Avoiding a pointless blockchain project

I&#x27;ve saved a couple of potential clients months of development time and probably tens of thousand of dollars just by convincing them not to use a blockchain.<p>So we have this great world changing idea which will transform, reinvent and disrupt ... and it uses a blockchain to keep track of ....<p>Why the blockchain ? Because ... distributed ... anonymous ...<p>But you have user accounts on your servers.. your project is centralized by design. Why not save yourself the trouble and use a mysql database ?<p>People like being involved in things which sound cool and they try to bend reality so that they can find a use for a cool sounding technology.

After much exposure in big data processing and running an Ethereum meetup since it wasn&#x27;t yet cool, I think the main promise of this technology is more conceptual than strictly determined by a dominant protocol. These are:<p>- Fully user owned identities<p>- Eradicating information asymmetry in mutually beneficial ways<p>- Transparent update rules, i.e. an evolving but never deprecated API<p>Thus different roads will lead to those economic gains. Essentially you take mongodb, encapsulate any write access into UDFs (=smart contracts) with permission to execute based on a public&#x2F;private key, a second set of keyholders able to read and validate the log and et voila, all promises of blockchain tech fulfilled.

This is a helpful summary!<p>We could also say that blockchains can be useful in principle when people are afraid of retroactive modification of history (for example because they get hacked, or because of governmental pressure to falsify their records). This is sort of an instance of this article&#x27;s mutually-untrusting writers issue, but it&#x27;s an interesting one because the writers are saying that they don&#x27;t want to be trusted.<p>I think this is the case now for software distributors and certificate authorities, among others (I gave a talk related to this at CCC); they are saying &quot;it&#x27;s bad for <i>us</i> and you if you just believe whatever we say, without at least a way to know if a larger audience has heard it and whether we&#x27;re denying what we said before&quot;.<p>So we can also say that blockchains (or perhaps another kind of distributed consensus mechanism; clearly Ben Laurie and others are claiming that blockchains are too heavyweight some or all of the time) can be useful when people are afraid that they&#x27;re going to be made to emit writes that they didn&#x27;t want to, or to deny writes that they previously emitted.

Excellent post.<p>As much as I am fascinated by the Blockchain, Bitcoin and all related matters the Blockchain shows how random projects are created around some tech just for the sake to do something with this new tech.<p>People fell in love with the Blockchain and desperately try to find a use case. Bitcoin was and I still think <i>is</i> a killer use case for the Blockchain. But in the last 24 months I met so many founders of blockchainy startups—exceptional smart guys, after 15 minutes of listening to them I felt so stupid like I missed the past five years of tech. But once you ask them what is the use case of their new shiny blockchainy tech they don&#x27;t give a proper answer. Instead they shotgun more words with even higher confidence.<p>Again, absolutely nothing against the Blockchain and I am highly impressed by Ethereum. And I understand that people often need to play around with new tech some while to find proper use cases. But especially with the Blockchain I feel that people do not find many more killer use cases beyond currency.

Question - does the incentive (or lack thereof) of the miners to create the blocks also need to be considered? There&#x27;s an obvious incentive with bitcoin - you make money. What would be the incentive for me to create a block of (using one of this article&#x27;s examples) entries on a shared calendar? It seems like part of the reason that this works for bitcoin is precisely because the &quot;thing&quot; being recorded (money) is something I also want as a miner. Why would I want to put in the computational work to create a block of calendar entries?

Yeah, it&#x27;s a bit like people taking &quot;Internet Of Things&quot; hype and declaiming that your toaster needs a wireless connection.

This is a great article, but I disagree on one point. Blockchains aren&#x27;t overhyped. Sure, people promote them for strange use cases sometimes. But I&#x27;m pretty confident that we&#x27;ll look back on blockchains as <i>under</i>hyped. Blockchains will reshape entire industries, and some of the largest corporations on the planet will find themselves competing on a level playing field with a few kids in a garage.<p>Has disintermediation ever been overhyped? Currency disintermediated trusted community members who you knew would do you a favor in return. The printing press disintermediated the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful entities of its day. The internet disintermediated... lots of people. Blockchains disintermediate everyone else.

I recently talk with a stock exchange team who wanted to start a blockchain project, so we asked naively: approximately, how many nodes are part of the system? Only one was their answer.

Sometimes it&#x27;s hard to know what&#x27;s a good idea and what isn&#x27;t until you&#x27;ve tried it.

For all of you who get a connecing to the database error:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.multichain.com%2Fblog%2F2015%2F11%2Favoiding-pointless-blockchain-project%2F&amp;oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.multichain.com%2Fblog%2F2015%2F11%2Favoiding-pointless-blockchain-project%2F" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...</a>

I&#x27;d also point out that there are a couple of projects out there aiming to add &quot;blockchainish&quot; behavior to a &quot;regular&quot; database without sacrificing the functionality we&#x27;re all used to (try finding a tx with a specific value of the op_return on the bitcoin blockchain for example).

Blockchain idea: Decentralized LinkedIn

This is a really good essay, and good frank analysis and insight. Thanks for writing it.

seems like an encryption escrow service could meet 90% of use cases for a lot less costs. I digitally sign and timestamp then encrypt data upload it to web service and make it available to others.

I work with blockchain technologies and sometimes I would like to say that the king is naked

(2015)