Blockchain status in 2023

Interesting things are emerging in blockchain’s trough of disillusionment. On the Gartner hype cycle, blockchain has lost momentum. Artificial intelligence has been delivering a lot since the paper “Attention Is All You Need,” and it has become clear that blockchain was little more than a tool to help solve the problem of decentralized governance, a point I have already discussed here.

Last year (2022), Ethereum’s Merge happened. Many miners sold their graphics cards on the used market, and hobbyists like me started looking for alternatives. Some went back to ETC, others to Ravencoin and Ergo, and a fork called EthereumPOW even appeared. PoW radicals, by the way, cannot seem to think of anything other than wasting energy.

Of course, I understand why Nakamoto chose PoW 15 years ago. He had already come up with a brilliant idea, PoW fit it perfectly, and Bitcoin is still here today as the undefeated king of crypto assets. But let’s be honest: apart from BTC and its purist community with their ASICs, nobody in the blockchain world takes PoW seriously anymore. There are more efficient and effective ways to deal with malicious actors.

DPoS and PoS have been proving themselves on several chains. Purists hate the inflation that comes with these currencies, but creating a deflationary currency where early adopters receive most of its value is not an effective way to manage a community. To build a community, you want everyone to be able to take part. I also understand that, on Ethereum, 32 ETH is not accessible to everyone who wants to stake.

To sum up, outside Bitcoin and Ethereum, the crypto universe is like the universe: a vast emptiness, full of coins that could have been tokens on Ethereum.

Note: This article is a prequel to one about Gridcoin… haha.