Blockchain and Patent Medicines

In the 1800’s patent medicines were the rage, and people drove around selling magical cures.
Today, blockchain is the magical cure. Everyone including a friend starting an insurance company includes blockchain on their website, as it makes everything better… 

The de medici family invented the double entry bookkeeping system, which kept two simultaneous books one using debits and the other credits, so that they could keep banking honest and detect embezzling/sloppy bookkeepers. That invention powered the family to a huge advantage in banking. The blockchain concept, of distributing the ledger into not just 2 sets of books but 1000 sets of books makes it virtually impossible to cheat, so it is an improvement to be sure.

However, if you have an honest person running things, you can do just fine with one set of books, and i personally would derive no benefit whatsoever from having my bookkeeping spread onto 1000 computers. The only people who need blockchain are people doing illegal, off the book transactions where they don’t want anyone to know how much and with whom they are doing business. So all this crypto stuff is helping tyrants move their money around the world without resorting to couriers, bearer bonds, gold bullion, diamonds, etc.

But for ordinary people such as myself blockchain is a minor change to how things are stored on computers, and mean absolutely zero. The fact that 150 billion was invested last year into cryptocurrencies, half of that will disappear, as the organizers cash out their “pet rock” gains, and will be remembered in the distant future as another mass mania like the Tulip Mania.