[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] Letter to Congress re Blockchain and Crypto Hype

[Jerry Harris]

Hello,
I am sharing this since on the day I gave the Bitcoin / Web3 talk, a group
of 25 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists drafted a
letter <http://concerned.tech> to Congress Wednesday criticizing blockchain
technology. It did not go over well with the crypto community. The letter
focused most of its attention on blockchain technology, and it didn't hold
back: “Not all innovation is unqualifiedly good; not everything that we can
build should be built. The history of technology is full of dead ends,
false starts, and wrong turns"

A well-known Kubernetes engineer Kelsey Hightower felt a harsh backlash,
saying that he’d received death threats over Twitter DMs. “Now I gotta go
figure out how to unsign a thing. This isn't the hill I'm willing to
literally die on." He didn't remove his signature, and he's not the only
critic of crypto I've heard receiving death threats, DDOS attacks, and
other harassment.

"The catastrophes and externalities related to blockchain technologies and
crypto-asset investments are neither isolated nor are they growing pains of
a nascent technology. They are the inevitable outcomes of a technology that
is not built for its purpose and will remain forever unsuitable as a
foundation for large-scale economic activity.

Given these vast externalities, together with the-at best still-ambiguous,
and at worst non-existent-uses of blockchain, we recommend that the
Committee look beyond the hype and bluster of the crypto industry and
understand not only its inherent flaws and extraordinary defects but also
the litany of technological fallacies it is built upon."

http://concerned.tech

Jerry
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