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Maybe it's the much-discussed 2019 economic softening, or maybe it's just that things are not happening fast enough in the blockchain news cycle. If the case is not enough, this may be the case that is void of value altogether, or at least might be far ahead of its time.
Maybe the biggest punctuation mark to the beginning of the month when a team from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) examined 43 implementations of distributed ledger technology (DLT). The various DLT projects covered by a wide variety of tasks, and users included non-governmental organizations (NGOs), contractors, and government agencies. For the record, many expect to replace the term blockchain, perhaps in an effort to distance the technology from cryptocurrencies and the general initial coin offering (ICO) space.
It was also intended for the use of a wide variety of applications, including land registries, humanitarian aid disbursement in refugee camps, education subsidies, as well as in the supply chain. International development actors, including government agencies, multilateral organizations, and think tanks, to improve effectiveness or efficiency in their work. So with all the energy and enthusiasm in so many areas, why the recent spate of concern?
Earlier in the year, a research group called MERL Tech wrote a collaborative piece among three authors. MERL stands for Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning, and its mission is to examine technologies in the social impact, humanitarian, and international development fields. In this case, the authors reached out to 43 "blockchain use-cases" and came away discouraged by the lack of the evidence provided. The blog post on the MERL Tech site did not indicate the longitude of the study, the different kinds of blockchain companies contacted, what the expectations were of the researchers one way or the other, etc. In other words, many questions came to mind, which
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The register "Biting the hand that feeds", "with a clickbait-style headline:" Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors do not call back when asked for evidence. " Part of the register's agenda to be overseen. It likes to point out quangos, and they seem to be a group of people interested in the world. Fair enough.
Clickbait or not, the headline was effective. News loop. In one case, Forbes contributor Bernard Marr referred to in his headline on December 10, "Is This The End of Blockchain?" Marr referred to the MERL study, and also how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have steadily lost value in 2018, asking the question: "Is it time to admit that the great experiment with decentralized, distributed ledgers has failed?"
Marr brings up a couple of discerning points. First, blockchain has been tainted in the minds of two to overhype, scams, and the cryptocurrency industry from where it originates. He said it would be a recent event done by Forresters released November 7, suggesting that blockchain will continue to evolve unless "disillusionment causes a winter." Principal analyst Martha Bennett actually forecasts that "the visionaries will forge ahead," while those hoping for immediate industry disruption will give up.
The term "winterization" refers to a technology that is so far ahead of its own time that it does not receive the widespread adoption that would be transformative to a society two to other often technological, but also cultural, barriers. Charles Babbage's vision of an "automatic computing engine" was designed between 1833 and 1871. He was about a century ahead of his time. Artificial Intelligence was first conceived and designed by John McCarthy in his Advice as early as 1958. Yet another example is that of "additive manufacturing," or 3D printing. It was invented in Japan in the early 1980s. However, it is only now that we are seeing the impact of what additive manufacturing can do with such companies as Fast Radius (owned by UPS). One of the reasons that 3D printing did not work out that prototyping, there were not enough companies adopting the appropriate applications.
FreightWaves reached out to John Burg, one of the MERL authors. In other online writings, he authored, "Blockchain will impact your life … here's how and what you can do about it," in late April of this year. 15 years of cross-cultural and multi-sectoral experience in managing and facilitating international work, including policy and budget formulation, in governmental and non-governmental positions. He has extensive experience in fragile and conflict-affected environments in 16 countries across six global regions.
We were not able to comment on the MERL blog. He did that he followed closely since 2015, and that "I feel that I'm seeing a large feedback loop of smaller interrelated chicken-and-egg binary challenges for enterprise-level blockchain uptake, resulting in some of the less- than-positive headlines these days. "
Burg sees plenty of challenges for blockchain. After the initial telephone conversation, here's what he sent by email as a macro assessment / overview of where things currently stand with blockchain.
Wrap up the week with JP and Chad. Click here to listen on demand.
When crypto boomed, VCs doubled down and pushed into the technology.
But it does not mean that it is not the case that it can not be pulled from potential users to adopt it. This results in a lack of equilibrium between the supply and demand, which can result in a solution looking for a problem.
This gets to the value-add conundrum. Blockchain adds value as a macro or meta system-of-systems, which is a level nobody is going to pilot at. So there are many small-scale pilots, which is the smart way to pilot. But the evidence does not translate to enterprise-level scale, so it is hard to articulate a case, based on evidence, that blockchain would add value to the enterprise scale.
And, this is to the evidence conundrum, which is not specific to enterprise-level applications. The absence of equilibrium in the supply / demand means for the customer of the lack of equilibrium -disclosure agreements is rampant (in order to protect both property and intellectual property, as well as possible embarrassing failures), but we do not know about good or bad.
And, complicating these conundrums is that the public conflicts the use of blockchain for crypto as opposed to its use for strictly non-financial applications. So, when the crypto markets become volatile, as they are currently, people tend to think blockchain has lost its value, in the sense of an enterprise platform sense – the public is not making that distinction. Of course clickbait headlines bear a great deal of responsibility for this, as I learned all too well recently!
Binary problems is a large-scale bifurcation of public messaging. On the one hand blockchain firms and proponents (including myself in the past) have painted rosy pictures about the potential of blockchain, while opponents cite all manner of technological challenges the technology still faces, and the general public do not know what to think .
To be an integral part of an enterprise platform role, it can be used to identify and process any structural process inefficiencies. Of being or not there are inefficiencies. Tinkering with processes invariably means tinkering with culture, which individuals tend not to take kindly to most people. Human-centered design principles and advocate for approaching culture culture change through the iterative and gradual process of individual behavior change. This runs afoul of what most blockchain firms are looking for in a client-i.e., A quick turnaround engagement. The rise of "blockchain as a service," or BaaS, might be a sign that blockchain firms are warming to the idea of slower-burn longer-term engagements; however, only time will tell.
Nonetheless, there are also significant R & D projects in process. Oil giants BP and Shell have a blockchain project. Maersk and IBM's global shipping application, and Walmart's recent blockbuster project, are also major enterprise endeavors that will measure the effectiveness at scale. The growth of blockchain will see the continuation of blockchain experiments, but breakthroughs may be a little further on the horizon.
The overarching factors heading into 2019 are that blockchain is "tricky" technology that does not really add value until you can stairs. People are inherently adverse to change. There's always that confounding human component.
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