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  • True Unpopular opinion, I respect that.

    But ... eh yes, I just disagree. I know it's like 2 days after your post but I just need to spill this out.

    So I'm not a software architect but I'm interrested in software architecture. And the thing is, very rarely I've seen the blockchain being used during a system design. And the reason I'd say is, it doesn't have that many benefits. Actually I can think of just one - the data ownership. The fact that no one owns the data (i.e. they have no single dedicated storage) is actually nice. But the thing is ... this isn't really needed in vast majority of scenarios. And on the other hand, it introduces several very crucial disadvantages. Like

    1. The amount of data to synchronize across the nodes is just crazy. I mean it's sort of bearable for simple data like money transactions but even that can get out of hand. And doesn't Ether has like terabytes of data to synchronize? I mean holly fuck. And isn't a lot of that just bullshit data? And bear in mind that there is just relatively small group of people using it, not the entire world. I know there is some way that your wallet contains just subset of those data but to me it kind of defeats the purpose of the chain where only few selected nodes (who can afford it) can synchronize the entire chain.
    2. The energy consuption is again, just crazy. What is esentially a simple operation consumes ridiculous amount of power. And I admit I only know the Bitcoin way but in that case the power goes to ... nothing? The power goes to making Bitcoin exist. Nothing of value was produced. And we need to remind ourselves that this is a very a simple operation and we're spending ridiculous amount of resources on it. And for what exactly? So no one owns the data?
    3. The protection from frauds - So someone sends money from A to B. In most of the systems, having an authority, a 'C', a 3rd party is actually a desired thing. Someone who can take a look and say "Hmmm this doesn't sound right, better contact A and B wheter they're ok with it". Without it, the system is much more prone to frauds which is exactly what's happening in cryptocurrency world
    4. Immutability - some data are immutable, like transaction data. But majority of data are not. Data change. Blockchain by its design is immutable. The result is that you can use blockchain for anything, it just won't be very efficient. And will produce a lot of bullshit data.
    5. And probably the most crucial of all - the data publicity. All the data are public. This is something you just do NOT want in vast majority of the systems. And I see that this is what you mean by corruption fighting. But who will agree to this? Sure you might see that this politician took 500k from that business man. But you'll also see that I ordered something from a sex shop for 350€. Or that I spent 95k on a new car. Really, who'd be ok with that? Also do you think that corupt politicians would be that stupid to use blockchain in that case?

    So I take all those arguments and when I hear "Medical records could be on blockchain!" and I'm like who the fuck would want this?! I absolutely do not want that anyone could access my medical records as long as they know my medical record ID. I can imagine that those records could be encrypted by f.e. AES. But at that point I could store those data anywhere. I could store it on server of evil-corporation-101 and even they couldn't decrypt it.

    So that leads me to the conclusion who really needs a blockchain? And what's the benefit of it against f.e. a huge MongoDB cluster? I mean really, if you're about data integrity and security, just fork some NOSQL database and add what you need. Or am I completely out of touch here? I'm open to learn and I'm definitely open to better understand the benefits of blockchain because that's a puzzle for me for years

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