First, from the BBC, comes the news that the price of BitCoin is still crashing:
The fall brought the total value of all Bitcoin in existence to below $87bn.
On Thursday, 15 November, Bitcoin Cash - an offshoot of Bitcoin - split into two different crypto-currencies, which are now in competition with each other.
And some observers have blamed this for creating turmoil in the crypto-currency markets, with many of the digital assets experiencing falls.Hmmm.... sounds to me like folks got greedy and over-reached. Maybe that's why mentions of the word "blockchain" was down by eighty percent in corporate corporations' messaging to investors this year.
As reported by BTCManager.com:
The value of digital currencies might not be the only thing that has seen a steady decline throughout 2018. The prospect of incorporating blockchain technology or cryptocurrency into businesses excited investors and drove up share prices for companies such as Kodak, Long Blockchain, and Chanticleer Holdings, but the hype wasn’t all that long-lived.
At its peak in the second quarter of 2018, “blockchain” was mentioned 173 times, according to an analysis of company transcripts from all of the S&P 500 companies. The number has since fallen as much as 80%, with the lowest number of blockchain mentions recorder as of November 8, 2018.
It seems that Bitcoin was never as popular as a buzzword as blockchain was, receiving only 68 mentions at its peak in the first quarter of 2018. As of November 8, Bitcoin was mentioned only 11 times.When the people who were hyping blockchain are already losing interest, it bodes poorly for the future ubiquity of the technology. It's not just BitCoin traders and corporate America that are losing interest, though: IT researchers are also warning that BitCoin may not be as bulletproof as it appeared to be for security purposes, either. As reported by Gizmodo:
Blockchain is meant to be secure—but a new paper from quantum computing scientists warns that quickly advancing quantum technology poses a vulnerability for the much-hyped blockchain.
Blockchain is the technology behind bitcoin. It’s found uses as a secure digital ledger and authentication system maintained by its users, rather than by one central authority. But quantum computers may soon have the ability to break its codes.
“Quantum computers pose a risk to any kind of security where public key cryptography is involved,” Alexander Lvovsky, experimental physicist at the University of Oxford, told Gizmodo. “However, blockchains are especially at risk, because they’re completely anonymous. They’re only protected by public key cryptography, whereas banking has human tellers, plastic cards, and ATMs. You have to be a human to use a bank, but you don’t have to be human to use the blockchain.”With all of these headwinds, it's looking more and more like blockchain isn't all that and a bag of chips, after all. Maybe that's why David Wachsman, founder and CEO of Wachsman, which provides professional services to the blockchain industry, is spinning so desperately. As reported by Silicon Republic:
Blockchain elicits all reactions and none. The response from people when the topic is broached can range from a blank stare to a laboured sigh. Some know blockchain only through bitcoin, others don’t know it at all. A small cohort of people will nearly scratch a cornea rolling their eyes at its mere mention, deriding it as a fad.
David Wachsman, founder and CEO of Wachsman, certainly disagrees with the technology’s detractors. He, described by Crunchbase as a “world-renowned blockchain expert and thought leader”, welcomed me in the glass conference room of his company’s Dublin office. This office recently announced the expansion of its functions beyond PR, now offering a broad swathe of blockchain professional services to clients such as Dash, CoinDesk, Indiegogo, Kik and more.Sorry, David Wachsman; I know that you're trying to build a business of your own on the back of a blockchain industry that's looking less and less likely to actually materialize, but I really don't think it's happening. And neither do the people with all the money, to whom you're trying to sell this idea of a blockchain future.
The simple reality is that blockchain has too many technical problems to work at scale. "Mining" is time-consuming and energy-intensive, and assumed that too many people will altruistically work for the good of the network. But our increasingly connected world can't spare the time that blockchain needs to develop; our warming globe can't support the energy expenditure that blockchain technology demands; and a world in which Russian government- and mafia- connected hackers work tirelessly to exploit and explode every single Western governmental, societal, and financial system and institution simply must assume that every single vulnerability of blockchain will be both found and exploited.
Like so many recent subjects of hype, blockchain just isn't ready for prime time yet. The fact that so many were trying to force it into the mainstream of corporate practice, and of our financial system, even though it wasn't ready yet, seems to serve as yet further proof that the #disrupt mindset of the tech industry is not only intellectually and morally bankrupt, but practically deficient as well. Breaking existing systems simply to see what happens, or doing so in the hope that you can position yourself to capitalize on the resulting chaos, regardless of how much harm is done to society or democracy in the process, is the mindset that leads to Facebook. It's not just bad, but evil, and I can't help but be glad that its profitability is proving to be short-lived.