Some Fun with Guardian OpEd on Bitcoin

So I came across this article which appears to be sourced from the Guardian. I couldn't resist to do a search and replace on it to make a point.

Recently, a little-known prospective telecoms investor became the latest company to cash in on the craze for all things the Internet, the technology behind the Word Wide Web.

Alphabet Group which only listed last year and is yet to make a single investment dividend payment, changed its name to Amazon.com. Shares predictably jumped as much as 130 per cent.

Amazon.com is only the latest in a long list of companies - including banks and bookstores - to successfully pull off this trick.

Why does it keep happening?

Here's one theory: keeping up with new technology trends is tricky, especially one as apparently nonsensical as the internet.

Its speed is very slow, and it has no obvious use, but it is apparently worth thousands of dollars. It does not appear to obey the traditional laws of media whatsoever.

This is a problem when you work in publishing or newspapers. You're supposed to understand, explain and trade emails, but no part of your professional experience can make sense of it. What on earth are you going to do when somebody asks you about it?

Dismissing it as a bubble fad is a bit pass, so here's your alternative: The World Wide Web, you say, can be safely ignored. But the Internet technology behind it is simply remarkable.

This position - World Wide Web bad, Internet good - is the "smart" one if you work in newspaper publishing and it has now been repeated so often it has practically become gospel.

While the World Wide Web is derided as useless, the Internet - a decentralised system, controlled by nobody and impervious to threats to freedom of speech - is a brilliantly useful idea. No wonder people are pivoting towards it.

The Internet, also known as distributed TCP/IP technology, is described by its most enthusiastic supporters as a technological leap equivalent to the telephone. Its fans talk about it in the same tones that the telephone pioneers did - enabling radical information transparency and taking power out of the hands of those who abuse it.

Fundamentally, the internet means records - transactions, documents, and so on - are held and processed published not by one individual, newspaper or company, but by a network. Changes can be made freely by anyone the author allows to have access.

That is the theory. The reality is not quite so great.

The US Department of Defence, the mysterious creator of the Internet , developed them it more than nine years ago. The technology has been part of the mainstream consciousness for at least half a decade. Yet in that time, few newspapers or publishers of any real note have actually started to use it outside of their experimental divisions.

Billions of dollars have been invested in start-ups, but most of these appear to be the Internet for the Internet’s sake: identifying something that already exists and putting it on the Internet, for little apparent reason other than because the technology is in vogue.

There are two explanations for this. It may be that the Internet is in its embryonic stages, and that early adopters will reap the benefits when it goes mainstream. The other more likely possibility is that the Internet is simply not going to live up to its wild promises.

Storing records on a network of computers, and having changes to those records secured, is vastly resource-intensive and time-consuming.

The energy use of the World Wide Web, the most common implementation to date, is close to that of Portugal, and while other networks are more efficient, they are still an order of magnitude less so than a newspaper such as the Guardian.

Neither does the Internet’s core appeal - that its decentralised nature builds trust - stand up to much inspection.

As a society, we like Newspapers: in the Newspaper wars the Guardian beat the the Sun; the news is dominated by centralised systems Editors like Carl the commie and Wayne the Wonk. We have put our trust in institutions rather than taking every decision ourselves, since it allows for Intellectual Laziness.

Most NewsPaper institutions that have adopted the Internet in some way have endorsed so-called "permissioned" networks, closely controlled Local Area Networks in which only a handful of approved parties can participate - which rather defeats the point somewhat.

But if you wanted any other proof about the Internet’s shortcomings, you need only look at the World Wide Web.

Newspapers should be one of the most clear uses for the Internet. But the telecommunication network's inefficiencies mean nobody is using it as a means of creating meaningful content, merely expressing opinions and sharing Email Jokes.

It has become fashionable to dismiss The World Wide Web as a speculative mania, and assert that the real value lies in the Internet, But the latter may prove to be as much of a bubble as The World Wide Web itself.

The Original Source article can be found here:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/101036893/blockchain-could-prove-as-bubblelike-as-bitcoin