“Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.”
–Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
If you can dictate the premises, you can dictate the conclusion. It is possible to have transaction reversal mechanisms as part of a smart contract, which presumably these “experts” would know. They are worried about privacy, but at the same time, they are worried about too much privacy. Let me guess, only government hits that sweet spot of panopticon privacy and anything outside the panopticon must be used in service of crime.
As a counter to this document, I’d like to refer to the previously mentioned blog post on blockchains, where Tim Roughgarden says:
“An enormous number of people, including a majority of computer science researchers and academics, have yet to grok the modern vision of blockchains: a new computing paradigm that will enable the next incarnation of the Internet and the Web, along with an entirely new generation of applications.”
Which experts are being listened to and who does that benefit?
cafebedouin.org 