I’ve got some issues with Blockchain, Part 1

So, it’s time for me to get off the fence, as my old friend Bart from SAP has recently suggested, and explain the problems I’ve got with Blockchain.  There's too much to cover in one hit so here in Part 1, I’ll deal with the first beef I have with it, then in Part 2 we’ll do the detail.

Well, it’s not that the word Blockchain and the story surrounding it seems like a clever way of marketing a Mutual Distributed Ledger (MDL). It is very clever indeed. There are plenty of other ways of doing MDLs but this one has caught the global imagination, and that's got to be a good thing.

So the problem’s not that it can create a hub-less, centerless trading environment, which it most probably can.

And it’s not that Blockchain appears to be a clever way of linking transactions together to establish an immutable audit trail among trading partners, which it most probably does very well.

No, the first big problem I have with Blockchain is that its proponents and its followers have contrived to turn it into a religion.

I suppose it’s not that surprising given the unremitting hype we’ve had to endure from every quarter for quite some time now, combined with a rather conspicuous lack of concrete evidence to support it. It has become unnecessary to justify the opinion that “Blockchain’s the way forward, of course” and woe betide those who question the advice. (There’s a similar, albeit vastly exaggerated manifestation of this phenomenon at play among those who believe the Earth to be flat, and that’s really, truly, deeply disturbing. But I digress.)

Day in, day out, posts and comments crop up here on Linkedin, Twitter, et al, trumpeting Blockchain’s virtues and its power to resolve any issue, cure the ills of the world and even transform the economy. Massed hordes of Likers and Commenters from all over the globe then swiftly pile in on these posts, baa’ing away in ovine agreement. 

And they have one thing in common – none of them can possibly have the slightest inkling of a clue about the problem that they are agreeing Blockchain is the solution to. They are expressing or supporting an opinion without a single microsecond of research into the matter in hand. Research that would normally be done by experienced professionals to establish whether the solution being offered is actually a viable cure for the problem.

Has research gone the same way as truth recently? I suspect it has. Damn the internet.

And the vast majority of them cannot possibly have ever worked with Blockchain with so few reference implementations out there right now. Most, like me, have probably never even seen it in action let alone taken it apart on the kitchen floor and put it back together again (and thrown away the 3 spare screws and that round black plastic bit).

So, it’s not actually Blockchain that most bothers me about Blockchain. It’s people advocating it when they haven’t a bloody clue what they’re talking about. So stop it please. Now.

I therefore wait with eager anticipation for the outcome of both the B3i consortium and the London insurance market's TOM PoC investigation into the possible uses of Blockchain in the (re)insurance market’s modernisation programme. I know that many of those involved there are proper experts in their fields and thus not prone to adopting blind faith as a tactic, far less a strategy, so I fully expect their final recommendations to be somewhat unique in the world of Blockchain advice – properly researched.

In part 2, I shall be sharing my more technical problems with Blockchain but I need to finish a bit more research on that first, so give me a week or so. (You know, I’ll ask a mate down the pub, edit out the profanities and Tweet the rest.)

In the meantime, if you really want to learn about MDLs and Blockchain from some people who really do take the trouble to research things properly, you could do a lot worse than look at this from Z/Yen.

? Jeff Ward, 2017