Where is the Killer Blockchain app? Maybe he's buried under all the advertising campaign!

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Niel Harper

"Our approach, as it turns out, echoes others on the ground who wonder if the benefits of Blockchain add value above and beyond existing technologies, or accumulate to stakeholders beyond the donors who finance them" .

This article on ICTworks really brought to the fore all the feelings I had on Blockchain and DLP (distributed ledger) technologies.

In recent times, I have struggled to determine where the blockchain has demonstrated its immensely promised value, provided true market value or stakeholder value, or interrupted an existing ecosystem. And so far, what I keep thinking is that "blockchain is really a solution in search of a problem". Above all, many of its enthusiasts and proponents are generally conceptual thinkers and / or snake oil vendors who have little or no experience in providing safe, integrated and complex systems.

My confidence in blockchain is not low because Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) started with many promises as an innovative way to secure the capital for startups, but quickly turned into a swindle that raised thousands of crypto-enthusiasts of the their collective wealth. I am not a skeptical blockchain because Bitcoin does not seem anything but a much lower way to consume huge amounts of electricity in the pursuit of a speculative investment product that wastes energy, which changes the climate (and which fails spectacularly as a payment system ). In fact I am willing to recognize that the combination of immense capital and technical effort channeled towards Blockchain projects will ultimately produce results. At present, the space is really very noisy and most of the approaches are profoundly imperfect.

Interestingly, the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Butelin, believes that Blockchain will never have a killer app. In "The value of blockchain technology", claimed:

"There will not be a killer app for Blockchain technology, the reason is simple: the low impact fruit doctrine: if there were any particular applications for which blockchain technology is massively superior to anything else … We are already talking loudly … And until now, there has been no single question that anyone has come up with that has seriously distinguished itself to dominate everything else on the horizon. "

So why are we concentrating so many resources on technology that I'm forced to ask? Experts and pseudo-experts have propagandized several & # 39; revolutionary & # 39; Cases of use for Blockchain: digital gold, micropayments, smart contracts, digital identity, medical records, digital currencies, token-licensed titles, intellectual property, IoT, online games, and the list could continue to the & # 39; Infinity. Cryptocurrencies, once thought to be safe, can not miss the application for Blockchain, have been tank on the market for obvious reasons such as downsizing challenges, regulatory pressures, security issues and general user accessibility. The folly around the ICOs and the use of Blockchain has seen companies formulate such a big catchall for what technology can get that they have ventured into the realm in which secure and clustered databases are simply a more effective solution. . Sigh!

But let's get back to security for a brief moment. Although the blockchain itself is quite safe if properly executed, this does not mean it has no vulnerability. One of the key problems is that the technology is relatively new and there are no sufficiently experienced developers who know how to properly protect blockchain solutions. Problems with resizing must also be considered (for example, complexity and transaction volumes can easily compromise an improperly designed blockchain system). Moreover, in the absence of adequate management, risk and control of IT, third party interfaces (eg exchanges, portfolios, fintech partners, payment processors, smart contracts, etc.) are easily the most weak in the Blockchain ecosystem. We have seen more than enough cases in which the poorly established systems linked to the blockchain have led to the theft of financial assets. The decentralized nature of blockchain platforms makes it even more difficult to respond to security shortfalls, since a consensus (time and energy) must be reached to impose a particular blockchain implementation. This is not always achieved in a timely manner.

I'm not saying that blockchain does not have potentially real and valuable use cases. As stated earlier, there are extremely brilliant people working on the development of blockchain systems and platforms and a large amount of capital funding their work. I hope that, while I still breathe in the lungs, I will see a Blockchain product or service that is truly capable of changing lives. But so far, there is sufficient evidence to say with confidence that the blockchain has been mostly bluster and little benefit. More specifically, 10 years later there is no industry where this technology has made its competitors obsolete. There were thousands of great ideas (and thousands more that were not great), but where the rubber hits the road, the execution was incredibly poor. Perhaps, just maybe, the blockchain killer app already exists and we have not realized it. Or it will simply never come.

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