince every year fresh new people to put their money into crypto - absurdly inflated claims that this is gonna be as huge as the internet without the extraordinary evidence to back it up
Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Web inventor Tim Berners Lee tells us we can and we should ignore web3 aka blockchain, cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens

β€œIt’s a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they’re doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all.”

β€œBlockchain protocols may be good for some things but they’re not good for Solid,” a web decentralization project led by Berners-Lee, he said. β€œThey’re too slow too expensive and too public. Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private.”

Collapse
 
voltra profile image
Voltra

Fun and snappy to read? Did I actually stumble across something good on the internet?

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Thank you πŸ˜€

Collapse
 
mteam88 profile image
Matthew

CSS sucks sorry lol

Collapse
 
byt3h3ad profile image
Adhiraj Dutta

blockchain is just torrent but overhyped and a lot of security jargon

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Exactly in fact Blockchain reminds me from the P2P Napster alternatives from 20 years ago and this mythical article from Joel Spolsky

Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like β€œNapster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

All they’ll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each other’s stories: β€œPeer To Peer: Dead!”

The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: β€œCan you imagine a program like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?” Then they’ll build applications like Groove that they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it β€” the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular.

Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You – Joel on Software

Collapse
 
mellen profile image
Matt Ellen

I do mean to be pedantic, so, lots of people wake up every morning wondering about the value of the dollar, euro, etc. there are plenty of forex traders. I agree with the pont though, bitcoin is much more a commodity than a currency.

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Counter argument: the percentage of forex traders, trade economists and similar jobs in the general population is rather very small. Most people produce in euros, buy in euros and are only remotely affected by its evolution.

And the evolution euro/dollar is much less exciting than the ups and down of bitcoin.
google.com/search?q=evolution+euro...
coindesk.com/price/bitcoin/

Collapse
 
rmcdaniel profile image
Richard McDaniel
Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Frankly I regret trying to read that blog.
Why those logorrhea of words and jargons in the BBB world?
Whatever is well conceived can be clearly said, and the words to say it flow with ease.

Collapse
 
rmcdaniel profile image
Richard McDaniel

I'm happy to explain any jargon that you find confusing.

Thread Thread
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Can you explain what you find interesting in this article without using jargon?

Thread Thread
 
rmcdaniel profile image
Richard McDaniel

Jargon is part of any specialized field. Do you get mad when aerospace engineers use jargon like "apogee" or "lagrange point"?

If you have a specific question, I'm happy to answer it. But I'm not going to rewrite an entire article just because you refuse to learn what some words mean.

Thread Thread
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Fine, you do what you want.

My point of view is that every programmer can write code that is understood by the compiler, but the best programmers write code that is easily understood by humans.

Same thing here: everyone can write about in a way that is obscure and hard to read. Jargon is fine if you are sure that everyone works in the field and understands it, but it would be a mistake to assume that this is the case here.

Once I had the curiosity to read the four ground breaking scientific papers from Albert Einstein's miracle year of 1905 and it's ground breking stuff, like 10.000 times more important that whatever that blogger is trying to say, but it's surprisingly readable.

The 1905 Papers - Annus Mirabilis of Albert Einstein - Research Guides at Library of Congress

So is my basic assumption that whenever something is harder to read than Albert Einstein's papers - and that happens surprisingly often - it's not because it's profound but because it's as best written for the wrong audience, badly written, or at worse deliberately misleading us.

Thread Thread
 
rmcdaniel profile image
Richard McDaniel

Did you have an actual question or not?

Thread Thread
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

I don't, have a nice day.

Collapse
 
andyrosenberg profile image
AndyRosenberg • Edited

I used to think Facebook was stupid because it had homogenized styles (compared to the customizability of Myspace). Despite my apprehension, that platform had an extreme impact on society in positive and negative directions. I know it’s cool to criticize blockchain, and I agree that so far it hasn’t produced much substance, but it’s an interesting tech where someone could figure out use-case for eternal, decentralized, publicly-accessible storage, once people abstract away a lot of the pain-points of said storage and retrieval. Or it could end up being an overhyped fad that had its peak with dumb jpegs and overnight millionaires. Don’t count it out though.

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

The technology is indeed interesting and I think what you describe is the likeliest scenario. In 10 years the blockchain will be in the plateau of productivity of the Gartner Hype Cycle and people will have figured out the use cases for which it's the best solution.

My real objection is that I feel there is an abnormal level of bullshit and dishonesty in the BBB world. People pretending it will be a huge revolution similar to the internet. LOL. A get-rich-quick mindset who attracts con artists who have a nice bridge to sell you. People washing their hands about wasting precious energy resources and enabling bad actors selling pedo-pornography and stuff.

Collapse
 
rickdelpo1 profile image
Rick Delpo

what about NFT or the metaverse? Count me out on both of these too

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

I have the same feeling but no real arguments, feel free to make your own meme.

Collapse
 
jankapunkt profile image
Jan KΓΌster

Biggest BS-Bingo is when I hear the term Blockchain in context of government funded campaigns...

Collapse
 
pabloorte profile image
Pablo Ortega

HFSP

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

?

Collapse
 
devshirt_club profile image
devshirt.club • Edited

We have a feeling that it's a burning topic in the world.
That is why our newest shirt covers both sides :)

would you mind if we snatch the memes for our site?

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Yes, but in fact you don't even have to ask.
The nature of meme is that people steal them from each other.

For example mines here are entirely stolen from the DEV community
jmfayard.dev/programming-memes/