Eight out of nine correct isn’t so bad.

And crypto will have a permanent place in the future of financial technology. Absolutely.

But for 99% of “enterprise” applications, there is no use for the blockchain.

Don’t get me wrong — the blockchain is an amazing discovery. It solves a very hard problem, the consensus problem, that seemed to be unsolvable. Yes, the blockchain is extremely computationally and resource expensive, but that goes with solving very hard problems.

But here’s the thing — if you don’t have a consensus problem, you don’t need a blockchain. And very few things do have a consensus problem. In fact, cryptocurrencies are the only real-world example I could come up with.

Consider how long it takes to settle a Bitcoin transaction — up to five minutes and occasionally more. You could do somewhat better, but there isn’t going to be some magic way around this because of the great weight of the blockchain. But financial trades in the real world settle in milliseconds.

(Note that I spent a few years getting paid good money to write C++ for the XRP cryptocurrency, so I know whereof I speak.)

All the positive properties that the blockchain has except solving the consensus problem can be easily reproduced for a tiny fraction of the effort with non-blockchain crypto. And this is already happening.

Great article overall!