Blockchain technology has been damned as nothing but hype and devoid of any meaningful use case at a select committee meeting in Westminster, reports Yahoo Finance.
UK MPs met in Portcullis House near the Houses of Parliament and questioned various experts on the utility of blockchain technology.
The policymakers demanded examples of blockchain’s effectiveness in solving problems in different parts of the world and sought to know what the UK could learn from this innovation.
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on Blockchain was told that the technology is “rather simple” and provides a solution to things that were never a problem in the first place.
Technology journalist and author David Gerard outlined the actual potential of the technology that has been hailed as the foundation of web3.
“Blockchain technology provides security for things that don’t need securing and are not a problem and a lot of the innovation started from the technology and then they sought to find problems they could solve with it,” Gerard said.
However, two witnesses that spoke at the committee meeting described a glaring hole in the argument that blockchain technology is beyond the reach of manipulation and falsifying of data and transactions.
Izabella Kaminska, editor of The Blind Spot described how blockchain does not solve the problem of accuracy of data and its ability to keep information secure and beyond the reach of corrupting effects.
She said that the blockchain “only records what it is told to record, and you don’t know what is going into the blockchain unless you check it and that involves trusted intermediaries, if garbage goes in, then garbage comes out”. A viewpoint echoed by Gerard who added that “a distributed ledger that cannot be altered is good, but how do you know the data going into the blockchain is good”.
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