Blockchains might be used for x” is equated to “blockchains are used for x”, which in turn is equated to “blockchains are the best solution for x”.

The book has a lot less material on the the application (or rather potential application) of Blockchain in general, particularly in financial services. He's also on the board of the foundation behind RationalWiki (which apparently has a foundation with a board behind it, who knew), so I bet he's a lot of fun at parties. Its discussions of business blockchain failures (especially in the music business), The DAO clusterfuck, Craig S Wright, and Vitalik Buterin's past as a quantum computing scammer managed to be both informative deep dives and quite funny. Sadly for Bitcoin, most Austrian economists aren’t fans – even as Bitcoiners remain huge fans of Austrian economics.Yet the book is a fun read, packed with memorable history and anecdotes, told with biting sarcasm and wit. If nothing else, the events of the past few months in the crypto world are bearing out the author's central argument about the current shortcomings of this technology. One commenter posted: “They just prefer the imaginary debt based ‘money’ their slavemasters issue via the central banks of the world. This requires some technical understanding of the language of IT, but even without that you will get a sense of what is happening.

What the author sets out to do is give the history of blockchain technology in a way that a layman can understand in and then show that many of the promises made by the promoters of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are mostly empty.

This doesn't go nearly as in-depth as Popper's Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, though it brings a wonderful focus on the vast number of ways that bitcoin fails to live up to its promises, and a better interrogation of what those promises might actually mean. He is a volunteer spokesman for Wikipedia, and is on the board of the RationalMedia Foundation, host of skeptical wiki RationalWiki. I was aware of several of the drawbacks, but Gerard really cuts the whole thing to ribbons in a few pages. I was shocked to learn how bad the exchanges actually are, in terms of product quality and discipline.