{"id":1193,"date":"2019-02-06T16:56:44","date_gmt":"2019-02-06T16:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2019-02-06T16:56:44","modified_gmt":"2019-02-06T16:56:44","slug":"theres-no-good-reason-to-trust-blockchain-technology-wired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/?p=1193","title":{"rendered":"There&#8217;s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology | WIRED"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/theres-no-good-reason-to-trust-blockchain-technology\/\"><img src=\"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/wp-content\/uploads\/litho\/fc73ca34a14c35aa811c7dcce7e5bde8fd32f8fdd40112c130f9b31a562eb852.png\" class=\"image-treated\" data-original=\"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Blockchain-Cyrpto-LaTigre.jpg\" data-treated=\"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/wp-content\/uploads\/litho\/fc73ca34a14c35aa811c7dcce7e5bde8fd32f8fdd40112c130f9b31a562eb852.png\" \/><\/a>What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they\u2019re often single points of failure.When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there\u2019s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don\u2019t have the expertise to audit?Blockchain enthusiasts point to more traditional forms of trust\u2014bank processing fees, for example\u2014as expensive. But blockchain trust is also costly; the cost is just hidden. For bitcoin, that&#8217;s the cost of the additional bitcoin mined, the transaction fees, and the enormous environmental waste.Blockchain doesn\u2019t eliminate the need to trust human institutions. There will always be a big gap that can\u2019t be addressed by technology alone. People still need to be in charge, and there is always a need for governance outside the system. This is obvious in the ongoing debate about changing the bitcoin block size, or in fixing the DAO attack against Etherium. There\u2019s always a need to override the rules, and there\u2019s always a need for the ability to make permanent rules changes. As long as hard forks are a possibility\u2014that\u2019s when the people in charge of a blockchain step outside the system to change it\u2014people will need to be in charge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/theres-no-good-reason-to-trust-blockchain-technology\/\">There&#8217;s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology | WIRED<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they\u2019re often single points of failure.When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,49,5,45],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1195,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}