Lot of fluff in blockchain articles

I was reading an article about a startup today doing some cool things in the telco space. There are over 2000 telecommunications operators, carriers , and companies in the world. And a decentralized like blockchain telco sounds interesting and promising. But the article and the startup reek of clueless writers and founders.

Telecom industry to create an  “); background-size: 1px 1px; caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.843137); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: -0.07199999690055847px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat”>ecosystem where consumers are in full control, and there is trust, security and transparency in the participating ecosystem. 

In theory this sounds good. In reality we’ve seen how few people actually care about any of that stuff. Especially people paying for things. Or companies looking to make money and paying for things. How many telcos who are revenue generating really wish their customers have full control ? The trust and security is just nonsense because we’ve seen how the crypto and blockchain space is filled with just as many con artists and scam artists as any other space. Maybe even more when my was at an all time high.

A much more reliable and efficient solution would be to do this using a private blockchain, accessed by the CSPs.

The article then dives into private blockchains. Being 5G requires closer proximity and more gateways and base stations, etc and not so much larger cell towers sprung up every mile , I think people forget someone pays to have these gateways installed and maintained. And many times they pay to lease the property it’s on. Oh the telco companies make billions , especially the AT&Ts and Verizon’s and such , but they still have costs associated with new towers , new gateways and new data centers. If they are building some telco private blockchain, how exactly is that any different than what exists now ? Oh it’s a blockchain and not a database. That’s someone who doesn’t seem to know how blockchains work or is purposely making things up to serve their own agenda.

Telstra extends the security provided by blockchain technology and combines it with biometric features, such as voice and facial recognition. These are stored encrypted on a blockchain, making it immutable, verifiable and traceable. 

This sounds like a bunch of nonsense. They store all that on a “blockchain” or a “blockchain” that is really Kafka and MongoDB with some hyperledger thrown in.

Gotta be careful of all the blockchain articles out there. Most aren’t talking about blockchain. More like a hybrid big data and cloud system with some blockchain sprinkled in.

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