Blockchain is like Lego - a Toy that doesn’t Fly

Playing at building things has always been part of growing up. ?Plato recommended that “If a boy is to be a good farmer or a good builder, he should play at building toy houses or at farming and be provided by his tutor with miniature tools modeled on real ones. ... One should see games as a means of directing children’s tastes and inclinations to the role they will fulfill as adults.” [Of course, this did not apply to ‘mere’ girls, the Gods forbid].

Children have always ‘built’ things with wooden blocks. For example, in the 16th century, the idea of painting letters and numbers on wooden blocks became a way of teaching children to read, spell and count. In the 19th century, educators used blocks of different shapes and sizes as formal tools in teaching.

In the mid-20th century, the small struggling Danish wooden toy maker, Lego, bought a plastic injection moulding machine and punted on manufacturing plastic ‘blocks’ and, even though the journey has been bumpy, the firm has emerged in the 21st century as the leading manufacturer of ‘toy blocks/bricks’. There can be few children, in first world countries who have not had the opportunity to play ‘with Lego’, at home or in school.

The concept is simple, studs on one side of a block fit into hollow tubes on the reverse and thus blocks can be ‘locked’ to one another to build more complex shapes. ?So, a row of blocks could be chained together to form a ‘block chain’ and a row of blocks can be locked to another row to form a wall and other fairly crude shapes.?

Lego, experts at marketing, have published plans that allow a Lego-Fan to build some very clever shapes, such as trains and boats and planes.

Now Blockchain, the digital Lego, also allows aficionados to ‘build’ things, such as payments systems, currencies, stock exchanges, shipping companies, and almost anything else you can think of.?

Easy, just get a few blocks, link them together and bingo you have not only a new ‘thing’, you have a new ‘paradigm’

How very exciting! Why don’t we all do it?

In dim light, and squinting eyes, you can certainly imagine that your precocious child has built a ‘plane’ and you will, of course, compliment them mightily on their obvious intelligence, as they take after you; obviously, this child is going to go far.

But not in the Lego plane!

Before you can cry out ‘Don’t!’, the child, overflowing with praise, picks up the Lego masterpiece and launches the plane on a perfect semi-parabola, before it stalls, plummets to the ground, smashing into a thousand pieces that you will be picking up on your sore bare feet for days.

The tears flow and the child has to be told that Lego is not meant to be used for real planes, nor boats or trains. And, that if you go school for another twenty years, study hard, and graduate with honours from one of the top engineering schools, someone just might let you design an overhead luggage rack for a new plane.?

‘But I don’t want to be an engineer when I grow up, I want to be Lionel Messi, or Alexia Putellas’ they cry! So, you unwrap the football-shaped Christmas present and off they go happy.

How do you explain to a child that Lego is not designed to be used to actually build something real; that planes cannot be built out of rigid structures which are flat and lifeless and designed to pull apart easily.?Real objects are not as simple as they appear on the Lego box, one needs to understand aerodynamics, physics and maths to design a plane and even with that knowledge it is hard to build something that must operate day in day out at high speed and not fall out of the sky.

Blockchain is a simple concept, like Lego blocks, but one that apparently can solve all problems. There have been hundreds of toys (or Proofs of Concepts as they are called) that have been built by devotees, but none that have flown yet. Some even look like Lego plans

Figure 1 - Inthanon-Lion Rock to mBridge: Building a multi CBDC platform for international payments

Why do these projects keep failing?

Because the ‘builders’ are neophytes, using plastic blocks to create toys, not using proper materials and tried and tested architectures and development techniques to develop real working systems.??Because, they do not know how to do that!

The designs are not even useful prototypes because they are not tackling new problems but trying (and failing) to ‘improve’ existing designs, but with Lego, not modern technologies.

The efforts are not serious. Typically, a group of people, such as economists, lawyers or marketeers, get together and like a Lego club (or Lego Users Group – LUG) play around for a while before becoming bored and drifting away. They neither understand the real problems they are tackling nor the difficulty of building real solutions. They posture and preen and ‘build’ a plane that cannot possibly fly or a boat that cannot float. Defeated, they move onto the next toy craze.

So next time someone comes to you and says, ‘We can do that with Blockchain’, just take them aside, into a quiet room, give them a hot drink and tell them to GROW UP!