Crypto Curator S01E02 – An issue of trust
December’s issue of Crypto Curator is all about opposing arguments in the blockchain world. Let’s start with general feeling of trust people have in the blockchain ecosystem.
New York Times wrote a great article on how people are starting to trust IT systems and blockchain more than their governments. Here’s one great quote from the The Bitcoin Boom: In Code We Trust
Consider the tech stocks of the late 1990s — a bubble, to be sure, but in retrospect, was Amazon really overvalued?
The article goes into depth of explaining why blockchain economy is similar to tech growth in 90’s and that crypto value rise is a reflection of something much greater. One similar moment happened in Rusia during this month – Moscow’s government has launched an Ethereum-based voting blockchain on which it will hold votes through its Active Citizen program. This voting system will go live once the dev crew reaches 1000 transactions per second.
Let’s oppose this two articles with two moments that also happened during December. First, NiceHash was hacked and the robbers apparently stole 62 million dollars.
This smells like an inside job as there are no regulations or policies to give back the money to their users. Second, some Bitcoin users are freaking out on their lost wallet passwords! A good story from a college professor who, in 2010, bought couple of bitcoins to show the cryptomarket to its students. These bitcoins are now worth around 400.000 USD :/ and the poor guy cannot use them. Yikes! Seems to me like these are essentially “people” problems that will exist no matter the technology you place before them.
Our second opposing topic is usage of electricity for mining operations. Wired wrote a piece stating that Bitcoin mining is ever-growing and it will consume all of the world electricity by 2020. This is a far fetched statement, pretty distant from the truth. There are other sources claiming that mining operations are not using so much power and that media articles on power consumption are bloated in every sense of the way. Currently, there is no hard data or objective measurement on mining power usage and all of these media outcries are barely rough estimations based on the price of Bitcoin, not hashing power or mining power equivalents which would be mathematically correct. This article is explaining in great depth what is happening there.
Seems like we’re not doomed after all i.e. Happy holidays folks!
Krešimir Končić is the founder and CEO of Neuralab and a longtime columnist for Netokracija. He has been working with software since the mid-1990s, and since 2007 has built complex digital and eCommerce projects through Neuralab for clients across Europe and the United States. He writes about software, artificial intelligence, technology, and the human forces that regularly complicate all of it. He is the author of Coding Is the Easier Part: Makers, Machines, and the Mess in Between.
