http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2016/02/22/my-view-on-the-.htmlDefinitely worth to read!
No it's a must.
SO READ IT!!!!It's a wall of text so take your time.
I've picked out my personal highlights.
[...]I'm worried about the current situation of Bitcoin and the Blockchain.
Partially driven by the overinvestment in the space, and partially by the fact that Bitcoin is much more about money than the Internet ever was, it is experiencing a crisis that didn't really have any parallels in the early days of the Internet. Nonetheless, the formation of the Internet offers some important lessons -- most importantly, on the question of the talent and knowledge pool. In those early days, and at some layers maybe even still today, there were only a very small number of people who had the background, brain type and personality to understand some of the core elements that made the Internet work. I remember when there were only a handful of people in the world who really understood Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and we had to hunt them down and share then with our "competitors" when we were setting up PSINet in Japan.
It's very similar today with Bitcoin and the Blockchain. There are a small number of people who understand cryptography, systems, networks and code and are capable of understanding the Bitcoin software code. Most of them are working on Bitcoin, while some are working on Ethereum and other "related" systems and a few more are scattered around the world in other places. It's a community including some who have been around since the 90s, before the Internet, going to crazy conferences like the Financial Cryptography conference. Like any free and open-source software community on the Internet, it's a bunch of people who know each other and mostly, though not always, respect each other, but which fundamentally holds a near monopoly on talent.
Unfortunately, the wild growth of Bitcoin and now "the Blockchain" has caught this community off guard from a governance perspective, leaving the core developers of Bitcoin unable to interface effectively with the commercial interests whose businesses depend on scaling the technology. When asked "can you scale this?" They said, "we'll do the best we can." That wasn't good enough for many, especially those who don't understand the architecture or the nature of what is going on inside of Bitcoin.
Many companies that are used to making decisions around less complicated systems -- like building a website or buying and running Enterprise Resource Planning systems -- felt they could either just hire other engineers who would listen to the customer needs better or became so annoyed with the, "we can't promise but we'll try" attitude of the core developers that they lowered their standards and went with whomever would promise to meet their demands.
The future of Bitcoin, decentralized ledgers and other Blockchain-like projects depends on this community. Many people call them "Bitcoin Core" as if they are some sort of company you can fire or a random set of developers with skills that you can just train others to acquire. They're not. They're more like artists, scientists and precision engineers who have built a shared culture and language. To look for another group of people to do what they do would be like asking web designers to launch a space shuttle. You can't FIRE a community and, statistically speaking, the people working on the Bitcoin ARE the community.
If you try to build "something like Bitcoin but better!" it will probably turn out insecure, underwhelming, and will go against the the fundamental principles that give Bitcoin the potential to be as impactful to banking, law and society as the Internet has been to media, communication, and commerce.
[...]I fear that we'll build something that at the application layer looks like what Bitcoin and the Blockchain promised, but under the hood is just the same old transaction system with no interoperability, no distributed system, no trustless networks, no extensibility, no open innovation, nothing except maybe a bit of efficiency increased from new technology.
[...]Lastly, but most importantly, we're burning out those developers who we most need to be focused on the code and the architecture. Many are dropping out or threatening to drop out. Many are completely discouraged and depleted by the public debate. Even if you believe that we will eventually have a new generation of financial cryptographers, you can't train them without this community. We have many smart people on all sides of this debate and I think that most of them are doing what they are doing with good intentions. However, those of us on the sidelines fanning the flames, making uninformed and provocative statements and fundamentally disrespecting and undervaluing the contribution of the Bitcoin community to the past, present and future of this possibly world-changing innovation, are doing harm.
