From FT Alphaville:
Blockchain for Brexit: a wonderfully terrible idea
We've been here before. Blockchain, the antidote to all the world's greatest ills, is once again being trotted out as a solution to Brexit.
The last time, you might remember, it was our dear Chancellor of the Exchequer, Spreadsheet Phil himself, who decided that the distributed and supposedly immutable version of the humble spreadsheet was “the most obvious technology” to tackle... oh just the incredibly complex and sensitive Irish border question.
And amazingly (although also somewhat predictably), our Phil wasn't the first to suggest such a thing. There have been whole papers written about a blockchain for Brexit; countless column inches dedicated to the fanciful idea.
This time, it's the turn of an “internet pioneer” and CoinDesk advisory board member Pindar Wong, who penned an op-ed entitled “Is it time for a blockchain Brexit?” (cc Betteridge, Ian) that was published on CoinDesk, a crypto news site, on Monday....MORE
But where our Phil lacked detail (admitting that he was no “expert” on the matter), Wong has us covered.
He starts powerfully; passionately; provocatively:
There is a crisis in governance. I’m not talking about bitcoin, but Brexit.Wow, yeah. He totally caught us out there. Clever.
He carries on:
Where blockchain can help is that its ‘cryptographic certainty’ avoids the need for bordered thinking in the borderless world created by the internet, a world where laws are difficult to enforce and collaboration difficult to incentivise....
Oh good grief, Jemima's right, that last para deserves all the opprobrium our plucky "blogger" can muster.
This sort of crypto-blather is reminiscent of an Andreessen Horowitz investee, 21.co which became Earn.com. From 2015's "As Far As Whores Go, Larry Summers Seems To Have Become....
...the Whore of Babble-on."
Seriously, what does this crap even mean:
“The 21 chip adds a whole new dimension to bitcoin’s potential utility. At first we will be struck by the presence of a technology like embedded mining; eventually we may be struck by its absence...."
...Mr. Summers has joined Andreessen-Horowitz's Balaji Srinivasan at overfunded ($116 mil) bitcoin startup 21 Inc.
You can read a lot about Mr. Srinivasan in "The Silicon Valley Secessionist Clarifies His Batshit Insane Plan" or, for just a soupçon, we have on offer, "Climateer Line of the Day: Uh Oh Andreessen Edition":
...Bitcoins are like “tulips you can send anywhere in the world in arbitrary quantities”.
-Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan
Mr.Srinivasan may not be aware that, since ca. 1637 or so, tulips have not had the best connotation in the world of finance....A16Z was only able to exit Earn.com by merging it with another of their investees.
Mr. Srinivasan is no longer a partner at Andreessen.
If interested we looked at the Clameur in last August's "“Haro! Haro! Haro! A l’aide, mon prince, on me fait tort”".
