Art for art's sake in technology - Blockchain

Talks about Blockchain these days reminded me of the tendency of technology misuse for the sake of promotion and creating hype.

So here, I’ll focus on that part. And a bit about Bitcoin.

Most of the time, the reason for using the Blockchain was to create hype or get investment. But it just made little sense. If you want to create a useful product, the storage system you choose should be the best one for the task at hand, not what is the most popular at the moment. That goes for all other technologies that you are using in a startup as well. Remember that technology is just a tool for something greater than the technology itself: solving the problem users have.

To return to the blockchain. As noted, not that the technologies are bad. They are just used and applied where they should not be used or applied. Let’s look at the origins of the blockchain: it helped solve the Double spending problem other cryptocurrencies had since the 80s when they were first introduced. In short, if I give you an apple in the real world, you have an apple; I don’t have one. But, if I send you an image via the Internet, you have an image, and I have an image. That is ok with images, I guess, but it is a problem with money - if you send me some digital currency and get something in return, I (society, everyone) don’t like the idea of you still having that money.

And that is where Blockchain fits perfectly: it solves the Double spending problem elegantly, making it a perfect use case for Bitcoin. Once paid with Bitcoins, the transaction is written into a publicly accessible, immutable ledger, where others confirm you don’t have those Bitcoins anymore. That is the essence - technology used where it should be used, and where it makes a difference. Also, by creating a public Blockchain, everyone can be sure that there is no Double spending, while still keeping transactions (semi) private. Win-win.

But, after a couple of years, things went wild. You could hear from all the places things like:

We are creating an aggregation app for all the flowers shops in the state. But on a Blockchain. Whoo

It became popular, Bitcoin’s price rose in 2017 to an all-time high, and the founders, startup owners rushed to either implement or switch to the new shiny technology, gaining nothing except for buzzwords that stood proudly on emerging Single page applications.

Not to mention the rise of cryptocurrencies that soon followed. We all remember that. I was there, in the middle of it. The startup I joined in March 2017 got 10000 Bitcoins by June, after a successful ICO. Those 10K Bitcoins turned to $170M at the end of the year, in December. Not to mention other coins, and that the total value of resources at one point exceeds a quarter of a billion. Mein Gott, that was a lot. We were sent to create software and support products built on the Blockchain.

We failed.

To be honest, even if we had $2.5B on our account, that startup would fail. Reasons for that go beyond Blockchain or technology. But that is for another story.

To summarize:

~ Don’t indulge in l’art pour l’art when choosing a technology - use something that best fits the general software architecture of your product, and of course, the user’s needs. That should be your priority.

~ For the love of God, if you are going to use Blockchain, don’t use the private one. There are 99% chances that you don’t need it. If you need immutability, you will almost certainly be better off with Kafka or ImmuDB (I have not used the latter, but heard some good words). If you are worried about replication and not losing your data, go with Cassandra, Mongo, CouchDB, or others. Almost all DB nowadays offers some replication mechanisms. Hell, create a file for each user and store it on the Desktop. You will be better off than creating a private Blockchain.

~ Bitcoin in itself is not a scam, nor is it going to fall flat. It was built using math, and math (generally) can’t break. What is problematic here is its price, which is highly volatile and susceptible to speculation. In some terms, it is like every speculation since we invented banks. But, as long as there is one PC mining in the world, it will be here.

~ Think twice before implementing things on the Blockchain, and then think again. Where you really can't use anything else than Blockchain, think about all the implications: immutability, scalability, replication, community, developers availability, and so on. If you have all that sorted out, go on with the Blockchain. If not, look for alternatives.