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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Technology
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I feel like block chain as a public ledger has found quite a few purposeful uses, and was a solution to a handful of problems most people rarely if ever encounter. Then fake money got involved
The core issue feels like the dead torrent problem.
Its distributed, so it needs to be hosted, by several locations. Which becomes probitive over time as.it becomes huge. Its also massively inefficient for what its trying to do.
At some point, its basically just one server farm somewhere hosting a glorified MySWL database that doubles as a space heater for the entire planet every time you need to add a row.
I was thinking that with legal backing, blockchain could be a good record of ownership for deeds. Like NFTs but for physical property.
The history of ownership and the public visibility are good features there.
Lack of reliable, authoritative attribution of changes and no rollback or compensatory transactions are all dealbreakers.
Yeah who doesn't want a ledger you cannot change, sounds like a good idea. /s
In the case of deeds, i think it is desirable because it gives you an immutable history of ownership.
There are other problems but i don't believe that is one.
No it doesn't. It only works because 51% doesn't change the ledger.
You already have this with a simple database for ownership. It already exists, and ledgers made out of paper predates that.
But with good legal backing, all you need is a shared database and maybe basic cryptographic signatures to prove ownership in case of malicious actors. So basically, traditional banking.
Yes, exactly.
Block chain would have been an amazing solution to most democratic vote validation processes.
It can still be used that way. While most people talk about how corrupt politicians enrich themselves with fake currencies, more legal and legitimate uses can still use decentralized ledgers for useful things. Of course these won't make headlines.
There are far better global ledger approaches than blockchain.
I believe you, but can you name one so we can all learn more about the alternatives out there?
SWIFT is the easy one. Fun fact they looked into blockchain at one point and went "yeah, nah"
I thought Swift is currently Block-Chain based. Do you mean this Swift?
I meant the true and proper SWIFT that is used by almost all financial institutions for transferring funds.
Aren't votes meant to be anonymous to avoid retribution?
Isn't the public ledger identifying information to be used by authoritarian violence on every single voter in that case?
Proposed ideas for block chain to maintain election integrity would only use a block chain ledger to verify counts, not store voter information.
Well no, because we don't have a problem that blockchain solves (better than open software, if it must be digital), and there are loads of problems that the blockchain doesn't solve. Like how am I supposed to vote with that thing under no coercion.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. The blockchain is a good mechanism to maintain a source of truth that is inspectable and verifiable by anyone. It would only serve to certify that official counts can't be tampered with in certain ways.
But it doesn't replace the whole democratic voting process. It doesn't protect against coercive voting, for instance.
My point originally was that blockchain can be of use to us, but tech bros ruined its rep. Same with AI. I've been waiting for routers with ai-powered (really, just machine learning) firewalls that can adapt rules to environments. But instead of that, everyone is obsessed with generative stuff that isnt very good.
Yeah I hear you, but the 51% attack exists. Like if you use paper ballots, you're safer and it consumes less energy. There is just nothing better by using a blockchain, and paper ballots (for example) can be verified by anyone, the blockchain not so much.
Which purposeful uses did you have in mind?
Nothing that a centralized server wouldn't be able to handle better.
Or several other solutions for different use cases. I always remember this article about alternatives: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/a90e21e3d06e1ad924a1bfdfe3c16902