In my opinion, there's no justification to describe his opinion as a "professional opinion" and himself as something as official as a "blockchain researcher". I

In my opinion, there's no justification to describe his opinion as a "professional opinion" and himself as something as official as a "blockchain researcher". It's just an appeal to authority when there are no clear standards for what an authority is in this field. >>Unfortunately for this central value proposition of blockchain, there is no lack of trusted enough intermediaries in the financial/accounting sector. Has this individual ever tried integrating a payment system into an online business? Payments on the internet are rife with inefficiencies and problems. The lack of electronic cash is a serious impediment to frictionless commerce. Without cryptocurrency, the road ahead seems to fork between a future with a hodge podge of non-compatible processors, or one with a single payment processor holding a virtual monopoly over the market. >>Very few people outside so-called crypto-anarchist community are opposed to trusted intermediaries as a matter of principle, and outside this (admittedly vocal) minority and those who for their own personal reasons want to believe in this scheme It's not just "crypto-anarchists" who care about removing trusted intermediaries. Anyone who doesn't want to be a captive consumer of a trusted third party that runs a platform they are locked into by virtue of its network effect, will be interested in immutable protocols replacing platforms run by trusted intermediaries. >>also by certified wingnuts from the long-discredited hyper-libertarian Austrian school of economics, Ad hominem nonsense like this really discredits the article. >>the bog standard public blockchain with its Proof of Work scheme (e.g. how Bitcoin burns electricity) is certainly not going to cut transaction costs enough, as throughput rates are simply not even within two orders of magnitude from what is needed. Case in point: a Bitcoin developer conference just announced it won’t be accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment, because it’s too slow and the transaction fees are too high. As a self-avowed blockchain researcher, it's odd that he's not aware of Bitcoin Cash, and is using Bitcoin Core's self-imposed 1 MB per 10 minute throughput cap as the technical limits of what Proof of Work could scale to. The article is a disingenuous hit piece.