Blockchain - The latest disruptive hype : A different perspective

Every few years, a new concept (be it technology, be it an execution methodology, or a business process, or even a deployment strategy) comes around and everyone in the tech industry gets super excited and wants to be the first one to take it mainstream. 

Having come from a programming background at a grass root level, depicting what and how blockchain works was fairly straight forward. The concept is very good. Like everything else, it is another "option" to consider if there is an absolutely genuine use case to solve a problem.

As of today at the time of this writing, there are extremely very few such ones in the world which cannot be addressed by anything else other than blockchain.

The problem we face is this - Instead of trying to find a solution to fix a particular problem, we tend to find a problem which can be fixed with an available solution. It has become a style statement to say one is doing a lot of research on blockchain these days. Not many of them are technical enough to understand what does that mean. It is one of the modern flashing hobby to do something on blockchain and brag about it. It is a new buzz word which right from the CTO to a programmer are excited about it and I think they are all quite valid. The issue comes when we overdo it.

The same sort of thing happened multiple times in the past. Not all of them were for a specific technology though. A few of them were concepts. In short all of them were so called "disruptive trends".

I remember in the early 2000s, every other IT person I met used to be a "DOT COM consultant". Their job was to sell or guide start ups to go the .dot com way. Then came a burst to show us all the mirror of reality. The world wasn’t ready for digital and connected experience at that time. Now is the time for it and clearly we can see the success of it.

Then there was an era of Open source. Soon, every software, people wanted to build wanted to be open source and the image that was portrayed was, there is no alternative to open source. Then the extremism eventually faded and the industry has now struck the right balance of what can and needs to be open source and what is best to be a packaged or a product solution.

The same happened some time ago with Document based DB / NoSQL. Suddenly when versions of document DB started to go around, people started to believe, RDBMS is dead and it was a big mistake that it even existed. Soon quite a few of them wanted to include NoSQL in everything they do rather than thinking about the right use case, purely because they perceived it as the trend.

Then came Agile. For a few agile fanatics, every problem in the world can be fixed by Agile. I am clear in my mind, AGILE is a solution to a problem which shouldn’t have existed in the first place. 
More on this in my next blog :-)

The point here is not to demean any of these trends. They are fantastic trend changing technologies and are intended to stay. Same is with Blockchain. It is a fantastic concept and a breakthrough technology. But my worry is with the fact that we tend to take these to the extremes.

These are tools (not in literal sense, in some cases, yes) for the architects, business analysts and organisations to consider when trying to fix a business problem. The fundamental point here is - what is the business problem? If the business problem can be resolved by a simple spreadsheet, let's do it. There is no need to build an application to do that. It is a good thing to know (like any other technologies) and keep it in our back pocket to be used when the right scenario arises to put to use. There is never a one size fits all.

I am an architect by profession. Been one for more than a decade, and prior to that more than a decade long of core application and system development as a programmer. Blockchain is a superb invention and a beautiful concept and I am sure I would like to get my hands dirty on it too.  

I am fairly sure, I may not be the only one with this view. I found a few of such articles on the web and providing it here for some additional reading :
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/02/07/why-hype-is-killing-blockchain-technology/
https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/why-blockchain-hype-must-end
https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-companies-dropping-the-term-blockchain-due-to-hype-around-technology
(There are quite a few more, just Google it, to read more)

I suspect I am going to end up ruffling some feathers and I expect quite a few reading this, who advocate Blockchain for everything will try and prove me wrong and so say the least find me completely ignorant on the subject :-).

All I would like to tell them is to look for both side of the coin and wait for the right commodity to spend it. My intention is to suggest them to think and wait for the right use case rather than trying to use it everywhere. There are a few genuine use cases currently and there will be more that will land in the future. Till then, I would hesitate to call it really disruptive.

Disclaimer: All the views expressed here are solely personal views of the author and does not reflect in any way whatsoever the company the author is associated with. The matter expressed here is AS IS with NO WARRANTY explicit or implied.