The blockchain: threatening the distributed nature of the Internet?

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Caught this last month via social:

	"The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet"

	https://lasindias.com/blockchain-is-a-threat-to-the-distributed-future-of-the-internet

Basically, the idea seems to be that, because the blockchain in Bitcoin and friends
inevitably gets too big for the plebes to actually manage themselves, it ends up
putting control of the whole system back into the hands of the few giant players
who actually can afford to manage that much data. Which for finances means
it starts out looking like `a way to destroy Wall St.' but ends up just creating
a different `Wall St.'; and the more things we rearchitect around blockchains,
the more things end up controll centralised in the hands of a few big players,
e.g.: blockchain-based e-mail would ultimately mean that you can't just buy
a domain and a server and a network connection and start sending e-mail,
because it ends up being trivial for the superpowers to prevent anyone from
receiving your e-mail. That the idea of the blockchain was to have
reputation-based authentication of whatever was running on top of it,
and that such a thing was a Good Thing because it meant that MitM-ing
anything actually required compromising a so many independent nodes
in the network..., but really it wasn't "so many" but rather
"such a large portion"..., and that as the total number of independent
players is pushed down, the "so many" figure actually becomes
small enough for the `impossible' attack to be closer to trivial.

The Blockchain Internet Killswitch.

At least, that's how I'm reading Manuel's argument.

Here's some discussion via ycombinator...:

	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11708226

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