Based on the decade of cult-like blockchain advocacy I’ve seen, I’m going with “dead serious”. There are a few - maybe as high as 1-2% - people in that community who genuinely understand the technology and its relevance but it’s dominated by get-rich-quick types. Once you’ve “invested” the only way you make money is by convincing other people to buy in and that usually means turning into a marketing bot pushing it for every problem — basically the nerd equivalent of joining an MLM.
Something that cryptocurrencies changed about the internet is that you can be talking to someone who has $2 invested and is now spending their time shilling a product in bad faith.
The Brave browser suffers from this as well since they went with their own cryptocurrency BAT crap. Every "use brave" you see in the wild had a good chance of the 14-year-old hoping to get rich from their $2 investment. Yet they have all the time in the world to argue with people on the internet. There's no difference between the posts of someone who is excited about the Brave platform vs someone who holds $5 of BAT on Coinbase and thinks it will one day buy them a lambo if they put in the e-time.
meanwhile professors in academia teaching students (who came there to learn from an authoritative source) that blockchain is the future and an important skill in the industry. IMO academia doesn't do enough and is very much complicit in peddling this horse manure.
I've been surprised by the number of blockchain articles in Communications of the ACM and the more practical publication ACM Queue. I expect blockchain is a flash-in-the-pan topic that will get a lot of papers for a few years working on increasingly esoteric details, and then everyone will forget all about it in 5 years.
Being involved in audit/security for quite a while, I do appreciate the benefits of blockchain. Would I tell a large corporation to drop their DBs and switch to BC? Not this decade. As Jimmy Wales wrote "It works well.", and if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
I can imagine a general ledger audit to be 'bullet proof'. Of course there are other issues in a DB's user access management. But we can achieve the same results right here, right now, without having to invest $m to change our software/infrastructure/SIEM, etc. in order to achieve in 5 years, what we are already doing now.
Change will come (as always), but in the right time. Where "right" in this case is benefit largely outweigh costs (build/maintain/support/train/etc.)
What kind of usecase do you imagine for blockchain in audit/security, given that sensitive information can't be put on a public blockchain and the security provided by proof-of-work consensus doesn't work in a smaller private blockchain?
