I've also seen this behavior pattern a lot. I think there is a subtle line between disassociating yourself from evangelical Bitcoin fanatics and pushing a technology without really understanding it.
Also, isn't blockchain style computing obscenely inefficient? It would be great if someone well versed in these matters could weigh in.
There are two ways to secure the blockchain with a guaranteed level of security. Proof-of-work, and proof-of-stake. I use the second term very broadly, and I'm not referring to the consensus schemes that NXT or BitShares use. Anybody who says otherwise today regardless of the "marketcap" of their coin doesn't know what they're talking about from a CS/game-theory point of view, or they're ignoring the costs of proof-of-work schemes.
Proof-of-work is expensive and will ultimately be replaced with better consensus schemes that require no mining, namely those that only rely on cryptographic signatures, a good balance of incentives and penalties, and an underlying byzantine consensus algorithm.
Disclaimer: I'm one of a handful of people working on new consensus algorithms.
Proof of stake, while probably achievable technically within the next few years, has a major incentive problem. Anyone can show up and start mining a proof of work coin, and earn some. In contrast, all coins ever available in a proof of stake system must be given out by someone at some point. Most people distrust a system that claims to be decentralized, but has a central group or person giving out all tokens that will ever exist at the beginning.
It's only seemingly inefficient. It's basically the price you have to pay for maintaining a trustless distributed ledger.
If you were to run an organization/bank/Paypal clone that maintains a centralized ledger, it would be just as expensive (if not more), because you'd have to hire thousands of employees, compliance officers, lawyers etc. You probably see what I'm getting at.
There's always going to be a price for maintaining accurate accounting ledgers. The only questions is where those expenses are going to be pushed and whether it's going to be your payroll or your power bill.
You don't need mining to secure a consensus ledger.
People just think that way because so far mining is the only way it's being done with any level of security. There are a couple of algorithms based on academic research that are being implemented now, and the public hasn't seen it yet.
Hard to respond to that considering you could be making a jab at several things -- either altcoins, or crypto in general, or all of money and securities as we know it. Fix your jab and I'll respond with a quip.
Let's not jump to conclusions. I was talking about real events, not a "jab."
The event I was referencing turns out to have taken place in Denmark, not Holland, and was auctioning sugar beets, not tulips. They are using secure multiparty computation algorithms to auction sugar beet growing rights to farmers.
The paper shows a practical use of secret sharing and secure multiparty computation to discover the market price of a commodity. Not sure how secure it is, but it's interesting.
It's not the same thing as securing consensus of a blockchain ledger. In the paper they have over a thousand participants and 3 (or some small number of) servers. In the blockchain problem, each participant runs his own server. The fault tolerance model is different, and also the blockchain requires continuous consensus.
Also, isn't blockchain style computing obscenely inefficient? It would be great if someone well versed in these matters could weigh in.