Brook Monroe
Jul 10, 2017 · 1 min read

Two things occur to me:

  1. when the block chains pass a certain size threshold, things are going to get ugly.
  2. Bitcoins (or any other form of crypto-’money’) are useless when the power’s off.

Too much of our financial infrastructure depends on electricity. I can take a dollar to the flea market and buy…well, nothing, since there’s not much buying power in a single dollar these days…but hypothetically, transactions can occur at the flea market in the absence of electricity because I have tangible money that can be handed to someone in exchange for goods or services (like getting that dent in the rear bumper of my car pulled).

Crypto-currencies also reinforce the so-called “digital divide” that still plagues certain economic sectors.

There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins: pull the other one — it’s got bells on. With no governing authority, and no consequences for breach, this will be a rule until it isn’t. (For one thing, but Bitcoin community at large could just decide that tomorrow there are 25 million.) I think that’s going to be an issue with block-chain in general. Once there are multiple repositories composed of terabytes or petabytes of data, who or what will reconcile discrepancies? What bit-size will digital signature generators have to deploy in order to guarantee that replication against a chain can’t occur? How will the computational load be managed? There are scaling issues that might not be resolvable.

    Brook Monroe

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