Blockchains are cool. Very, very cool. Merkle trees on their own are pretty cool, and blockchains are just a Merkle tree hashed into a chain-like structure to create work for decentralized verification. This is a very clever concept, and it is the only known solution to the Byzantine Generals problem that doesn't involve a centralized authority (that I'm aware of).
What about this is intrinsically "dangerous nonsense"? Honestly, the "bitcoin bad" crowd so often loses me by conflating cryptocurrency - a ledger built on blockchain - with blockchain itself. Personally, I can see all the challenges faced by cryptocurrency and understand the skepticism, but these takes that write off blockchain due to cryptocurrencies' problems exhibit a sort of surface-level perspective that I can't take very seriously. And the fact that such shallow takes keep climbing to the top of HN is shameful, to say the least.
What about this is intrinsically "dangerous nonsense"? Honestly, the "bitcoin bad" crowd so often loses me by conflating cryptocurrency - a ledger built on blockchain - with blockchain itself. Personally, I can see all the challenges faced by cryptocurrency and understand the skepticism, but these takes that write off blockchain due to cryptocurrencies' problems exhibit a sort of surface-level perspective that I can't take very seriously. And the fact that such shallow takes keep climbing to the top of HN is shameful, to say the least.