[ad_1]
Blockchain Technology: The Wrong Expectations
It is no secret that the encryption prices have suffered a sharp blow in 2018 and that the consequences of the downward movement will probably not be corrected for months, perhaps even for years to come. However, despite the fact that many have lost confidence in the crypto, the same has not happened to blockchain technology. People still see it as a solution to some of the biggest social issues in the world, and companies continue to claim that they can use blockchain to produce such solutions.
This is where things tend to get complicated, especially due to the fact that blockchain can not solve the problems of the world in a way that most people think they can do. While it certainly has the potential to change many things, these are not the changes you might expect.
For example, people tend to believe that blockchain will eliminate our dependence on trust. If the blockchain were to become mainstream, we should no longer trust our governments, companies, agreements or otherwise. Blockchain would guarantee that all that has been promised is fulfilled. This is the part where this is misunderstood and misleading.
What's the truth?
The truth is that blockchain technology has a lot of power, potential and ability to change things. However, it is also true that its power is limited to the digital part of the modern world.
In other words, blockchain can affect the amount of trust needed by intermediaries for native digital world resources, such as digital currencies. If you have a certain amount of cryptocurrency, that money belongs to you, since no one else has access to it. However, this has no impact on real world resources in the same way.
A good example of this is the ownership of any physical property. In other words, if you own a private key, you are the official owner of all assets at the public address of a particular blockchain where the details about the asset are stored. However, if you lose your private key or someone steals from you, the property of that resource is lost, or better, transferred. This is one of the problems when it comes to blockchain technology.
So while the actual blockchain entries can define the existence and ownership of digitally native resources and no other databases are needed to decide these things, the situation with real-world resources is different, and not all that the blockchain he says it is necessarily true.
What's the problem?
Just for the sake of arguing, let's say that this actually happens. If your country decides that all properties should be moved to a blockchain – without going into details about which blockchain, who manages the nodes, develops software, and other things – and the whole situation occurs, what would it mean if someone lost his own private key? Would this person lose ownership of their things? Their home?
Some have proposed the existence of a centralized authority that would allow them to claim their "lost" property. However, this goes against virtually everything that the blockchain represents. Remember, blockchain leads to decentralization, which means that nobody has the power to change these things. If someone could do it, decentralization would not be real. Also, let us not forget that if someone has the power to decide who owns what, there would be nothing to prevent a corrupt individual or group from taking your resources and giving them to someone else.
Another example in which blockchain would not solve the problem would be the invasion of your property. If someone were to move to the land you own, they would not care what the blockchain says. Owning a private key will not reject them from your property. You would have only two choices at this point. The first is to convince them to leave or drive them away by other means. The other thing is to ask someone else to do it.
In other words, you would need a government or some sort of centralized authority to protect your rights and property. However, in order to know who the real owner of the land is, you need to have a database with this information. Can you trust them with the execution of such a database?
The next problem is in the rigid fork. We have already experienced the devastating consequences that a hard fork can have on cryptography. It happened only two months ago when Bitcoin Cash rigid fork brought another market crash. Now imagine if your property has been stored on the blockchain, and is divided into two chains, with two legitimate coins, with your property at the center of it all.
In this scenario, the conflict would be inevitable, unless there is a third party (as a central authority with its own database) able to decide how such a situation can be resolved. Again, this would mean that there is no truth decentralization.
Obviously, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the possibility of moving property ownership of the real world onto the blockchain. Several countries around the world have even decided to try to do it really, just to run into questions and unsolvable problems without clear solutions.
Blockchain can not completely eliminate trust
At this point, blockchain technology can not keep its promise to get rid of trust. There exists, and will always be probable, the need for some form of trusted authority that would have the capacity to influence certain events, such as those of the previous examples. Alternatively, people will start losing everything they have.
While blockchain technology may be the only database that the cryptic world needs, the situation is different for the real world. Indeed, there is a great possibility that we are not even fully aware of all the problems that would arise with the complete implementation of the blockchain. Many of the known problems are not fully explored and certainly do not yet have adequate solutions.
The promise of blockchain it's a big deal and people will hardly give up because of these problems. For this reason, we can probably expect more research, development and perhaps even some progress in 2019 and beyond. If technology changes, it evolves into something new, the promises made today can become reality. However, with this technology in its current state, this would be a very impractical solution.
[ad_2]Source link
