Blockchain is heartbreaking.
As a computer scientist, I love it. It’s a fundamental breakthrough: the first open participation distributed consensus algorithm ever. That’s a big deal.
As an engineer, I can’t responsibly recommend it to anyone for anything. It’s slow, unreliable, immature, hard to use, and functionality impoverished. It’s a database that hates you.
Truly heartbreaking.
HTML is heartbreaking.
As a computer scientist it’s a breakthrough! The first zero install open software platform.
As an client-side engineer I’d never use it. It is slow, inefficient, inexact, hard to use! There’s not even the most basic layout primitives. An env that hates me
agree 100%. worse is better. 😭
Note that my reply isn’t hypothetical. Most client-side engineers felt this way. For a decade. It got better. And the advantages came to outweigh the problems.
My money is on blockchains getting better. It will take awhile though.
Plus blockchain applications could be at odds with GDPR requirements around the “right to erase”.
https://www.cnil.fr/en/blockchain-and-gdpr-solutions-responsible-use-blockchain-context-personal-data
But blockchain is not (just) about open participation. It’s about trustlessness (“well actually” there are “permissioned blockchains” but that’s just a glorified/terrible variant of Git pretty much). And society is built on trust. As Nicholas Weaver puts it, blockchains (trustlessness) is good for one thing only: censorship resistance, i.e. evading the law. It’s just the only option for thing like ransomware. For everything else, systems with trust are many many orders of magnitude more efficient.
And I’d say systems without trustlessness can be “open participation”. Dename was a pretty cool idea.