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There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology
Article

There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

Bruce Schneier
Wired, 2019
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Controversial
  • Eye Opening
  • For Experts

Recommendation

Are blockchain currencies the future of money or just a temporary hype? Cryptographer and computer security expert Bruce Schneier believes the latter is the case. In fact, he questions the validity of what bitcoin advocates have long seen as the cryptocurrency’s winning asset: that it makes trust superfluous. Investors and technology professionals will find Schneier’s intelligent and well-argued opinion piece thought-provoking.

Summary

Advocates of bitcoin and the blockchain system that underlies it have hailed the system as superior to other payment systems because, they say, it doesn’t rely on trust. Public blockchains have three distinct features: 1) A public ledger records transactions that every member can review but no one can alter retroactively; 2) a sophisticated consensus algorithm ensures that all decentralized transactions follow the same rules and get recorded in the public ledger; and 3) the system maintains a common currency or digital token, to which members assign value...

About the Author

Bruce Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and a program fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute.

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