The only reason why bitcoin is still alive is because nobody is really linked to it, except for the imaginary Satoshi Nakamoto. The biggest fault of ethereum and the entire crypto ecosystem is having a leader, someone who is considered the ‘inventor’.
Whatever has an identity is vulnerable and subject to attacks, critiques and censorship. Terrorism is yet another phenomenon without a face. Hence, powerful and impossible to defeat.
What really is blockchain?
Blockchain is a (super hyped) technology that is actually very simple to implement, despite what they want you to believe. Make a block, hash it, make another block in which you store the hash of the previous and the current block. And so on. That’s basically it.
As for consensus algorithms, there’s not really much to say, except for some weird assumptions that are considered in two major schools of thought. One is “we do not trust everyone and everything will be fine as long as there is a majority of honest nodes”. Another is “as long as we trust a few validators everything will be fine”.
From these two extremes one can build consensus algorithms that sound fancy but are in fact just a mix of the two.
Blockchain is the least engineered technology ever created. Forcing the participants of a network to manage an append-only storage and keep crunching numbers to stay secure is the result of a very poorly engineered concept that cannot scale, is not sustainable and is slow. Doomed to fail as more participants adopt it.
What is happening?
Novelty has mesmerized only those who are not really familiar with the basic concepts of cryptography and computer science, namely hashing and distributed system (p2p and the like). Hype is doing the rest, since March 2017, with a long series of so called ICOs (initial coin offering). I’d better define ICO as the acronym of the most creative exercise to raise capital by promising innovation and disruption from a colorful slide deck.
This in turn has given word to an increasing number of charlatans who populate the many meetups and conferences. These very people pretend to tokenize any business and usually propose such nonsense blathering about technologies they barely understand. As if there were anything to understand. Armed by mottos like “we are changing the world one block at a time” they usually speak with the same energy and enthusiasm of those who know the Truth.
In fact, too much money and resources have been allocated for a technology that is only promising without really executing. Think about the hours spent on hackatons and programming stuff that many times makes little sense, and electricity consumed mining blocks that provide no value to any business.
What will happen?
A gigantic crash. Just like the dot-com bubble of the late 90s that wiped out a number of companies and almost annihilated those that eventually survived but took 10 years to get back to business. For sure it established a new order, frankly a better one.
The world keeps repeating itself, and those who are lucky/old enough to have seen it the first time should not be surprised. A cryptocrash is the antibiotic against charlatans and garbage. As all antibiotics, it is inevitable. Be prepared.