Misshapen, Hideous and Odd Blockchain Appliances

Yes, you’ve seen it all. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those IT solutions built on Blockchain without any reason and decency, misshaped, hideous and odd.

The ugly truth about Blockchain

Blockchain is a hot topic, and everybody wants a piece of it. The ugly truth is that its use is limited to a very particular applications, mostly including a few untrusted parties cooperating on the common ledger.

But it does not protect from the blessing of the buzzword – adding “Blockchain” or “Bitcoin” to a company name gave a similar stock boost as “.com” in the old days.

Why your project doesn’t really require Blockchain?

Blockchain is an incredibly slow database. You need a reason to adopt it.

What’s more, if your simply write your transactions on your own blockchain, and no one other has access to it – it simply makes no sense, it’s just a ciphered database, it needs no blocks. To make decentralised ledger, you need at least two identities to… you know… decentralise it.

The Blockchain starts where multiple parties share, update and verify data in a time sensitive way, and try to avoid intermediaries.

But there are companies who pave their own way to the market, despite the technology chosen against the hair. The use of Blockchain is dogmatic, and the problem solving value secondary. For example:

• Various match-making platforms, from dating to job seeking. In the most of the cases, Blockchain is a troublesome lump, slowering the platform and not giving you anything in return.
• Banking apps that publish your private data on a transparent Blockchain, effectively sharing your history of transactions with the third parties. It’s not only excessive, but simply obsessive trying to put a round shaped block into a square hole.
• FUCK token, a social cryptocurrency created to allow people to give “fuck” to the other members of the community. Truth be told, there are easier ways to give a fuck. The only thrill is connected with the fact, that you do it on blockchain. Wow!

The problem is not that you CAN’T do it – but it’s simply a solution, that doesn’t give help you, but rather creates a technical problems.

There might be one reason, actually…

Now, the big question – if Blockchain does not really help you to build more efficient IT solution, but helps you to market your platform, is it a correct choice or not?

Long Blockchain is an iced tea and lemonade producer. Why would they need a Blockchain? That’s a mystery, that can’t be solved even by themselves. But truth be told, they stock prices soared after adding the Blockchain buzzword to their name.

However, at this point, I believe the marketing power of misused distributed ledger cannot overcome the cons of a bad development and simply wrong design.