Thread by @_jillruth

The most recent blockchain think-piece in the @nytimes has been getting a lot of props thanks to its bullish and farsighted appraisal of crypto.

But I have a few problems... 0/

nytimes.com/2018/01/16/mag…

If you are writing a piece about security for a broad audience and choose, as a cute way of kicking off the post, to share a secret seed and a private key please for the love of god make it clear to your readers that _they_ should never actually reveal these things. 1/

Explaining the difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is not easy. But saying that the difference is that Ethereum can also act as a sort of social security number and email address where Bitcoin cannot is patently false, no matter how this statement is interpreted. 2/

Explaining PoW in layman's terms is no fun, but we have to be able to do better than handwave at "complex mathematical competitions." 3/

I'm just going to leave this one here. Imagine believing this is how Ethereum is run. 4/

The article makes much of the evils of Facebook, Google, and Amazon. I don't disagree with many of the points. But it glosses _why_ they have come to monopolize the internet. It's because people often like and want convenient, centralized, trusted service providers. 5/

The concepts of open source and public key cryptography get conflated with blockchain tech. As though Diffie and Hellman only came along after Satoshi had hit "publish". 6/

Okay, fine, the part about @juanbenet was pretty good and actually made sense. 7/

Oh my god decentralized != distributed. Can we please start using the word replicated? 8/

The article says that bitcoin as a payments mechanism or SoV misses the point, but then acknowledges the role of BTC as a reward within the design of the protocol. For BTC to function as a reward, it must have value. The self-referential nature of these protocols is critical. 9/

The piece implies that developers contributing to public blockchains inherently benefit from price rises. This is not the case unless those developers have put in capital themselves. (Admittedly this may be changing with on-chain bounties.) 10/

This whole bit about the Transit protocol. What are we even talking about here? Putting my location and credit card data on a public blockchain? I'll pass. Everything else mentioned in this section can be achieved with application level software. No blockchain required. 11/

Ah, now we get to the old "tokens to bootstrap a network" routine. If you need a token to bootstrap your application, you have not built something people want. 12/

Glorifying a token economy for its ability to confuse a cap structure is problematic. So is ignoring problems of token velocity and incentive structure. If you have speculators holding the tokens as they rise in value, how will they ever get into the hands of real users? 13/

We are back to talking about identity now and how Facebook owns it and how blockchain is our only hope. Firstly, what you are talking about is public key cryptography. Secondly, please look up @KeybaseIO. 14/

I almost stopped reading when I got to "health care data" but then I would have missed this horrifying bit about putting GENOMES on public blockchains. There is confusion here between permissioned databases and blockchains. Which is funny because they are kind of opposites. 15/

Chris is, of course, totally right in his statement here. But the article makes it sound like storing data or value on a blockchain is inherently more secure than using a trusted third party. It's not. There are a lot of considerations to make here. 16/

And it's definitely not more private. 17/

Genuine question: what does Brad mean by "a right to a private data store"? I'm imagining a One Air Gapped Computer Per Child program... 18/

"But the beautiful thing about open protocols is that they can be steered in surprising new directions by the people who discover and champion them in their infancy." Did we miss the whole Bitcoin Scaling Debate? Blockchain protocols are inherently difficult to steer. 19/

Closing with "If you think the internet is not working in its current incarnation, you can’t change the system through think-pieces" was either a masterstroke of self-awareness or hilariously deaf. 20/

Either way, I don't enjoy spending Tuesday nights poking holes in articles about blockchain tech. But it's equally not fun to spend my Monday course correcting people who read this article and now believe false promises about the technology. 21/

If we are going to bring crypto mainstream, it will only be achieved by having the highest standards of clarity and rigor when we write and research and educate. 22/

Finally, don't ever praise or share articles just because they are bullish. /End