Blockchain or Bluster?

Over the last few years we have seen the rise of the Blockchain. Bitcoin brought the real hype and as a result we are now left talking about securing the worlds transactions; whether they be election votes, money transfer, smart contracts or something of the like, with the distributed ledger technology used at the foundation of Bitcoin.

It is true that Blockchain is the diamond in the rough of the cryptocurrency landscape, but are businesses jumping on the Blockchain band wagon by branding their apparent new innovations as real Blockchain implementations? How many of these implementation actually use any Blockchain technology at all, or do they employ 'Blockchainesque' technology's that amount to no more than 'Tamper Evident Ledgers' TELs?

TELs have been around for many years and form the core of many secure industries, but are they Blockchain implementations? The sceptic's answer here is 'NO', but the diplomatic answer is, 'MAYBE'. The diplomatic answer comes about because the concept of Blockchain is not a new one, as Tamper Evident Ledgers that you can only add to, have been around for a long time but were never branded as 'Blockchain' technology.

The other key component used in Blockchain, commonly mis-communicated as Blockchain, is used in implementations where Cryptography is used to address and/or secure existing business processes. This is not Blockchain, this is Cryptography.

Bitcoin brought Encrypted Tamper Evident Distributed Ledger technology to the mainstream but more recent incarnations of Blockchain projects only harness small parts or subsets of the technology and promote them as Blockchain products.

Do not be fooled by the hype. Do your research, bring in an expert in the Blockchain field and put the vendors of the 'Blockchain' products through their paces.

A number of the latest Blockchain projects may work flawlessly in the test lab, but when your shiny new Blockchain implementation is released into production, you need to be sure that you are actually benefitting from the technology that you think you are buying into. Common real Blockchain issues that are experienced when implementing into live are performance related due to the processing power required to handle the encryption. This is something that you probably won't see in the vendor's test lab.

Reference: Professor Ferdinando Maria Ametrano.