BLOCKCHAIN ​​Almighty, or a magic potion

Throughout human history, people have been trying to find a universal remedy that should solve all problems. The first thing that comes to mind is a panacea and a philosopher's stone.

All more or less serious technologies have not escaped this sad fate. Electricity, peaceful atom, microprocessors and nanorobots. With the development of IT, the search for a magic pill has migrated to the virtual world. Every few years a new technology appears, which is immediately built as a monument and declared as a solution to all problems at once. 

-The infamous “dot com” boom (dot com - “.com”), when millions of dollars poured into any company that announced the creation of a website. 

-The famous Web 2.0.  No one could really explain what it was, but every “young and promising company” immediately announced that it was “developing web two-zero.” 

-Boom on the fashionable word “startup” - no comments.

Then there was a wave of creation of “BigData-based applications” - as with Web 2.0 - few people could really explain what it was, and most importantly, why it was needed. But every developer considered it his duty to “develop big data.” 

And probably the freshest trend of the era is neural networks. According to the latest observations of “British scientists,” manufacturers were preparing to build neural networks even into kettles and irons, but then HE came...

The Great and Mighty BLOCKCHAIN.

Around 2016, the general public suddenly learned about the existence of cryptocurrency, and bitcoin in particular. A little earlier, the first wave had already begun in developer circles, when the term blockchain began to be heard more and more often in conversations. Let's leave aside the economic component, at least everything related to the cryptocurrency market, and consider the technological one.

So, 2018. Every day there is news that “a large bank is considering using blockchain.” This is still going well. But a “blockchain router” or a “blockchain smartphone” is already something beyond good and evil. All we have to do is wait for the release of “Blockchain-based Plumbing Devices” and we can consider that life has happened.

What makes such statements controversial at best, if not outright absurd? 

Technology

Any technology is developed, first of all, to solve certain problems, and most often it is necessary to make some compromises or sacrifice something in order to obtain the corresponding advantages. Blockchain is no exception... 

Its advantages directly follow from the tasks for which it was created. And the task that faced the creation of bitcoin/blockchain was, oddly enough, quite specific, and mainly from the field of cryptography and mathematics. Blockchain was created as a solution to the problem of ensuring the reliability and immutability of data in a network where all participants by default do not trust each other. (the same cryptographic problem about the Byzantine generals)

If you read even basic articles about the work of bitcoin - the most common examples that are discussed there are “How can Bob check that the crypto coins belong to Alice?”, “How to eliminate the possibility that Alice will spend the same coins several times.” times?”, “How to eliminate the possibility of Fred stealing coins from Alice and Bob?” 

That is, initially the developers of the ideology itself created, first of all, an environment for the transmission of financial information with guaranteed data reliability. And the disadvantages of technology are direct heirs of the advantages. 

Disadvantages of Blockchain

And there are quite a lot of disadvantages.

First of all, this is the volume of stored data. When blockchain is called a distributed database, this is not entirely true, or rather, it is not at all true. Since network participants do not trust each other according to the terms of the task, everyone stores their own copy of the data. In fact, blockchain allows you to make sure that the data has not been changed and is reliable, even if Alice downloaded the data from Bob. That is, the amount of stored data grows in proportion to the increase in the number of network participants. A truly distributed database, on the contrary, would rationally use the space of each participant. 

The second disadvantage of blockchain is the high cost of execution time. And this applies not only to the fashionable modern phenomenon - mining. Simply checking data in itself is an extremely energy-intensive process, and it is required regularly. 

Already these two properties of blockchain make the creation of a “smartphone on the blockchain” a completely absurd idea. As well as the router. Whether in a smartphone or a router, there are simply no problems that blockchain can solve. 

But in the case of a bank, everything is not so obvious, but still raises some questions. It would seem - blockchain is designed for financial transactions, banks deal with finance - it’s logical.. But the question immediately arises: is the bank interested in multiplying the volume of stored data? Does a bank need decentralization within one banking institution? Dubious benefits. 

So why do we need blockchain?

As in the case of the already mentioned BigData and neural networks, blockchain may not solve all of humanity’s problems, but it copes with its tasks perfectly well. 

And if for one bank the benefits of blockchain are questionable, then for making payments between banks, even those located in different jurisdictions, blockchain can become a serious alternative to SWIFT.

Blockchain can be an excellent tool for storing legal information - we remember, information in the blockchain does not change. And storing not only, for example, the agreement between Alice and Bob, while excluding changes to it, is very tempting.

The use of blockchain by scientific centers to store research results looks quite adequate. For example, repeated duplication of information allows you to practically reduce the risk of data loss to zero. In fact, there are not so few industries where blockchain can find a place. The main thing is to remember common sense and the tasks for which blockchain was created as a technology.

( The opinion of the editors does not always coincide with the opinion of its authors. )