Interview with Kickstarter COO: An attempt to answer blockchain questions

[humble minion]

I know! I had 3 clients in the last year, all IT Security start ups, trying to figure out how to work "blockchain" into their offerings. Unbelievable.

Without going into to too much detail, I'm currently professionally dealing with a company who did that and succeeded in selling it. My experiences with them have ... not made me more enthusiastic about the blockchain industry ecosystem, I'm just sayin'.

This interview sounds like a guy who is either way out of his depth, or who either let some blockchain tech evangelicals at KS talk him into making the big announcement without being fully across the detail, got taken by surprise by the backlash, and is now trying to gently walk things back without alienating the blockchain bloc inside KS to whom he has already, and probably ill-advisedly, handed the keys to the kingdom.

I'm no guru, but I've been working in the financial software sector for over a decade. Everything he talks about as a potential advantage of blockchain is a robustly solved problem using conventional databases, financial protocols etc without requiring blockchain at all. I'm just not seeing an upside here at all, much less one of a sufficient magnitude to justify the downside.

Still, it doesn't matter what i can or can't see, it's convincing this guy that'll be the problem. I suspect what will happen is that Kickstarter will set fire to a whole lot of money and neglect their core platform while their tech people chase fairies at the bottom of the blockchain garden, maybe produce a proof of concept which will be limited, buggy, and widely ignored or despised, and then eventually quietly shelve the whole idea.

 

[éxypnos]

I suspect what will happen is that Kickstarter will set fire to a whole lot of money and neglect their core platform while their tech people chase fairies at the bottom of the blockchain garden, maybe produce a proof of concept which will be limited, buggy, and widely ignored or despised, and then eventually quietly shelve the whole idea.

This!

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

I used to work in computer game development (MMORPGs) and I can't see one good thing NFTs or blockchain could do in that area either.

This guy I once worked with had a video talking about it:

 

[Jer]

Umm, no. blockchain isn't designed for speed. It was designed for anonymity. There is no reason (well, no logical reason) for KS to use blockchain.

It's not even designed for anonymity - the transaction log is fully public and any anonymity it provides is due to how the token owner on the chain sets up their own access. it's very easy to create a blockchain identity that reveals everything you purchase to the entire world and points directly back to you.

Blockchain is designed to track transactions in an environment where there is no central authority that can be trusted to verify the transactions. The use cases for blockchain are so narrow that I'm always skeptical of a blockchain announcement. I generally assume that they're throwing out buzzwords to get investors mollified/hyped until proven otherwise.

BTW - that interview with the COO of Kickstarter is embarassing. I walked away from it wondering if he knew anything but buzzwords about the tech he was talking about.

 

[éxypnos]

It's not even designed for anonymity - the transaction log is fully public and any anonymity it provides is due to how the token

It is DESIGNED to NOT require personally identifying information to OPERATE. Same thing at the end of the day I am juxtapositioning versus TRADITIONAL FUND TRANSFER methods.

 

[CleverNickName]

I suspect what will happen is that Kickstarter will set fire to a whole lot of money and neglect their core platform while their tech people chase fairies at the bottom of the blockchain garden, maybe produce a proof of concept which will be limited, buggy, and widely ignored or despised, and then eventually quietly shelve the whole idea.

I hope it happens sooner rather than later. I used to back a lot of Kickstarter projects; I'd like to continue doing so again someday.

 

[Rabulias]

I posted some relevant updates in the main Kickstarter/blockchain thread: Kickstarter moving to blockchain