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The market for selling buzzwords to upper management has done very well with “Blockchain,” which is vastly superior to “cloud computing” or “NoSQL” in not being verifiably any particular sort of product whatsoever. Which means it can be any product, at least hypothetically.
This was apparently news to them. It turns out that IBM set up an elaborate hammer design consortium without first finding out if there are nails.
Distributed consensus is so much simpler if you don’t distribute it. 2016 press stories that Visa was using it in the real world were in fact forward-looking versions of Visa’s press release that they were planning a pilot programme for 2017.396
the overview buys the hype wholesale with fantastic claims of present-day capabilities that are not true of any existing blockchain, its “case studies” are largely hypothetical and it has way too many typos for a report anyone cared about at any stage. It reads like an end-of-term assignment written in a single desperate overnight caffeinated tour de force.
“We are but a few bright-eyed technologists with a special hammer, looking for the right nail.”415
