The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day
(2021/12/06)
- Reference: 1638782110
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/12/06/the_dark_equation_of_harm/
- Source link:
Opinion In 1960, Theodore H Maiman made the [1]first laser .
Famously described at birth as a solution in search of a problem, it delivered a Nobel prize four years later, was in barcode scanners in shops 10 years after that, and in 1979 gave birth to the compact disc.
Not content with enabling digital audio, revolutionising many sciences and much else besides, it has since become the glowing heart of the global internet. Yay lasers.
[2]
In 2009, Bitcoin was invented – another solution in search of a problem. [3]We don't know its inventor . To date, this bastard technology has yet to solve any problem that needed solving, but boy, has it created a few. Let's put it on trial for its life.
[4]
[5]
The underlying technology of Bitcoin, the distributed ledger of the blockchain, is undeniably cool and dangerously seductive to intellectual types. A tamper-proof public database that needs no central control and is both transparent and anonymous, it entranced mathematicians and computer scientists. It seemed then and still seems now that something that clever must be useful for something.
Now we know what that is. Cybercurrency, by dint of eschewing central control, is terribly useful for transferring value outside the banking system. Early boosters said that this would reduce costs and increase flexibility so that you could and would be using it to buy things in corner shops, foreshadowing a future where it, like the laser, was a ubiquitous component of the retail experience.
[6]
That hasn't happened. Instead, it is at the heart of a [7]$20bn a year world-wide extortion racket . Ransomware, that insanely profitable mega-heist, uses many techniques and is constantly developing, but it is utterly reliant on cryptocurrency to be worthwhile.
Cybercurrency does have a role in specialist retail too, the sort where drugs, weaponry, fake ID, hacking data stashes and dubious services are traded by the internet's demimonde: There is certainly an argument for an open trade in recreational drugs, but not like this.
Another early promise was efficiency. Freed of the need for financial edifices such as banks, regulators and financial rulebooks, cybercurrency would have an inevitable Darwinian advantage. But baby, Bitcoin don't scale. With insane market swings, glacial transaction speeds and the miners' gluttonous appetite for energy, this stuff is an environmental and practical disaster.
[8]
[9]Sweden wants to ban it for its power consumption, not because it creates so much carbon dioxide but because it sucks so hard at the teat of renewable energy there's not enough for everyone else.
At this point in time, based on a dozen years of practical experience, no experiment in cybercurrency – or anything blockchain – is fixing real problems. Smart contracts? Not so smart
If you want a mildly entertaining few minutes, go and search for "successful blockchain projects." You'll find lots of lists of the top 13, or 30, or 56, "most disruptive" or "most promising" or "must-watch" projects, some with big names attached. Most profitable? Most effective? Most indispensable? You must be joking.
Try running a search for "top crypto scams", though, and you'll find a much healthier market. By some estimates, the total amount of cash abstracted from marks worldwide dwarfs the ransomware haul by a factor of five to one. Even if you discount the [11]headline figures of $100bn because crypto hype is the hypiest hype, the ratio of harm to good is off the scale.
Blockchain is bunkum. It hasn't done anyone any good, excepting boosters, crims and enablers. When the best you can say about a technology is that it has roughly the same role in crime online as stolen art does in the physical world – a useful token of value that is harder to track than bank transfers – you’re not making the world a better place.
Fortunately, we have ways to handle technologies that tend to disgrace themselves. From distillation to driving, nunchucks to nukes, society weighs reward versus risk, harm versus benefit, and sets the rules accordingly. Cryptocurrency has had its chance; it deserves to be so tightly controlled it can barely breathe.
[12]Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe
[13]Tech bro CEOs claim their crowns because they fix problems. Why shirk the biggest one?
[14]Think your phone is snooping on you? Hold my beer, says basic physics
[15]Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that
[16]Pirate Bay digs itself a new hole: Mining alt-coin in slurper browsers
Where cryptocurrencies touch the rest of the world and cause problems, shut those paths down. We close down cannabis farms by tracking energy usage and heat production, that'll do it for miners. We catch criminals when they make transactions they can't explain, so ramp up the reporting requirements on the exchanges. It takes the will to say this is a failed experiment: it is, and it's robbing people of many billions.
As for the non-cryptocurrency blockchain projects: the market will take care of them. You want to convert your supply chain management to blockchain? Go ahead, and see how well you do compared to your competitors just using databases. NFTs – in a well-regulated environment, they may even do some good as robust tokens of ownership. Or not, we kinda know how to do that too. Caveat emptor. Like a feared pandemic that mutates to a mild autumn cold, if the cost of closing them down is greater than the cost of leaving them alone, then let them be. But they can and should be fiercely unfashionable.
We can't kill blockchain: it's an invention, an idea, and may we never live in a society that can erase ideas. It may yet be useful, though you'd be better off betting on Freddie Mercury being beatified by the Vatican. In a world where even lasers are regulated, the need to ruthlessly police the harm blockchain can do can no longer be moderated by the what-ofs that never could be.
It's had its chance. Bust blockchain back to the lab. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.photonics.com/Articles/A_History_of_the_Laser_1960_-_2019/a42279
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/01/craig_wright_loses_bitcoin_founder_lawsuit_roger_ver/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.cybereason.com/blog/report-ransomware-attacks-and-the-true-cost-to-business
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/26/sweden_bitcoin_mining_ban/
[10] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.06974.pdf
[11] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/avoid-cryptocurrency-scams-2021/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/05/chia_hdd_sales_context/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/15/tech_must_help_save_planet/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/18/information_wants_to_be_free/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/29/smart_things_column/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2017/09/19/pirate_bay_bitcoin_mining_script/
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Famously described at birth as a solution in search of a problem, it delivered a Nobel prize four years later, was in barcode scanners in shops 10 years after that, and in 1979 gave birth to the compact disc.
Not content with enabling digital audio, revolutionising many sciences and much else besides, it has since become the glowing heart of the global internet. Yay lasers.
[2]
In 2009, Bitcoin was invented – another solution in search of a problem. [3]We don't know its inventor . To date, this bastard technology has yet to solve any problem that needed solving, but boy, has it created a few. Let's put it on trial for its life.
[4]
[5]
The underlying technology of Bitcoin, the distributed ledger of the blockchain, is undeniably cool and dangerously seductive to intellectual types. A tamper-proof public database that needs no central control and is both transparent and anonymous, it entranced mathematicians and computer scientists. It seemed then and still seems now that something that clever must be useful for something.
Now we know what that is. Cybercurrency, by dint of eschewing central control, is terribly useful for transferring value outside the banking system. Early boosters said that this would reduce costs and increase flexibility so that you could and would be using it to buy things in corner shops, foreshadowing a future where it, like the laser, was a ubiquitous component of the retail experience.
[6]
That hasn't happened. Instead, it is at the heart of a [7]$20bn a year world-wide extortion racket . Ransomware, that insanely profitable mega-heist, uses many techniques and is constantly developing, but it is utterly reliant on cryptocurrency to be worthwhile.
Cybercurrency does have a role in specialist retail too, the sort where drugs, weaponry, fake ID, hacking data stashes and dubious services are traded by the internet's demimonde: There is certainly an argument for an open trade in recreational drugs, but not like this.
Another early promise was efficiency. Freed of the need for financial edifices such as banks, regulators and financial rulebooks, cybercurrency would have an inevitable Darwinian advantage. But baby, Bitcoin don't scale. With insane market swings, glacial transaction speeds and the miners' gluttonous appetite for energy, this stuff is an environmental and practical disaster.
[8]
[9]Sweden wants to ban it for its power consumption, not because it creates so much carbon dioxide but because it sucks so hard at the teat of renewable energy there's not enough for everyone else.
At this point in time, based on a dozen years of practical experience, no experiment in cybercurrency – or anything blockchain – is fixing real problems. Smart contracts? Not so smart
[10]PDF
. NFTs? Ffffft.If you want a mildly entertaining few minutes, go and search for "successful blockchain projects." You'll find lots of lists of the top 13, or 30, or 56, "most disruptive" or "most promising" or "must-watch" projects, some with big names attached. Most profitable? Most effective? Most indispensable? You must be joking.
Try running a search for "top crypto scams", though, and you'll find a much healthier market. By some estimates, the total amount of cash abstracted from marks worldwide dwarfs the ransomware haul by a factor of five to one. Even if you discount the [11]headline figures of $100bn because crypto hype is the hypiest hype, the ratio of harm to good is off the scale.
Blockchain is bunkum. It hasn't done anyone any good, excepting boosters, crims and enablers. When the best you can say about a technology is that it has roughly the same role in crime online as stolen art does in the physical world – a useful token of value that is harder to track than bank transfers – you’re not making the world a better place.
Fortunately, we have ways to handle technologies that tend to disgrace themselves. From distillation to driving, nunchucks to nukes, society weighs reward versus risk, harm versus benefit, and sets the rules accordingly. Cryptocurrency has had its chance; it deserves to be so tightly controlled it can barely breathe.
[12]Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe
[13]Tech bro CEOs claim their crowns because they fix problems. Why shirk the biggest one?
[14]Think your phone is snooping on you? Hold my beer, says basic physics
[15]Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that
[16]Pirate Bay digs itself a new hole: Mining alt-coin in slurper browsers
Where cryptocurrencies touch the rest of the world and cause problems, shut those paths down. We close down cannabis farms by tracking energy usage and heat production, that'll do it for miners. We catch criminals when they make transactions they can't explain, so ramp up the reporting requirements on the exchanges. It takes the will to say this is a failed experiment: it is, and it's robbing people of many billions.
As for the non-cryptocurrency blockchain projects: the market will take care of them. You want to convert your supply chain management to blockchain? Go ahead, and see how well you do compared to your competitors just using databases. NFTs – in a well-regulated environment, they may even do some good as robust tokens of ownership. Or not, we kinda know how to do that too. Caveat emptor. Like a feared pandemic that mutates to a mild autumn cold, if the cost of closing them down is greater than the cost of leaving them alone, then let them be. But they can and should be fiercely unfashionable.
We can't kill blockchain: it's an invention, an idea, and may we never live in a society that can erase ideas. It may yet be useful, though you'd be better off betting on Freddie Mercury being beatified by the Vatican. In a world where even lasers are regulated, the need to ruthlessly police the harm blockchain can do can no longer be moderated by the what-ofs that never could be.
It's had its chance. Bust blockchain back to the lab. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.photonics.com/Articles/A_History_of_the_Laser_1960_-_2019/a42279
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/01/craig_wright_loses_bitcoin_founder_lawsuit_roger_ver/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.cybereason.com/blog/report-ransomware-attacks-and-the-true-cost-to-business
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Ya3tbuL@tfB5Uy488hGwPAAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/26/sweden_bitcoin_mining_ban/
[10] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.06974.pdf
[11] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/avoid-cryptocurrency-scams-2021/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/05/chia_hdd_sales_context/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/15/tech_must_help_save_planet/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/18/information_wants_to_be_free/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/29/smart_things_column/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2017/09/19/pirate_bay_bitcoin_mining_script/
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Lack of comprehension and imagination ...
JimmyPage
The truism that old people need to die for new ideas to be explored proven.
Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...
jake
The truism that young people get scammed by old ideas masquerading as new proven.
Or, if you prefer, those who forget (or never learn) history ...
Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...
tiggity
Whether it is a good idea or not @JimmyPage is fairly irrelevant, article pointed out the big issue (as far as I am concerned) is the potentially huge energy usage, not ideal when climate change is a major issue facing mankind in the short term (and beyond) with potentially dire consequences.
It' a major struggle to clamp down on long established activities that are bad for the climate, but blockchain has not got that level of traction and so could be addressed relatively painlessly.
But hey, who cafes about future human generations & other lifeforms on earth when you can toss around dubious insults,
Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...
Doctor Syntax
It should start earning its keep when we have boundless fusion energy. Until then we're best off without it.
The power consumption thing
the small snake
So blockchain fetishers will say that 'oh we use renewable energy is not making carbon blah blah blah'. As all blockchain fetishers they have brains which do not work. Energy is fungible : a joule is a joule and all joules are the same. So we see Sweden saying it is not causing carbon emissions but it is using up all the renewable energy that other people want. So ... those other people are getting their energy where? Gosh they are getting it by burning fossils and puking out carbon. So in fact blockchain fetishers are causing carbon emissions.
(Yes, I know is edge case where renewable energy becomes free, that is not what is happening here.)
We know it has no future
It has no future, but like all fads, it's not over yet or soon.
Exploit it if you can. Use if you can. Ignore it if you can. But don't get caught as the last fool when it finally collapses.