I think cryptographers working on blockchains have come up with loads of fascinating new ideas. However, the touts, conmen, religious fanatics, etc. involved in these things aren't really capable of having honest discussions about the flaws and strengths. 1/
One of the biggest misconceptions these people often have is the notion that the existing financial services industry is woefully inefficient compared to (say) bitcoin, when the opposite is true. 2/
Another frequent claim is the financial system can't do some interesting thing (store value safely or well, move transactions internationally inexpensively, safely and efficiently clear and settle large transactions), when the existing banking system does these things better. 3/
The other constant misperception is that bitcoin's flaws are trivial or easily fixed. Proof of Work is a tragically bad mistake and isn't getting corrected any time soon. It makes bitcoin insanely expensive to run. 4/
The complete lack of privacy for users of the system is not a trivial problem either. There are experiments out there on fixing that, but none is ready for large transaction volumes and bitcoin isn't going to get them in the future anyway. 5/
The transaction volume problem is pretty deadly too. Sure, off-chain systems like lightning could improve the situation, but only if on-chain capacity was radically larger, and that's not getting fixed soon any year soon either. 6/
But I can reliably predict that if any of the fanatics or con men see this thread, I'll get a steady stream of belligerent and irrelevant commentary for days. None of them care. All that matters to them is that it keeps going up. For now at least. 7/7
