Despite the many amazing use cases for public and private blockchain networks, there’s no way around the fact that the word “blockchain” has been misused, misunderstood, and hyped into a state of near-meaninglessness in the last few years.
Money-hungry ICOs have jumped on the chance to put everything from celebrities to board games “on the blockchain,” and there have been multiple cases of the stock value of different companies skyrocketing simply for putting the word blockchain in the company name.
British firm On-line Plc changed its name to On-line Blockchain Plc and saw a 364 percent increase in stock value on the same day. At least the company was tech-related — when Long Island Ice Tea changed their name to Long Blockchain stocks value jumped 200 percent, and, well it’s a company that mostly just makes ice tea!
It’s no wonder that well-known satirical news network The Onion has taken a crack at the hyped up state of cryptocurrency tech, and they certainly make some, well, interesting observations.
The Onion Guide to Blockchain
The guide starts off reasonably enough, pointing out that blockchain is the underlying protocol to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin, before facilitating a little Q&A for the readers. So far so good, right?
Q: How does blockchain work?
Ah.
The Onion is, of course, referencing the borderline feeding frenzy that was ICO crowdfunding, in which billions were raised for companies with no products to speak of by investors who wouldn’t have understood what the products were for — had there actually been any. ICO fundraising has slowed down a lot in Q4 of 2018, but not before raising well over $13 billion in the first half of the year alone, according to some estimates.
In an unregulated market suddenly opening up investment for more people than ever before, hype tactics by ICO marketing teams made cryptocurrency sound like a magical solution to all the world’s problems, and many invested with no knowledge of what blockchain really even was. Whoops.
Q: Is the system fully secure from hackers?
While blockchain is purported to be one of the greatest leaps forward in cybersecurity history, it’s fair to say that further testing is needed to determine exactly how secure it is from attacks. NASA programmer and creator of the XKCD webcomic Randall Munroe had a go at the use of this technology for secure voting software: