Editor's Note: This article comes from36 krypton36 krypton

Editor's note:"Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing.", Translator: Ti Kewei, released with permission.

Editor's note:

"Blockchain - a magical but useless solution. This is the title of an article taken by the Dutch crowdfunding news website - "the correspondent" recently when it talked about the blockchain. The shipping industry, the financial system, the government...what else can it not change? In fact, the enthusiasm for it mainly comes from the lack of awareness and understanding of it. Blockchain is a solution to a problem. Blockchain is a technology, one of many technologies. It is not magic."In front of a crowd of programmers seated in folding chairs, their laptops on folding tables, one climbs onto a stage illuminated by violet-blue lights."Seven hundred blockchain people", the man shouted to his audience. He pointed at every programmer in the room."Machine-to-machine learning..."

Then, at the top of his voice:

Energy transition! healthy! Public Safety and Security! The future of pensions!"This is the scene at the 2018 Blockchaingers Hackathon in Groningen, the Netherlands."Luckily, we also have live video! And according to the speakers, something very, very big is going on here. Earlier, in a promotional video played live, people were asked if they could imagine that right here, right now, in this room, they were about to find change

human life"s solution. In the accompanying video, an Odaily burns up."Then Raymond Knops, the Dutch secretary of state for the interior, arrives in tech fashion: a black hoodie. he is as a"super accelerator"The identity (God knows what it is) came.

Everyone feels that blockchain will dramatically change government.

said the secretary of state.

I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering: for goodness sake, who can tell me what a blockchain is? How revolutionary is it? What problem does it solve?

That's why I wrote this article. I can tell you in advance that it has been a bizarre journey that has gone nowhere. I've never seen so much unintelligible jargon describing so little. I've never seen so much bloated bombastic stuff so bland on closer inspection. I've never seen so many people try so hard to find a problem that matches their solution."secondary title

small town in the Netherlands

"change maker"In Zuidhorn, a small town of fewer than 8,000 people in the northeast of the Netherlands, residents know nothing about blockchain."What we do know is that blockchain is coming, and it is disruptive."

A civil servant in the town told a Dutch newsweekly."We can sit and do nothing, or we can choose to follow the trend."At Zuidhorn, they decided to move forward. A municipal poverty assistance program for children will

are placed on the blockchain". Maarten Veldhuijs, a student and blockchain enthusiast, was placed as an intern in the municipality."His first job was to explain what blockchain is. When I asked him, he said it was"an unstoppable system",it"It's a force of nature", or rather"A decentralized consensus algorithm"。

. Well, it's hard to explain, he finally admitted.

I said to Zuidhorn: 'I'll just make you an app and you'll understand'

So he did."The Child Assistance Package entitles families living in poverty to a bicycle, access to theatres, cinemas and more. In the past, it was a bureaucratic, receipt and paperwork nightmare. But thanks to the Velthuijs app, it's all very easy: you scan your code in a shop, you get your bike, and the shop owner gets their money."Suddenly, the town was declared a

One of the international pioneers of blockchain technology". There was national media attention and even awards: they won the Pioneer Award for Municipal Work and were nominated for the IT Project Award and the Civil Service Award."Local managers are becoming more and more enthusiastic. Velthuijs and his"Teams are the ones shaping this new world. But the word doesn't show enough respect. In Zuidhorn, some people have tended to call them"。

agent of change

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How does blockchain work?

Agents of change, agents of revolution, nothing is set in stone. But what is blockchain?

At its core, a blockchain is a glorified spreadsheet (think Excel with just a database control). In other words, a new way of storing data. In a traditional database, there is usually one person in charge who decides who can access and enter data, and who can edit and delete it. In the blockchain it is different. No one is in charge, and you can't change or delete anything, only view and enter data.

The first, most famous, and indeed the only application of blockchain technology is Bitcoin, the digital currency that allows you to move money from A to B without the involvement of a bank.

How does this work? Imagine that money needs to be transferred from Jesse to James. The bank knew what to do and I asked the bank to wire the money to James. The bank will do the necessary checks, is there enough money in the account? Does the account exist? Then enter your own database: send money to James from Jesse.

In order to add these blocks of transactions to the public blockchain ledger, miners have to crack a complex puzzle (in effect, they have to guess a very large number from a very, very long list of numbers). It took about 10 minutes to solve the puzzle -- if it was solved faster, say because people used more hardware to solve it, then it automatically got harder.

Once resolved, miners add the transaction to the latest version of the blockchain ledger, the one they keep locally. They make an announcement in the chat: We solved it, look! Everyone can verify that the solution was correct, and everyone will update their own blockchain ledger. Voila! The deal is done. As a reward for their work, miners receive some bitcoins.

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What is the problem?

Why set up complex puzzles? If everyone behaved decently, you wouldn't need it. But imagine that someone wants to spend a sum of money twice. I told James and John: I give you this bitcoin. Someone needs to go and check to see if it's ok. And miners do what banks usually do: they decide which transactions can go through.

Of course, miners can try to cheat the system by playing along with me. But if I spend the same money twice, other people can see it directly, and they can refuse to update the blockchain. So, a malicious miner would get nothing if he tried to solve the puzzle. Because guessing numbers is so hard, it pays to follow the rules.

This is very inefficient. And if you trust someone else to manage your data (like a bank), it's not that complicated. But that’s not what Satoshi Nakamoto did, which is what the inventor of Bitcoin calls himself. He doesn't think banks are a good idea. They can make money disappear from your account. So he invented Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin is feasible, it exists, and according to the latest statistics, there are currently nearly 1,855 Bitcoin-like currencies.

However, Bitcoin was not a complete success. It is also true that very few stores accept this digital currency. Its transaction speed is very slow (sometimes a transaction takes 9 minutes, sometimes it takes 9 days!), very cumbersome (try yourself, it is more convenient for users to use scissors to cut the hard plastic packaging), and very unstable (its The price rose to 17,000 euros; fell to 3,000 euros; and then rose to the current 10,000 euros).

Not only that, the decentralized utopia Nakamoto dreamed of, that is, avoiding trusted third parties, is still out of reach. Ironically, there are now three mining pools, a kind of company building rooms full of servers in Alaska and other places far above the Arctic Circle. They are responsible for more than half of all new bitcoins (and are also responsible for checking payment requests).

This brings us to the blockchain. Because indestructible technology can bring sudden wealth, it is a tried and tested hype formula. MPs, managers and consultants read in the newspapers about a mysterious currency that can turn people into millionaires. We need to be part of it, they argue. But you can't do a lot with bitcoin, but on the other hand, blockchain: it's the technology behind bitcoin, and that's what makes it cool.

Blockchain sums up the Bitcoin hype: We’re not just getting rid of banks, but land registries, voting machines, insurance companies, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, lung foundations, the porn industry, and governments and businesses in general. They are redundant, thanks to the blockchain. WIRED lists 187 things that blockchain is said to be able to solve.

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A EUR 600 million industry

Meanwhile, Bloomberg estimates the size of the global blockchain industry at around $700 million (over 600 million euros). Large corporations like IBM, Microsoft, and Accenture have entire divisions dedicated to this revolutionary technology. In the Netherlands, there are various subsidies for blockchain innovation."The only problem is, there's a huge gap between the promise and the reality. It seems like blockchain sounds best in PowerPoint slides. A Bloomberg inventory shows that most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press conference. The Honduran Land Registry was supposed to use blockchain. That plan has been shelved. Nasdaq also intended to do something with the blockchain, which didn't happen. What about the Dutch central bank? No. Of the more than 86,000 blockchain projects that have been launched, 92 percent had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consulting firm Deloitte."

Why did they decide to stop? Enlightened and ex-blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explains.

You can also use a forklift to place a six-pack of beer on the kitchen counter, but it's really not that efficient."I list a few questions. First: The technology conflicts with European privacy legislation, especially the right to be forgotten. Once something is in the blockchain, it cannot be deleted. For example, hundreds of links to child abuse material and revenge porn have been placed on the Bitcoin blockchain by malicious users, making it impossible to delete these."Also, in the blockchain, you are not anonymous, but

pseudo-anonymous

For example, Hillary Clinton emails were hacked because their identities could be linked to bitcoin transactions. Some researchers at Qatar University were able to fairly easily identify tens of thousands of bitcoin users through the social networking site. Other researchers have shown how more people can be identified using trackers on shopping sites.

No one is in charge, and nothing can be modified, which also means mistakes cannot be corrected. Banks can reverse payment requests. This is not possible with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So anything that gets stolen will always be stolen. Hackers continue to target bitcoin exchanges and users, as well as investment tools launched by scammers, which are actually pyramid schemes. It is estimated that nearly 15% of all bitcoins have been stolen. And it was born less than 10 years old.

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Bitcoin and Ethereum use as much energy as the entire country of Austria

There is also the environmental issue. Environmental issues? Aren't we talking about digital currency? Yes, it's even stranger. Solving all these complex puzzles of the mining process requires a lot of energy. The world's two largest blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum, use as much energy as the entire Austrian electricity. It takes about 0.002 kWh to make a payment with Visa; the same payment with Bitcoin needs to consume 906 kWh, more than 500,000 times that of Visa, enough to provide electricity for a two-person family for about three months.

And environmental problems will only get worse. As miners put more effort into solving hard problems (i.e. building more dark server caves in places like Alaska), mining automatically gets harder and requires more computing power. It's an endless, pointless arms race to use more and more energy to facilitate the same amount of transactions.

And for what? This is actually the most important question: what problems can blockchain solve? Well, with Bitcoin, banks can't just withdraw money from your account at will. But will this really happen? I've never heard of a bank taking money out of other people's accounts at will. If a bank did something like this, they would be dragged into court and lose their license in no time. Technically, it's possible; legally, it's a death sentence.

Of course, liars are active everywhere, and people lie and cheat. But the biggest problem is scams by data providers (eg: someone secretly registers a hunk of horsemeat as beef), not scams by data administrators (eg: banks making money disappear).

Some have suggested putting the land registry on the blockchain. This will solve various problems in countries with corrupt government departments. Take Greece, for example, where one in five buildings is not registered. Why are these buildings not registered? Because the Greeks were just starting to build houses, and suddenly there were illegal buildings that were not in the land registry."But the blockchain can't do anything about it. Blockchain is a database, it is not a self-regulatory system that checks whether all data is correct, let alone a system that stops illegal construction projects. The rules are the same for blockchains as for any database: if people put garbage data in, garbage will come out."

My unalterable, unforgeable, cryptographically secure blockchain record proving I have 10,000 pounds of aluminum in the warehouse, and if I smuggle the aluminum out of the warehouse through the back door, the blockchain record means nothing to the bank used.

Data should reflect reality, but sometimes reality changes and data stays the same. That's why we have notaries, supervisors, lawyers, in fact, all these "boring" positions that blockchain thinks can be avoided.

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Blockchain has no background

What about the pioneering town of Zuidhorn, isn't the blockchain successful there?

Actually not. I took a look at the kiddie kit app on GitHub (a site where programmers release software) and there was almost nothing blockchain-related inside. So, there is a lone miner working outside, on a server not connected to the Internet, doing internal research. But the families and shopkeepers who live in poverty are using a very simple application, using very simple code, running on a very simple database.

Velthuijs："I called Maarten Velthuijs."

Hey, I noticed that your application doesn't really need a blockchain at all.

That's right."But isn't it weird that you won all these awards even though you didn't actually use blockchain?"

he:

So how is this possible?"I have no idea."I have no idea."

I don't know, we've been meaning to tell people, but it doesn't seem like we've followed through. Now you call me again and say this...

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So where is the blockchain?

Zuidhorn is no exception. If you look closely, there are all sorts of blockchain experiments out there that involve just a little bit of blockchain.

Take My Care Log, another award-winning experiment, this time in maternity care. All newborn Dutch babies are assigned a certain amount of maternity care. Like Zuidhorn's child aid kit, it's a bureaucratic nightmare, but now you have an app on your smartphone that keeps track of how much care you've received and sees how much you have left.

If you ask me, they're building a perfectly functional, working database, but extremely inefficiently. Once you slice through all the jargon, it becomes a boring description of a database schema. They write about distributed ledgers (that's a shared database), smart contracts (that's an algorithm), and proofs of authority (that's the right to veto anything entered in the database).

Merkle Trees (a way of unlinking data from inspections of that data — long story) were the only blockchain element shortlisted. And that's perfectly good technology, nothing wrong with it. The only problem is that Merkle trees have been around since 1979 and have been used for many years, for example in Git, a version control system (used by almost every software developer in the world), which is not unique to the blockchain.

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There is a market for magic, and it's a big market

"I have already said before: this story is a strange process, nowhere to go."While writing this article, I decided to have a chat with one of our developers. In fact, there are real, living developers hanging out in our newsroom. The developer, Tim Strijdhorst, doesn't know much about blockchain, but he did tell me something else.

My job is to work with code, so everyone thinks I'm a magician.

he said proudly. This has always surprised him - a magician? He spends half his time yelling at the screen in frustration, fixing those years-old problematic PHP scripts.

What Tim means is that ICT is like the rest of the world, one big old mess.

And this is simply unacceptable to outsiders, laymen, and non-technical people. Lawmakers and management figured that no matter how big or fundamental the problem was, with the technology they were hearing about in their beautiful PowerPoint presentations, the problem would disappear in an instant. How will it work? Who cares? Don't try to understand it, just benefit from it!"It's about the market for magic, and it's a big market. Whether it is about blockchain, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence or other hot words."However, this kind of magical thinking may sometimes be necessary. Take the My Care Log maternity care experiment, well, nothing special. But Hugo de Kaat from insurance company VGZ, who worked on the study, said:

The largest software provider in the field of maternity care has been mobilized by the experiment."They're going to make a similar app, but without all the gimmicks, just traditional technology."And Maarten Velthuijs, can he make that wonderful child rescue kit app without blockchain? Impossible, he admitted. But he isn't attached to the technology."You see, things didn't necessarily work out until we invented the airplane."

Velthuijs said.

Check it out on YouTube, there was a guy who just jumped off the Eiffel Tower with a homemade parachute! Yes, of course he fell to his death. But we also need these people."So, if Maarten manages to use the blockchain to make it work, great! It would be nice if he didn't implement it with blockchain. It would be nice if he didn't manage it with blockchain. At least he'll learn something about what works and what doesn't, and the town has a nice app to demonstrate it."Perhaps this is blockchain’s greatest virtue: it’s a publicity campaign, albeit an expensive one."blockchain"and"innovation"and

innovation

yes.

Thanks to all the hype, Maarten was able to develop his Child Rescue Kit app, maternity care providers started talking to each other again, and many businesses and local authorities realized their data management was inadequate."Yes, it cost some crazy, unfulfilled promises, but the result is managers are now interested in boring topics that help make the world run more efficiently, no great progress, but progress ."。

Matt Levine writes that the smartest thing about blockchain is that it allows the world to be forced to