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This is a guest contribution by Jeri DeBitto. If you wish to send a contribution, contact Bill Beatty or the details of the presentation. Thank you.
In the previous articles, I talked about the technical scalability and the aspects of the intelligent contract of the different blockchains that a company can take into consideration.
In this episode of Blockchain and Enterprise, I would like to talk more about the conditions and the necessary characteristics that make a blockchain a viable prospect for the Enterprise to be considered also in terms of use, namely that of stability.
I'm not talking about the kind of stability in terms of network performance, I'm talking more about the stability in terms of protocol changes themselves.
The biggest obstacle to the mass adoption of public blockchains for businesses is the fact that developers are not controlled or contracted, the protocol, due to its decentralized nature, can change outside the control of businesses . This is a very undesirable quality from a business point of view. Coming from over 10 years of work in a business development environment, I can tell you that these internal projects can take a long time. Co-ordinating all the work between many teams, planning a smooth dismantling project of an old business system in a way that does not interrupt the flow of business, can be a very demanding task. The last thing a big company needs is another potentially highly disruptive variable that will change their project plans and cause delays that would cost them millions. In public blockchains this is always a possibility because the rules of the platform are not controlled by any development team, but the collective consent of the miners in the system that can be pseudo-anonymous.
We have seen the problem with this model in the last big fork blockchain in BCH, between BAB and BSV. Both sides had ideological differences and, because of this, the protocol bifurcated and so did the ledger, making sure that all the companies that used it had to choose the sides, and also possibly make some changes to the business processes of the company. emergency to manage the divided fork to ensure that their customers have not lost money.
This is why a focus should be taken, rather, DOGMATIC adherence to the model that the basic protocol should rarely change. This will surely be against what many groups of blockchain developers would support for, but then, of course, would do it, as regular and regular updates (not compatible with previous versions) to keep all developers well paid and guarantee them the security of work.
Of the public blockchains, only Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, Ethereum have had big problems, (creating BCH, BSV, Stellar and ETC in the process) and these have been very disruptive. Among them, the BTC / BCH, BCH / BSV and ETH / ETC forks were the most disruptive, given the amount of companies that were using the chain at that time and the need to maintain transactions and preserve the reconstructed ecosystems. While the ETH / ETC division was caused by the desire to claim the stolen DAO funds, Bitcoin's divisions were all based on ideological differences on the need for the same updates.
BTC / BCH fork:
This fork was caused by a side where hardfork (non-backward-compatible) changes should never be performed deliberately and those that deemed it necessary to change to remove the 1mb block limit limit that was inserted into Bitcoin by Satoshi as security measure that made sense at the time (and wrote how it should be removed later). This was really a split that was necessary, as one side had developers who wanted to change and add sidechain and LN to achieve the Bitcoin objective as it was not able to adapt it natively (due to the imposed limits ) and the other side had developers who wanted to return Bitcoin to the way it was meant to be, namely the downsizing of hardware and the mining ecosystem.
Fork BCH / BSV:
This fork was interesting because many said it should not have happened and could have been avoided. This division is due to the group that has separated from BTC because in reality it wants to resize Bitcoins by modifying the protocol, we have had two fundamentally different groups. One who wanted to have regular updates on the hard fork so that he could continually add new features and innovative scaling technologies and another that only wanted to return the protocol to the original project (since the BTC developers have disabled many features in Bitcoin since 2011 ) and allow it to scale economically. Then the BCH / BSV split precipitated. The result was very costly for all parties and played an important role in the collapse of prices in 2018 and in the deflation of the cryptography market as a whole, but now for the first time since 2011 we have a Bitcoin project that represents stability and the desire to keep all unnecessary changes out of the protocol. This is truly a unique moment, as we can now see what Bitcoin would have accomplished if it had all its potential to grow naturally.
At the end of this series, corporate concerns regarding the use of blockchain platforms revolve around the predictability of protocol changes and minimize those as much as possible. There's some value for a system that works without too many disturbing updates that eradicate all the systems that have been written about it and can depend on it. The best example that is often cited is that of IP. Only after IPv4 has been standardized, the Internet has started to grow and the World Wide Web has been created on it. Previously, there were many network protocols that never reached that level of ubiquity, such as Novell, Framerelay, ATM. But only by standardizing on a stable protocol, has it been encouraged to build on us the uses of the real world and possess everything we know today IP and how the proponents resisted the temptation to make IPv5 or IPv6 updates mandatory. In fact, even if IPv6 has been adopted as a standard, even now it is still a choice of option and no one is forced to use it. This is the way blockchains should be. Above all given its primary role as a global ledger written by everyone, Bitcoin can not afford to have too many disruptive global updates that could endure leaving those that do not update in a ledger that no one recognizes anymore.
Finally, we can see that simple idea in action and if it can actually be used to change the world.
