Molly White on Chris Dixon’s Blockchain Book Read Write On

From Bruce Schneier’s website, quoting Molly White:

In fact, throughout the entire book, Dixon fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale. The closest he ever comes is when he speaks of how “for decades, technologists have dreamed of building a grassroots internet access provider”. He describes one project that “got further than anyone else”: Helium. He’s right, as long as you ignore the fact that Helium was providing LoRaWAN, not Internet, that by the time he was writing his book Helium hotspots had long since passed the phase where they might generate even enough tokens for their operators to merely break even, and that the network was pulling in somewhere around $1,150 in usage fees a month despite the company being valued at $1.2 billion. Oh, and that the company had widely lied to the public about its supposed big-name clients, and that its executives have been accused of hoarding the project’s token to enrich themselves. But hey, a16z sunk millions into Helium (a fact Dixon never mentions), so might as well try to drum up some new interest!

Every time I heard Dixon advocate for blockchain in the past, I always thought the same: he couldn’t come up with a concrete example. Just because someone made money speculating with cryptocurrencies doesn’t mean there is more than that: speculation. Just to remind myself not to read the book.