12 May 2016

Against Blockchains

Blockchains, which are the technological underpinning of cypto-currencies like Bitcoin, have been hailed as the next big thing in business innovation.

But, a read of Paolo Bacigalupi's newish near future novel set in the American Southwest, "The Water Knife", illustrates dramatically who catastrophically a blockchain based systems can collapse with only a slight amount of data degradation in just the right place (I can't explain more without spoiling a critical plot point of the novel).

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