Blockchain: A Database Tooth Fairy?

April 19, 2018

Writer Kai Stinchcombe at Medium understands why so many people want to believe blockchain technology will cure the ills of society, he really does. However, he is compelled to burst that bubble in the piece, “Blockchain Is Not Only Crappy Technology but a Bad Vision for the Future.” Most advocates of Bitcoin and other blockchain products proclaim the value of “a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone” (his words). That would be great, he acknowledges… but that is not what we have here. He explains:

“You actually see it over and over again. Blockchain systems are supposed to be more trustworthy, but in fact they are the least trustworthy systems in the world. Today, in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times those of the world’s most mismanaged currencies, and bitcoin, the ‘killer app’ of crypto transparency, is almost certainly artificially propped up by fake transactions involving billions of literally imaginary dollars. Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic. A corrupt government can create a blockchain system to count the votes and just allocate an extra million addresses to their cronies. An investment fund whose charter is written in software can still misallocate funds. How, then, is trust created?”

See the post for more about the technical limits of blockchain technology, as well as Stinchcombe’s philosophy on the role of trust in a connected society. In a nutshell, he thinks we should stop trying to avoid it and start working to build it. Sounds ideal to me.

Cynthia Murrell, April 19, 2018

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Database, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.