Dudes. Blockchain. In a phone. It's gonna smash the 'commoditization of humanity' or something So it wasn't a joke. HTC today vowed to launch its "Blockchain Phone", which it calls an "agent of decentralization". HTC confirmed overnight that the Exodus smartphone will ship in its third quarter – meaning some time before the end of September – without releasing specifications. Or even what advantages it promises for the …
There, have I helped boost the Registers share price/click through/relevance now?
I thought I'd take the hit in the comments section, to avoid The Reg from having to float their own ideas. Should we all post these nonsense buzzwords in our posts, it will help keep the site legitimate for now. Once the money stops coming in though, I guess even this site will be forced to use the spam of cloud hosted solid state server based articles to generate revenue... oh.
Like many Reg readers I've been around a while and have seen my fair share of hype cycles, but the one surrounding blockchain is the biggest and the worst yet. Never in the field of tech has so much bollocks been spouted by so many. I have it on good authority that things ending in gasm are supposed to get smaller with time, but hypegasms just seem to get bigger and bigger.
PS Mildly bitter as I seem to have managed to miss my ride on the gravy train of pretty much every single tech hype cycle.
The original web hypegasm had supposed valuations about a hundred times lower than the latest ones. There's even hyperinflation of hyperinflation. At this rate, if there's one every twenty years or so, the 2100 one will need wheelbarrows full of ones and zeroes just to write down the supposed market caps.
"That's nothing, for those that haven't seen it I present the Hdac advert on itv during the world cup in all it's complete and utter b*llocks glory."
I've now seen it several times and still haven't worked out what exactly it is supposed to be about. In this brave new world do your home appliances have access to your bank account and pay for their own energy use on an hourly basis using Bitcoin? This can't possibly go wrong.
There's something to be said for this decentralisation stuff. If I rely on credit cards to finance transactions from a centralised bank they only work if everything in the entire payment chain doesn't have a TITSUP - card network, bank, everything. The possibility of that ideal state of affairs these days seems to be getting more remote. So, my lords, ladies and gentlemen I present my own, novel solution: Compensation Asymmetrically Serverless Hosted.
Of course, especially if the granting body is a "seminary".
There are some real universities that have real theological departments that award real degrees in how people delude themselves*, but their products don't tend to become VCs because they went into it to understand things like moral imperatives, and that is something VCs can't afford to have.
*P D James mentions in one of her books that a degree in theology is potentially useful to a detective. Certainly reading some of the more convoluted attempts at self-deception is a good background for understanding some program libraries.
FTFA: "l...likely to cost around £1,000..."
I probably won't be buying one, then. I get the wife's hand-me-down iPhones. I'm rockin' a 5S now!
I can make calls, send SMS, even run a few apps. Frankly, I don't have the patience to wait for the damn thing to bring up a web page, so I don't do too much browsing with it. It's worth what I paid for it ($75 - had to have the battery replaced).
/ why, yes, I am a cheap old guy, why do you ask?
I get the wife's hand-me-down iPhones.
I hate the iPhone, personally, but after a few rounds of buying unused overstock previous-generation grey-market phones, in the hope they might last a few years each, I've switched to buying used Android phones. New or used, they're all crap, as far as I can tell, so why pay any significant amount of money?
Currently I have a Galaxy S6, which is shit (Samsung beats Lenovo and ASUS at making Android worse), but it was cheap and basically works.
I'd just go back to feature phones but my family insist on texting rather than calling, and I hate T9, so I need something with some sort of qwerty keyboard. I'd like a physical one but cheap phones with physical qwerty keyboards have become hard to find.
Email has, if anything, become more centralized. There are a couple reasons for this:
1. Spam. ISPs have found it necessary to block direct SMTP from their users to limit spam, so everything has to go through a central smarthost anyway. Filtering *incoming* spam is also a difficult and time-consuming job and one of the reasons I stopped running my own private mail server.
2. Convenience. People want to be able to access their mail from their desktop, their laptop, and their phone. That requires some kind of central repository. No one particularly wants to go back to the old days when you POP'd your mail down to your desktop machine, and that was it, it was trapped there.
There are already decentralized file-sharing services, but uptake has been slow. Not a lot of people are eager to share their disk space with others, especially when you never know if someone's going to upload kiddie porn and get you arrested.
I wish they blockchained themselves to a chunk of concrete and made a leap of faith, preferably over a Baikonur launchpad, or Mariana trench, I bet they'd make a splash. Preferably everybody from the level of mid-management up (the level where humanity ends). Including the AI, of course. Yes, Mark Z, you too sir...
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