Questioning the chain of blocks
During the last few years, the blockchain or blockchain has been an unquestionable promise.
Starting from the apparently simple principle that we can ensure the inviolability of a transaction by distributing its process and storage in many devices and providing a proof of its obtained record and fixed with a time stamp by means of cryptography, the original paper of the unknown (or unknown, or unknown) Satoshi Nakamoto became one of those works elevated to the category of modern incunabula, something that many automatically saw as the perfect solution, mathematically and computationally elegant, and suitable for all types of transactional systems.
Overnight, and after the small price that had to be paid to get to understand its mechanism and operation, blockchain became the new mantra, in the unanswerable term, in what had to be in every project to automatically equip it of attractive, in the universal solution. But ... what if it were not like that? What if, as on so many other occasions, a promising technology follows the familiar pattern of the hype cycle and, after reaching the peak of oversized expectations, it turns out that it is not able to pass the test of a mass adoption? Can we question blockchain without fear of looking ignorant or technophobe?
The well-known tweet of Vint Cerf in July of 2018 with an univocal flow diagram that states that nobody needs a blockchain should lead us to think, and not necessarily about the fallacy of authority. Vint reserves were already some years before, and time and reflection had not managed to qualify them at all, rather the opposite.
On February 6, another legendary figure in the field of security, Bruce Schneier, published an article in Wired entitled "There is no good reason to trust blockchain technology", with much more level of detail than the criticism of Vint, and with a much clearer separation between the technological base as such, blockchain, and some of its concrete implementations such as bitcoin. According to Schneier, the concept of confidence in the chain of blocks was not as clear as some intended, and also, the consensus algorithm was the most expensive and inefficient we had seen in the history of mankind.
Indeed, the uses of public block chains so far have led to energy aberrations like the one underlying the speculative explosions in popularity of cryptocurrencies, where practically the only minimally hopeful scenario has to do with Vitalik Buterin and the possibility - or better, the need - to reduce the energy consumption of the transactional mechanisms of ethereum by no less than 99%. But beyond the energy consumption, which in itself would already be a major brake on mass adoption, it turns out that, in addition, Schneier is right about the mechanism of trust, and the phrases made of the type "in crypto we trust" , "In math we trust" or "in code we trust" are simply that, phrases that are very nice, but behind which lies an obvious reality: block chains, like everything else, also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
The result of this progressive questioning is evident: in the lists elaborated by analysts on the technological trends of 2019, the block chain shines by its absence. This, as such, does not mean anything: neither analysts are infallible, nor is technology a hit parade. But undoubtedly, the fact reflects a questioning that until now, in all the understanding phase and in the first application of the block chain technology that we have lived, had virtually no place. We are moving from a questioning derived from "I do not understand", to one motivated by "I have already understood it, and it does not seem interesting", or "because it spends a lot", "because the consensus algorithm is dementedly inefficient", or "Because the concept of trust is not safe".
Source:enriquedans