Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain Quotes

“Everything to do with cryptocurrencies and blockchains is the domain of fast-talking conmen. If anyone tries to sell you on either, kick them in the nuts and run.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“Computer programmers are highly susceptible to the just world fallacy (that their economic good fortune is the product of virtue rather than circumstance) and the fallacy of transferable expertise (that being competent in one field means they’re competent in others).”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“A record shop must not be harder to use than BitTorrent. The legal options, iTunes, Netflix and Spotify, made it big by being more convenient than piracy,”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“Smart contracts on Ethereum are worse than even non-financial commercial code; as of May 2016, Ethereum contracts averaged 100 obvious bugs (so obvious a machine could spot them) per 1000 lines of code.348 (For comparison, Microsoft code averages 15 obvious bugs per 1000 lines, NASA spacecraft code around 0 per 500,000 lines.)”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“Darknet markets remain the most popular Bitcoin use case after speculation and ransomware. In 2014, darknet markets were estimated to have processed more bitcoins than all legitimate payment processors put together.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“Sadly for Bitcoin, most Austrian economists aren’t fans – even as Bitcoiners remain huge fans of Austrian economics.27 You will find Austrian jargon in common use in the cryptocurrency world. Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions. Zero Hedge covers Bitcoin extensively, and Bitcoiners are fans in turn.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“David Golumbia’s The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism is a short but very useful academic survey that traces just where the Bitcoin cluster of crank political and economic ideas sprang from.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“Bitcoin itself, as an ideology fundamentally at odds with reality based on a technology that reached its limits in 2015, will keep lurching from crisis to crisis.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“Hyperledger.org is a corporate open source Potemkin village of the sort IBM has long favoured: the illusion of an open project, with no “there” there.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“If you have programmers, they probably save their code in Git, which is the closest I can think of to a useful blockchain-like technology: it saves individual code edits as transactions in Merkle trees with tamper-evident hashes, and developers routinely copy entire Git repositories around, identifying them by hash. It’s a distributed ledger, but for computer programs rather than money.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“The A/B test showed that the text “Donate with Bitcoin” dropped revenue per visitor by 7.5%; adding the text would have lost them $140,000 over the campaign, for the sake of a few thousand dollars in Bitcoin.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“One commenter posted: “They just prefer the imaginary debt based ‘money’ their slavemasters issue via the central banks of the world.” (Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity responded: “Yes I use it to buy groceries.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“The darknet markets are fuelled by users who want to buy drugs without having to go to the bad part of town and talk to people from a minority, and dealers obtaining commercial quantities to sell locally”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“Bitcoin’s cryptography is solid, but it’s a bit like putting a six inch thick steel vault door in a cardboard frame.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“I’d never encountered American-style ideological libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism before the Internet. When I first heard about it, I honestly thought it was a wacky Swiftian political satire that nobody could actually believe.”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts