Dr Eerke Boiten
There are always new technologies around in my discipline: computer science, and usually they are introduced with a really useful application in mind. Sometimes we discover a little later that the downsides of such technology outweigh the advantages. Facial recognition is getting close to that point, and the online advertising industry is trying hard to convince us that browser cookies are in that category too.
What is much rarer is a technology that is shown to be harmful before anyone has demonstrated that it could be useful. In my view blockchain technology (if you want to be technical and precise: public non-permissioned blockchains
– including those of bitcoin and Ethereum) has now reached that point.
In my keynote at the 2018 Computing conference, “No, let’s NOT put it on the blockchain” (see video), I carved out a number of application areas where blockchain would definitely not be suitable: personal data of any sort for legal reasons; long term valuable data because encryption might not protect forever; successful applications (with lots of users and activity), as the chain already can’t keep up. While this gave a strong hint that blockchain might be mostly useless or redundant, and since then I haven’t seen any convincing successes of blockchain, while many companies have pulled out of blockchain projects, by now I’m convinced it is worse than that: it’s actually harmful.
There are two main reasons for that. One is cryptocurrency. People don’t participate in blockchain projects if there’s no reward for it, and giving them cryptocurrency is the normal way to do that. But to cover the real-world costs (e.g. computer time, see next point) somebody needs to insert some real money into the system by buying cryptocurrency. That gains them nothing except the hope that the value will go up over time – which can only happen if more people buy into this. For an academic explanation of the difference between proper money and a pyramid scheme fraud, please
ask an economist. The second reason is ecology, which is also outside my expertise. The bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains use the “proof of work” method to reward participants in reaching agreement on the state of the world.
Currently this takes as much energy as a medium-sized country to process a few transactions per second worldwide. My discipline is full of people who believe more responsible alternatives exist, but while that may be true, the scale of the ecological disaster is now such that we can’t afford to wait for them before we switch this one off.
Now just to work out how to be effective in getting this technology abolished …