PARIS — The
bitcoin boom spawned new billionaires and videos of beach parties and
Lamborghinis. The crypto crash brought devastation for small investors and
bankruptcy for many companies.
اضافة اعلان
Blockchain
technology underpins crypto and has been hailed as a world-changing innovation,
but does it have any use beyond creating speculative financial instruments?
AFP asked crypto
critic Stephen Diehl, author of recently published “Popping the Crypto Bubble”,
to examine some of the most popular claims made for blockchain technology.
More secure
voting?
As tension and confusion engulfed the
US after the 2020 election,
Changpeng Zhao, billionaire founder of crypto firm Binance, had a suggestion.
A “blockchain-based
mobile voting app”, he tweeted, would mean “we won’t have to wait for results,
or have any questions on its validity”.
Fellow crypto
billionaire Vitalik Buterin replied that there were “significant challenges”
but he thought it was “directionally 100 percent correct”.
So far, experiments
have been very small scale.
For Diehl,
blockchain was more likely to introduce problems than solve them.
“Centralizing the
voting system in one digital place would be pretty risky — then all you have to
do is corrupt the blockchain and you could corrupt democracy.”
Automated house buying?
Blockchain at heart is a ledger, a way of storing transactions that is —
according to fans — secure, transparent, and permanent.
Those qualities
have led countless enthusiasts to propose that the technology could in effect
replace paper contracts for things like house buying.
Diehl said it was
“absurd” that the blockchain was “going back to things that were solved a
millennium ago to justify its own existence”.
“This is the system
we’ve had since the Middle Ages — you have a government registry of land, a
title, and deed that get transferred when the ownership changes,” he said.
“The blockchain
isn’t solving anything here.”
Payments without banks?
The blockchain emerged from a 2008 white paper on bitcoin, which was
conceived as an alternative to fiat currency.
The opening line
reads: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.”
Bitcoin was the
first
cryptocurrency. There are now more than 10,000 others sitting on many
different blockchains.
Big firms have been
desperate to find ways to accept payments in crypto.
Diehl pointed out
that cryptoassets are speculative instruments not suitable for payments.
“When was the last
time you paid for your coffee with Apple stocks,” he asked.
“It just doesn’t
happen. You want something that’s going to be stable so the price of your
coffee is the price of your coffee next week.”
Supply chain tracking?
Want to know where your mango came from? Some supermarkets believe the
best way for you to find out is to access a blockchain-based system capable of
tracking the fruit from the tropics of Central America to your corner store.
Walmart and
Carrefour are among the firms trumpeting blockchain systems.
Carrefour told AFP
earlier this year that shoppers would be able to scan a QR code and discover
the provenance of an array of products.
The shops hope the
blockchain will provide security, certainty, and transparency.
Diehl pointed out
that digital supply chain management has been around for years and is perfectly
adequate without blockchain.
“Blockchain is not
adding any incorruptibility to the system,” he said, pointing out that people
in the supply chain could tell lies on the blockchain as easily as on any other
platform.
“If I have a carton of apples and report that I put 100
percent of them on the truck, but then I skim off 50 percent for myself, the
blockchain is not going to prevent that.”
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