From my usual Internet doom-scrolling, I often see people displaying hatred towards "blockchain". I'm kind of standing on neutral grounds about it. To avoid getting "echo-chambered" on social media, I do often think about it.
I have figured that, you probably don't hate |blockchain| (not in quotes). You are using "blockchain" to refer to related things caused by |capitalism|, and we hate those.
(Same argument can be applied for AI hype, but I'll leave that to another time.)
To avoid any ambiguity, and to make sure that you understand my opinion correctly, I hereby provide definitions of some words I will be using.
Refers to |ONLY the technology concept itself|, so that doesn't include cryptocurrency, NFTs, what not. It is the concept of having a decentralized public ledger, that is cryptographically secured.
Refers to |cryptocurrency ethusiasts|. This term is misleading due to it taking the common word "crypto". It does not mean "cryptography". Cryptography itself is an extremely essential technology that allows us to have secured communication over the Internet. It's the sole reason you don't have to worry people stealing your information while logging in to your bank.
|Blockchain| is just a technology developed to solve some existing problems, or at least attempt to solve them.
Initially, it is meant to be used as something |transparent|, |secured| and |decentralized|. Some of these are attributes we are yearning for. As an example, the |Fediverse is focused on decentralization|. And blockchains are indeed achieving these.
Well, if you haven't read the title yet, _*|capitalism|*_. Always ruining things. To make sure I'm not just making this up in my mind, I actually [went on Lemmy and ask for other haters' opinion](https://lemmy.world/post/22273178). The question is biased, which caused a lot of downvotes, so I just started yelling at people to give their opinion, and it totally worked. All it cost was my virtual Internet points, but who cares? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Anyway, they aligned with my thoughts pretty well, so I can confidently write this blog.
Honestly, problems start when we talk about money. |Bitcoin| is the first generation of blockchain. It is money in the blockchain, and we refer to it as "cryptocurrency". If you are a hater, you have probably heard about "mining". Mining is a computationally heavy task to make Bitcoin secure, and of course, valuable. And this is where the first problem begins.
So everyone was like, "omg it's easy money". We refer to these people as |crypto-bros|. And that, |FOR THE THIRD TIME NOW|, inflated the price of GPUs. As mining requires a lot of computation power, it is bad for the environment with our current energy generation distribution. On the other hand, because of how hard it is to trace the actual user of a Bitcoin account, people started doing scams with Bitcoin.
On the business side, blockchain was hyped up to be "the next generation of the web" (aka "Web 3"). People started randomly inserting blockchain technology to where it should not be, just because it will bring in investors. Kind of like |AI slop| (as of the time of writing). This is just putting efforts into unncessary components of a business, and performance is worse most of the time.
Hype keeps the ball rolling, and keeps bringing sh*t in.
Remember |NFTs| from a few years back? That was done on the second generation of blockchain: |Ethereum|. If you forgot what NFTs were, here's a brief recap: |You have a token in the blockchain saying that a link to an image is yours.| This is gotta be the stupidest thing anyone has ever thought of. It was fine at first, until some crypto-bros started saying "ay you can't use the image from this link which should be owned by me." And then everyone dunked on them.
As someone who make web scrapers, I keep this rule in my mind:
You either never upload your images to the Internet, or people will for sure download it. Sailing the seven seas is fun :>
Obviously, the other problem about NFT is |artists' works are getting stolen.| The policy of converting a digital asset to NFT is immature. There are people who doesn't respect copyright, so there's nothing stopping them from converting others' work into NFT for their own profits. I think this was the breaking point for everyone? Again, think about why this happened. Yup, it's *_capitalism_* at its finest.
To fix this problem, we need everyone to switch to the blockchain system, at the same time, which is basically impossible.
From my post, I realized some people are still complaining about the computational requirement of blockchain. |This problem is actually already fixed.| After the Ethereum merge, it is now using |Proof-of-Stake| (PoS) instead of |Proof-of-Work| (PoW) adding new blocks. Instead of mining, you now just pay extra, and it is significantly faster.
I believe that all technical problems can and will be fixed. |The main problem really lies in capitalism.| It's such a major system in most societies, technology like these just can't survive on its own without hype. Hyping brings in the stupid capitalistic stuff that quite a lot of people hates.
Please, don't just hate someone when they mention the word "blockchain". It's been used very loosely. Make sure they are referring to the bad stuff before blasting them.
Plus, blockchain is still a developing technology. We don't know how useful it can be yet. Maybe it is the entrance to something more remarkable in the future.