It's worth noting that the author's company is in the private blockchain field, complete with a smart contract language under their belt, in Haskell.
Indeed, it's not the first time that a private blockchain partisan has attempted to tar all of "public" blockchain/crypto as a lawless amoral cesspool. R3 made similar claims in years past. In truth, there's been equal or more FUD thrown at private by public zealots too. But it's not confidence-inspiring to see this kind of tribalism, and it speaks to a conflict of interest (at least in R3's case, who were signalling to governments that "private is safer").
The broad brush is FUD. There are any number of crypto efforts that are not fraudulent. Grin and zcash come to mind. Ethereum itself is hardly a criminal effort. The claim that this technology has not advanced the field is simply laughable. Sure, there's a lot of technobabble and money being raised around nothing, what else is new.
Anybody in the fintech industry pointing fingers at crypto need to take a look in the mirror. Crypto is a tiny speck compared to the modern financial system. That's not to excuse fraud and shady stuff, but companies servicing hedge funds, private equity and megabanks have zero moral ground from which to point fingers.
It's a recent pivot/rebrand. As of May 2019 their hero copy was "Adjoint empowers enterprises to achieve new levels of efficiency and control by delivering blockchain technology built specifically for the needs of the financial industry."[1]
Also, Stephen Diehl was actively promoting smart contracts and blockchain technology in Haskell until recently. [2]
> Cryptocurrencies and blockchains still don't seem to solve a real problem.
Have you ever wanted to send money to someone who wasn't in the same location as you? Alternatively, have you ever wanted to send a large amount of money without dealing with a large volume of cash, gold, or some other physical store of value (making the down payment on a house or car for instance)? Blockchains make it possible for you to do that electronically, and without the enormous and centralized infrastructure of banks, vaults, guards, armored cars, etc.
> I'll believe this when somebody buys a house with Bitcoin.
Regardless of whether centuries-old cultural and social infrastructure evolves to take advantage of this, the fact of the matter is that blockchains do actually enable this kind of electronic value transfer. And they do it in a way that results in a number of properties that are significantly different from our existing value transfer systems.
It remains to be seen how important these differences are and how much of an impact they will have on our society. Will it be huge like the crypto-maximalists preach? Or will it be a passing fad that is not much more than a blip? I don't know. But that doesn't change the fact that blockchains were a genuine technological advance that enabled something that we weren't previously able to do.
"Our buyer has evolved, they've moved from mom and pops to young people who want to pay with various forms of payment," said Ben Shaoul, president of Magnum Real Estate Group. "Cryptocurrency is something that has been asked of us — 'Can you take cryptocurrency? Can we pay that way?' — and of course when somebody wants to pay you with a different form of payment, you're going to try to work with them and give them what they want, especially in a very busy real estate market."
Spoiler alert: no one bought a house with Bitcoin. A real estate agent advertised a willingness to buy Bitcoin from his customer to facilitate a transaction.
Others, however, are not as comfortable with the relatively new currency. The first ever single-family home sale in Texas involving bitcoin was announced last month. The buyer, who works in the tech industry, purchased the newly built home in Austin using bitcoin, but the seller, a custom homebuilder, wanted the currency converted to dollars during the transaction.
This article is from 2017 I'm sure if I searched for more I'd find more examples but regardless is buying a house really the final test of something's potential as a currency?
Indeed, it's not the first time that a private blockchain partisan has attempted to tar all of "public" blockchain/crypto as a lawless amoral cesspool. R3 made similar claims in years past. In truth, there's been equal or more FUD thrown at private by public zealots too. But it's not confidence-inspiring to see this kind of tribalism, and it speaks to a conflict of interest (at least in R3's case, who were signalling to governments that "private is safer").
The broad brush is FUD. There are any number of crypto efforts that are not fraudulent. Grin and zcash come to mind. Ethereum itself is hardly a criminal effort. The claim that this technology has not advanced the field is simply laughable. Sure, there's a lot of technobabble and money being raised around nothing, what else is new.
Anybody in the fintech industry pointing fingers at crypto need to take a look in the mirror. Crypto is a tiny speck compared to the modern financial system. That's not to excuse fraud and shady stuff, but companies servicing hedge funds, private equity and megabanks have zero moral ground from which to point fingers.