In a Huffington Post blog “Why the Blockchain Still Lacks Mass Understanding” William Mougayar describes the blockchain as “philosophically inclined technology”. It’s one of his rare instances of understatement. Like most blockchain visionaries, Mougayar massively exaggerates what this thing does, overlooking what it was designed for, and stretching it to irrelevance. If “99% of people still don’t understand the blockchain” it’s because Mougayar and his kind are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Let’s review. This technology is more than philosophically “inclined”. Blockchain was invented by someone who flatly rejected fiat currency, government regulation and financial institutions. Satoshi Nakamoto wanted an electronic cash devoid of central oversight or ‘digital reserve banks’. And he solved what was thought to be an unsolvable problem, with an elaborate and brilliant algorithm that has a network of thousands of computers vote on the order in which transaction appears in a pool. The problem is Double Spend; the solution is have a crowd watch every spend to see that no Bitcoin is spent twice.
But that’s all blockchain does. It creates consensus about the order of entries in the ledger. It does not and cannot reach consensus about anything else, not without additional off-chain processes like user registration, permissions management, access control and encryption. Yet these all require the sort of central administration that Nakamoto railed against. Nakamoto designed an amazing solution to the Double Spend problem, but nothing else. Nakamoto him/herself said that if you still need third parties in your ledger, then the blockchain loses its benefits.
THAT is what most people misunderstand about blockchain. Appreciate what blockchain was actually for and you will see that most applications beyond its original anarchic scope for this philosophically single-minded technology simply don’t add up.