One of the laziest and most frustrating criticisms of digital currencies — particularly Bitcoin (BTC) — is when pundits liken it to a pyramid scheme dependent on the “greater fool” joining to make a quick buck. While some people do indeed purchase digital assets purely for speculative purposes, it’s unfair to ignore many of the great services and achievements that are being made by developers in areas such as remittances, logistics, financial inclusion and intellectual property.
A fairer criticism of blockchains is that, for all proponents say about decentralization, blockchains are still dependent on miners or other powerful players that control their networks. Whether it be factories filled with servers for proof-of-work (PoW), pools of PoW miners, large pools of tokens for proof-of-stake (PoS), or the fact that at times, more than 50% of transactions that run on the Ethereum network run through the Infura API, there’s no ignoring these massive centralized points of failure.
Granted, the design of popular PoW and PoS blockchains has been incentivized to ensure bad actors are punished, yet it remains to be seen how they will operate when the value of digital assets operating on certain blockchains exceeds the value of the underlying…
