What the experts are saying about blockchain, and why they’re wrong.

There's not much reason in arguing with someone who simply doesn't have the vision for seeing how blockchain technologies might be a natural fit for many use cases (especially in the financial industry). Their statements will not age well. But I was struck by this straw man filled article in CSO magazine entitled "Blockchain isn't always the answer". Despite the fact that no one is making the case that blockchain IS always the answer (most chains have one primary use case), I want to consider carefully a theme from the article regarding where blockchain fits and doesn't.

The author starts with the example of food borne illness and sets up his second straw man with:

Certainly, saving a human life is worth any amount of money, yes? Turns out, nope. We put price tags on human life all the time in nearly every protection scenario.

And again, we're left asking, who is saying we should spend "any amount of money" to protect lives against food borne illness? But don't be fooled, the US spends a LOT of money on this. The FDA has a $1.4 billion (with a B) budget to protect America's food supply. It turns out that "rapidly detecting and responding to major food borne illness outbreaks" is one of their core focuses for 2019. The company who builds a solution to this problem is likely to have a fat government contract waiting for them in addition to the appreciation of the public. Just because there is funding for a solution to this issue, doesn't mean that blockchain is the right choice to solve the problem; But make no mistake, Americans care about securing our food supply and we ALREADY pay for it. The author goes on to tell us that we COULD setup a blockchain to solve this issue but "at what cost?" The author doesn't say, and we're left to assume blockchain is expensive.

But it's not. Blockchain technology is insanely cheap.

I can easily deploy a private Ethereum based blockchain on any number of private and public cloud providers. Standing up one system in 25 AWS Regions and 25 Azure Regions (redundantly covering most of the planet) would cost less than $1000/month. Ethereum full nodes can run on devices as small as raspberry pi. For companies with existing hardware, blockchain can likely run in the excess. Additionally, much of the supporting technology is also open sourced and ready for use. Not surprisingly, there are already supply chain specific blockchain technologies in the works because it's actually a well-fitting use case.

I get that today's blockchain craze is hitting a fevered pitch. Crypto snake oil salesmen have a token for every ill. That said, don't let the hype distract you from the capabilities of the technology. Join me in a simple thought experiment of how a blockchain might be applied to a food borne illness scenario for a bag of salad. To keep it simple we'll focus on one ingredient, lettuce. Starting with the grower, they would have an address on the blockchain that they use to start the process. As lettuce is picked, sorted and packed in cardboard, a QR scanner is used to send tokens from the grower to the boxes of lettuce that are shipped (note: this doesn't need to be done in the field). As the boxes are loaded onto pallets and trucks more tokens are spent to build connections between the lettuce and other objects in the supply chain. Once the lettuce arrives at the salad manufacturing plant, tokens from the plant are transferred to the boxes of lettuce. Then tokens from the boxes of lettuce are eventually transferred to bags of salad those ingredients are destined for. As the bag of salad is shipped to the store you could imagine more tokens being spent from the trucks, distribution centers, and finally the store. If a consumer purchased a bag of salad and it made them sick, the FDA would simply need the QR code on the bag to build the relationship necessary to discover the entire supply chain. Further, the FDA could send tokens to the addresses of compromised salad bags and other consumers could simply use an app to know if their bag of salad is affected by the recall or not. Since the blockchain is immutable, the guilty party could not change the data after it had been set. No doubt that this is over-simplified, but you can easily see how blockchain technology is suitable for this kind of application. Why can't the CSO article's author?

But why not just use a database? I hope you're sitting down. Blockchain is a database. Not a traditional database mind you, a highly secure, robust, globally distributed database. Perhaps more interestingly, blockchain is entering the world's conscience. Bitcoin is used in almost every country in the world. People are becoming familiar with blockchain as its use is growing from crypto-plaything to the future backbone of major systems. It's not hard to imagine that blockchain based solutions will become the "lingua franca" platform of choice for international applications. The author suggests that we could try "a regular national database", but would a regular database be better than a blockchain? Certainly not with regard to cost. I can't imagine anything more expensive than a huge "regular" database, plus the layers of application, security, and integration that must sit on top of it. Then multiple replicas around the world and finally DR. Traditional databases are commonly the most expensive and least robust part of the application. What about complexity? I can't even begin to fathom the number of tables, relationships and data needed in a traditional database to model the simple example I created above. I'm beginning to wonder if the expense and complexity of a regular database is the reason our FDA food supply tracking system doesn't exist yet.

I think the crux of the misunderstanding of the author comes with the statement, "Blockchain should only be considered when strong integrity of transactions among a group of people is needed..." Thinking of blockchain technologies as a security tool misses a lot of the features it brings to the table. Further, many of the new second and third generation blockchains have a completely different feature profile from Bitcoin. The technology is changing so fast it’s a bit like thinking of the Internet in terms of the features of email.

I have no doubt that there will be a steady stream of "blockchain doubting" articles like we saw with platforms like the Internet, Public Cloud, and Social Media. It's hard to imagine what is possible before it's been created. Let's try to have some perspective, traditional databases have been around for almost 40 years. Blockchain was conceptually invented in 2009 but really only burst onto the scene in the last couple of years. Give blockchain some space to come into its own before dismissing it to the bandwagon.