IBM has a female blockchain team

I have criticized IBM for over-hyping the potential for quantum computing and related technologies, but what it is doing with the Bitcoin blockchain is even worse.

CNBC.com reportsL

In the male-dominated world of cryptocurrency, IBM is going against the grain. The company's 1,500 member blockchain team is led by Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of global industries, platforms and blockchain. Meanwhile, the actual blockchain development was led by IBM Fellow Donna Dillenberger. ...

However, the company's predominantly female leadership lies in stark contrast to other blockchain start-ups, which are overwhelmingly run by men. It also makes the company an anomaly within a fintech industry that remains heavily male-dominated. However, Kralingen, who joined the company in 2004, notes that promoting women to leadership positions isn't a new trend at IBM. The company's CEO, Ginni Rometty, is the most visible example.

The demise of IBM is sad. It once owned the whole computer market, and had no serious competition in mainframe computers. If the management had any sense at all, it would now own the cloud computing market. But it is not even a serious player.

IBM got rid of its best operations, and brought in female management. So what do they do? Jump on a stupid fad, and try to use it for social justice!

Dillenberger notes that blockchain has many uses outside of cryptocurrency and she highlights food safety as an example. Using a cellphone, a farmer can scan the exact moment a food is planted, harvested, packaged and distributed, onto the blockchain platform. This comes in handy when there's a food recall because a company can quickly pinpoint where things went wrong. This leads to greater transparency and trust among businesses and consumers, explains Dillenberger.

In fact, it's this social justice aspect that makes blockchain development so appealing to her. Dillenberger points to the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, in which six infants died because plastic was added to baby formulas and milk. She says that tracking food production through blockchain would help companies and the public avoid these types of scenarios.

"I'm an IBM Fellow," she adds. "I'm expected to push the boundaries of the frontiers of science and math and technology."

Lack of women in blockchain
However, most women are not given this opportunity. An analysis of the top 50 blockchain companies found that just 16 percent are founded by and/or led by women.

The reasons behind the gender disparity are varied, but women overwhelmingly point to a "blockchain bro" culture that caters exclusively to men. In January, the North American Bitcoin Conference featured 84 male speakers and three women, while the post-conference networking party was held at a Miami strip club.

This is crazy. The blockchain does not run on a cellphone. China could have apps for farmer to log data from a cellphone, if it wanted to. Logging data into a database is old technology that does not need a blockchain.

The blockchain lets competing "miners" do million-dollar computations in a race to time-stamp the data, so that an outside party can choose to trust the time-stamp with the most computation. (Or more precisely, the first one to meet the computational requirements.) That's all. It is not going to stop a cheating milk producer from contaminating milk. Logging the supply chain might help trace a problem, but the blockchain itself does not add anything useful.

IBM has 1500 people working on this scam!

The major blockchain startups got the big funding about 5 years ago. There has been plenty of time to see a product by now. And yet there is still nothing useful.