# Pessimistic about blockchain By [robwil](https://paragraph.com/@robwil) ยท 2024-02-07 --- In my last blog post I shared my [optimism about blockchain](https://mirror.xyz/robwil.eth/rPzVBlELyCDvAwlyobCOOhfpvTgb7xJaW8Em2YNQ4CI). I felt it was important to expand on the pessimistic view as well. Truthfully, I hold both perspectives in tension and it is a continual internal struggle of deciding which is most authentic and true at any given time. Over the past year, I've experienced some of the most negative sides of the blockchain world personally. First, I was a victim of a phishing scam. A Discord server that I participate in had been compromised, and the main announcements channel shared a link about checking for an airdrop. I happened to open this link on my phone, and therefore my mobile TrustWallet app was used to prompt me for a signature. I am less familiar with the mobile wallet apps in general, and they lack almost all of the metadata and information of desktop wallets like [MetaMask](https://metamask.io/), or the much better [Rabby](https://rabby.io/). Those wallets make it clear when you are signing a signature and what kind of signature, vs. a transfer, vs. a contract call, etc. TrustWallet makes no such designation. Opening the phishing site, what I thought was an "authentication" to prove my wallet identity actually turned out to be a transfer of all my ETH from a small test wallet I use. A subsequent transaction, which I was not suspicious about because I thought the mobile wallet app had failed the first transaction, approved the spending of another token. By the time the third transaction came up, I knew something was wrong. I wasn't even able to figure out what had happened until I went back on my desktop. This experience made me realize how poor the wallet UX is in general for this space, but also how much worse the mobile wallet experience is compared to desktop. In addition to this, I realized how little I understood about the technical underpinnings, despite having deployed a few smart contracts and learned a lot about the fundamentals and theory of it all. I have since educated myself about wallet security practices thanks to the free resources at [Boring Security](https://boringsecurity.com/). Second, I was a victim of the Multichain Bridge situation. Exactly what occurred is still unclear, but [this Twitter post](https://twitter.com/MultichainOrg/status/1679768407628185600) deserves to be at the top of the hall of shame for crypto. It sounds like the founder and CEO of the bridge had deployed almost all of the critical infrastructure to his private cloud account, which included all the private keys necessary to access depositor's funds. This allowed hundreds of millions of dollars to be stolen, without any cosigning needed from the community or anyone else. The owner wallet had all of those permissions, with no multi-sig or similar check. When I first heard about the bridge funds being stolen, I did not understand what this meant for me personally. However, it turns out that I had exposure via Fantom chain and Kava chain. The coins that I held in my private hardware wallet, such as "BTC" and "ETH" and "USDC" were apparently not really BTC or ETH or USDC, but multiBTC and multiETH and multiUSDC. In the case of Kava chain, I had purposely been holding USDC as a caution against other more volatile assets on the chain, not realizing I had this underlying bridge risk. Similar to the phishing scam, I admit this was a personal lack of knowledge. I had always assumed that the worries of "bridge hacks" that we often read about was something to be feared only when explicitly using the bridge in question. I didn't realize that entire classes of assets like ETH or BTC on certain chains like Fantom are fully backed by a bridge, and nothing else. While it may be understandable that I did not know this as a mere user of the protocol, I'm also shocked that none of the billion-dollar companies like Fantom itself did the due diligence on Multichain to realize that all their funds were controllable by a single CEO. There is this motto in the crypto community: "Not your keys, not your crypto." But this motto is really more of a myth than a reality. Every wallet that we use, like the mobile wallet where my funds were phished, is a tool that I'm depending on. I'm depending on the tool to keep not only my keys safe, but my crypto safe. Beyond this, every smart contract we interact with, every blockchain we use, every frontend we connect to: all of these carry inherent and implicit risks. I may be cognizant of the risk I take when I stake an asset, but am I aware of the risk of using the chain itself? Which assets do I hold which actually have their value determined by a big pool of bridged assets? How can I even see this type of risk and exposure? There are no tools for this right now. All of the above only scratches the surface of the problem with UX and trust in this space. As I wrote about in ["The issue of trust"](https://mirror.xyz/robwil.eth/Z845RyKTdS-tkoUIpUzf2wVzhiTzBY5qo8kj4uvh0fQ), these technologies are not as "trustless" as they claim to be. Like all communications technology, blockchain and cryptocurrency brings us into relationship with other people. Whether we like it or not, all relationships require trust. This space needs to be more honest and open about the very real trust we're placing in the operators of chains, protocols, bridges, wallets, and more. Even for those of us who try to be as techno-literate as our busy lives allow for, there are continual surprises about how immature this space is. In the 15 years since the Bitcoin whitepaper, I think it would be reasonable to expect more progress than what we have gotten. Much of the "progress" in recent years seems to be almost entirely in the speculative space, with Liquid Staking Derivatives and LSDfi as just one example of this continued trend toward commodification and derivative financial instruments. As I look toward my own future and the priorities of how I spend my time and what I put my energy toward learning, I keep asking myself whether blockchain truly has the seeds for meaningful human progress or whether it will remain a financialized hellscape. I haven't given up yet, but my patience wears thin, and my distaste grows stronger. I applaud those who remain present and are trying to shape the future of blockchains for the better, but I don't know if I will remain one of those people for this season. --- *Originally published on [robwil](https://paragraph.com/@robwil/pessimistic-about-blockchain)*