Imagine if in 1975, the editor of your local news paper said that solar cells are the worlds least efficient energy source ever invented and they were the technology industry's greatest failure. Or in 1995 you read the same article about websites... now remove all journalistic integrity and quality from those misinformed articles and you have what this post is about.

This is an editorial fluff piece with a very poor core argument. I'm very surprised has risen this high on HN, usually the opinion pieces here have far better formulated arguments.

e.g. "Ok, so what do we even mean when we say “blockchain”.The answer is really that nobody knows, it’s not a term that has any precise definition and it really depends on who you talk to and the context. (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1363418896301228033)"

The irony being... the author also never bothers to spell out /which/ blockchain he is ranting against.

Again, he get's sidetracked on his own strawman argument of what a blockchain is...

"Now some introductions will tell you a blockchain is a data structure from computer science which consists of a linked list of blocks which are iteratively hashed so that subsequent blocks depend on the hashes of previous blocks. (7/)However the utility of a term of art for any piece of software that includes two of the most common concepts in computer science (hashing, linked data structures) is just bad classification. (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1363418896301228033)"

He entirely misses the point that the novelty of what a blockchain is, isn't a fancy linked list, it's a mechanism for distributed consensus. Where by distributed computing algorithms from Paxos -> RAFT and private implementations of distributed databases like BigTable, Dynamo, Cassandra, and now next generation iterations like Hazelcast, Redis Grid, Spanner, etc... have enabled the greatest leaps in computing scalability of the past 10 years. However these are all privately maintained databases.

The "blockchain"... whichever implementation to which you refer, must be defined in its usability as a trusted distributed database. The mechanism of the datastructure to represent it is the least interesting or novel part of the technology.

The rest of the author's "points" regarding utility and energy consumption are equally misinformed and poorly formulated.

All in all the author just doesn't seem very informed of what blockchain is beyond the sorts of talking head gossip you'd seen on CNBC. His own limited imagination into the possible uses are akin to people from 1995 who couldn't imagine why websites would be so big or that solar panels would ever be efficient enough to generate energy.