The Blockchain is amazingly useful, that’s why the establishment did their best to make sure people associate with incels and little monkey pictures to ruin its credibility. A banking system running on Blockchain is one where the Pentagon can’t lose trillions of dollars annually.
A banking system running on Blockchain
Is an astronomically terrible idea. It:
- would use as much electricity as an entire country
- payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
- would have no protection against fraud. You got scammed? Your money’s gone. You paid for something online and it never arrived? Too bad
- would have no way to stop money laundering
- would have no way to help people who forgot their password, they’d just lose their life savings permanently
- would tie up a bunch of capital, preventing reinvestment and growth. There would be no way to get a bank loan to buy a house for example
- the list goes on
Relative point to point
- which Blockchain are we talking here? How does it compare to the current banking infrastructure?
- again, which one? How does it compare to the current pricing?
- escrow is a thing, someone can build up a PayPal equivalent on top of a Blockchain, the list goes on
- the current system doesn’t do great here, some Blockchains makes it way more traceable, in fact
- skill issue, but also solvable with a PayPal equivalent
- not a fact, what does this even mean?
- does it?
You could say the Linux kernel is an astronomically terrible idea because it doesn’t do anything…but it is just the platform, the good comes from what people build on top of it that add all these quality of life features you miss
Buy ydy
Just to elaborate here. You are describing one implementation of a blockchain that provides a cryptocurrency. Blockchain is literally just another form of a database. It’s just that it can contain traits that would allow the database to be shared and distributed unlike typical databases. Currently there are some companies that are utilizing blockchain for their inventory systems. They aren’t using any more energy than they would with a typical system. They are just doing it to keep an unchanging record of past transactions which helps with fraud and loss prevention.
P.S. Money laundering using a system that is publicly distributed and has every transaction involving usd paired with an ID, social security number and enough pictures of your face to make a 3D model is genuinely idiotic.
You seem to have conflated blockchain technology with cryptocurrency. Most cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, but that’s not it’s only use case. Literally every problem you have listed relates to crypto and not blockchain itself. Blockchain is just a ledger of transactions. A private company using it to say, keep track of their inventory, or track their payments, or use it for document control, can implement it however they want.
Ok so firstly you’re not the OP I was replying to, so neither of us know for certain whether they were talking about replacing the banking system with a decentralised currency vs keeping the existing centralised private banks and just having them use a blockchain as their database. I assumed the former because of their wording (“replace the banking system”), and because the latter offers no advantages that I know of.
Secondly if you think a blockchain would offer some advantages over other more efficient write only databases, I’d be interested to know what those are, because to me if you’re not running a decentralised system then you’re only getting the downsides of blockchain (such as it being single threaded, slow, and space inefficient) without any of the upsides.
For some background, I’m well aware of how both blockchains and crypto work, having been obsessed with them for a little while in 5 or 6 years ago like many of us were before becoming disillusioned. I’ve also got professional experience as a developer on both immutable databases and banking ledgers.
payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
Not necessarily. You could have a federated system, where only big players like banks participate in larger blockchain, like banks already do with forex and wire transfers and pay ridiculous fees to clearing agencies, and clear out local transfers locally, possibly inside their own smaller and much faster blockchain.
All your points are about an obsolete idea of Bitcoin, a PoW public blockchain. A PoS private blockchain with private keys not handled by the users would invalidate your entire list.
You mean PoS, which feature is literally that the more you have, the more you can stake, and the more you can earn in return? So basically the system that has built-in wealth concentration?
PoS centralizes the authority to whoever is richest. That’s literally worse than how paper currency with semi corrupt government works.
All my points? That’s a bit rich
You make a good point that PoS would solve one of the issues I raised which is electricity usage.
In theory it could also increase throughput and reduce costs, but: a) in practice that hasn’t happened yet despite years of development, b) it’s never going to be as efficient as a centralised system because of the extra overheads necessary to decentralise it, so that point still stands
All my other points still stand as well, plus the additional problems PoS creates to do with centralisation of power
make sure people associate with incels and little monkey pictures to ruin its credibility
yall 100% did that to yourselves
Ah yes, let’s just make everyone’s financial transactions public record. That couldn’t possibly be an insanely dangerous thing to do.
