I’ve been following the blockchain ecosystem for some time now largely because it strikes me as yet another distributed database architecture, and I dream about those things.
For some time now, I’ve been wondering what to do after Tesora and blockchain was one of the things I’ve been looking at as a promising technology but I wasn’t seeing it. Of late I’ve been asking people who claim to be devotees at the altar of blockchain what they see as the killer app. All I hear are a large number of low rumbling sounds.
And then I saw this article by Jamie Burke of Convergence.vc and I feel better that I’m not the only one who feels that this emperor is in need of a wardrobe.
Let’s be clear, I absolutely agree that bitcoin is a wonderful use of the blockchain technology and it solves the issue of trust very cleverly through proof of work. I think there is little dispute of elegance of this solution.
But once we go past bitcoin, the applications largely sound and feel like my stomach after eating gas station sushi; they sound horrible and throw me into convulsions of pain.
In his article, Jamie Burke talks of 3d printing based on a blockchain sharded CAD file. I definitely don’t see how blockchain can prevent the double-spend (i.e. buy one Yoda CAD file, print 10,000).
Most of the blockchain ideas I’m seeing are things which are attempting to piggy-back on the hot new buzzword and where blockchain is being used to refer to “secure and encrypted database”. After all, there’s a bunch of crypto involved and there’s data stored there right? so it must be a secure encrypted database.
To which I say, Bullshit!
P.S. Oh, the irony. This blog post references a blog post with a picture labeled “Burke’s Bullshit Cycle”, and the name of this blog is hypecycles.com.
Hype Cycles 
