The blockchain hype is amazing and entertaining, I love going to blockchain events where 95% of the speakers have no idea what the hell they are talking about, I love when banks and fortune 500s send their chief innovation officers to blockchain meetups to find out how they can use the blockchain (hint: they don't need it), I love going to hackathons where all the projects are fun and cute but provide no real world value. The coolest thing is that I live in Toronto, Vitalik Buterin is from toronto, I met him for 5 seconds, a lot of my friends have met him, therefore they can call themselves blockchain experts. The thing I love the most is when entrepreneurs with past exits tell me about their "private blockchain" projects which got a verbal endorsement from Vitalik's dad.
Also.. Vitalik (and his offsiders) created ethereum when he was like 19. This is impressive, but it also makes you wonder - what real world problems did Vitalik have experience of that he was trying to solve? Zuckerburg was trying to connect groups of friends. Was Vitalik really so driven by the need for unintermediated prediction markets and zero-trust digital contracts as a teenager?
Engineers don't like being told by mgmt what to do, that I agree with. To continue generalizing, engineers also hate to re-evaluate the level of their skills when having to learn a new stack.. It took msft 10-15y to get uptake for the .net stack on the back-end side, and the reason they did that was because of infighting in the Java community.
Having studied the BC stack, I would say that the biggest obstacle will be to get engineers to dare try something new. To many SW-engineers on the web-side today, don't really have sufficient skills to understand BC-technology. I don't mean to offend, just state what I see. We saw the same thing with p2p-tech before that.
Solidity as a programming language is an interesting abstraction and perhaps lowers the barrier somewhat, but it will take many years before the skills available match that for what is required to gain momentum on a broad scale.
If you're an engineer and wonder why mgmt keeps bringing it up, its because this will potentially help them build a platform (two-sided) market. If that occurs and you constructed it correctly, your company may well be able to skip on taxes as well, as a side-effect.
> Having studied the BC stack, I would say that the biggest obstacle will be to get engineers to dare try something new. To many SW-engineers on the web-side today, don't really have sufficient skills to understand BC-technology.
I find those sentences make an interesting pair: they're both huge assertions at odds with the general consensus and you didn't support either of them. The usual complaint of web developers is that they're endlessly drawn to new things, so it seems like some evidence would be in order to claim they're suddenly extremely conservative in this one area. Similarly, since Bitcoin proponents like to talk about about simple and easy to use it is, it seems implausible to blame everything on a lack of skill.
The comparison to P2P is interesting: the technology was rapidly adopted in a few areas where it offered a clear win but, similarly, had various people pitching it as the solution to all problems and claiming that skeptics were ignorant luddites. Since those products all failed, perhaps it would be better to work on answering those questions rather than dismissing them?
> If that occurs and you constructed it correctly, your company may well be able to skip on taxes as well, as a side-effect.
This kind of argument is not going to change the reputation Bitcoin has for being most of interest to crooks.
> The usual complaint of web developers is that they're endlessly drawn to new things
I'm referring to a new way of constructing software, using a transactional database at the core and defining every event as a transaction between two parties. Today engineers usually think of the platform as a distribution medium for data, aka. client-server. In the BC world refining this so that any party can take on any role, aka. decentralized/distributed is challenging. I'm trying to explain that this go far beyond a new JS framework or (no-)sql database, in the BC environment the engineer must be able to define and code business rules.
> Since those [p2p] products all failed
I don't think p2p failed because of technology, but rather because mgmt/industry wanted to keep control. See e.g Spotify or Skype as examples, there are many other interests at play than pure technological.
> tax evasion (value added tax and in some case corp. tax)
I agree with your view, but if you examine today's platform economies this is exactly what they have done to a large extent. They give away "free" services only to cash in on your personal data from a near tax free country setup. Examples are FB, Google, Apple, Amazon..
