The Blockchain is amazingly useful, that's why the establishment did their best to make sure people associate with incels and little monkey pictures to ruin its credibility. A banking system running on Blockchain is one where the Pentagon can't lose trillions of dollars annually.

[–] miridius@lemmy.world 24 points 4 months ago (14 children)

A banking system running on Blockchain

Is an astronomically terrible idea. It:

would use as much electricity as an entire country
payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
would have no protection against fraud. You got scammed? Your money's gone. You paid for something online and it never arrived? Too bad
would have no way to stop money laundering
would have no way to help people who forgot their password, they'd just lose their life savings permanently
would tie up a bunch of capital, preventing reinvestment and growth. There would be no way to get a bank loan to buy a house for example
the list goes on

[–] I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world -3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You seem to have conflated blockchain technology with cryptocurrency. Most cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, but that's not it's only use case. Literally every problem you have listed relates to crypto and not blockchain itself. Blockchain is just a ledger of transactions. A private company using it to say, keep track of their inventory, or track their payments, or use it for document control, can implement it however they want.

[–] miridius@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Ok so firstly you're not the OP I was replying to, so neither of us know for certain whether they were talking about replacing the banking system with a decentralised currency vs keeping the existing centralised private banks and just having them use a blockchain as their database. I assumed the former because of their wording ("replace the banking system"), and because the latter offers no advantages that I know of.

Secondly if you think a blockchain would offer some advantages over other more efficient write only databases, I'd be interested to know what those are, because to me if you're not running a decentralised system then you're only getting the downsides of blockchain (such as it being single threaded, slow, and space inefficient) without any of the upsides.

For some background, I'm well aware of how both blockchains and crypto work, having been obsessed with them for a little while in 5 or 6 years ago like many of us were before becoming disillusioned. I've also got professional experience as a developer on both immutable databases and banking ledgers.

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