What Etherscan Comments Tell Us About Crypto Adoption

Sometimes, when I'm bored, or waiting for the bus, I hop on to Etherscan and look at new contracts or just follow the money. One thing that always gets me though is the comment section.

Transaction, contracts, and accounts all have comment sections. These comment sections are rife with scammers, beggars, and people treating it a helpdesk, flooding it with complaints that show a general lack of understanding on the fundamentals of cryptocurrency and decentralization. Though decentralization definitely has its benefits, whether it be cutting out middlemen's fees, or the ability to operate trustlessly, the other side of decentralization, where there are no arbitrators to reverse fraud, hacking and theft may be a factor that continues to hold back mainstream cryptocurrency adoption.

These comment sections expose the sort of misunderstanding and misclassification of cryptocurrency as a transaction of value that is centralized, with some centralized authority figure that is able to reverse transactions due to fraud or hacks, or some entity 'Ether' that is 'stealing coins'. Though there have been instances of cryptocurrency fraud where there have been centralized authorities taking actions to reverse the fraud, such as the Ethereum hard fork to reverse the DAO hack, that is not the norm and some would argue that it should not happen at all.

Additionally, the idea of someone who you can contact, or e-mail, in this case, who can solve your fraud complaints is another carry-over from the world of centralized banking and money transfers.

These comments expose how cryptocurrency and other decentralized systems may not yet be ready for mainstream adoption because of how differently they function from tradition centralized power structures, and how they function with no arbitrators or policing.