The missing layer in application architecture

By Dane Sirois

I’ve been thinking a lot about Blockchain over the past year or so and I think one of the biggest hurdles with it in regards to getting enterprise adoption is the fact that there is so much volatility to the cost of entering data. It means that companies cannot effectively budget as their forecasts for even just months away will be wildly inaccurate. Not to mention the ridiculously high transaction fees which makes it unsuitable for most applications.

What Blockchain does well, is that it provides a layer of immutability and trust that was never before possible to the extent that it is now. What we have with today’s systems is often just an illusion of trust. In today’s world, there’s a missing layer in the architecture of our applications where we validate our data past the point of its creation.

There’s a missing layer in the architecture of our applications where we validate our data past the point of its creation.

We are creating more data at a rate that’s even more impressively hard to comprehend, yet we lack a way to reliably validate and verify it. What good is the data in the first place if you can’t fully trust it’s authenticity?

As we have seen time and time again exemplified in these massive data breaches, centralized databases are inherently insecure. It requires too much trust in a singular organization to instill the kind of confidence needed. Data stored in a centralized database is under a constant threat of unauthorized modification. That’s not to say that databases are bad, but more to point out that we are missing a system in which to identify when these unauthorized changes happen, and what data has been changed as a result.

In a lot of ways, data has become one of the world’s most valuable assets. To maintain that value, it’s imperative that we have ways to verify its integrity. I’m of the opinion that technology is only going to allow for more subtle alterations of that data and if we continue without proper integrity checking tactics, the value captured around it will be lost. This is where Blockchain comes in.

Blockchain and cryptocurrency have taken a ton of flack over the past year, and many of the skepticism is rightfully deserved. If you look deeper past the common surface level applications, many of the underlying concepts are actually quite sound. The Factom protocol® (factomprotocol.org) appears to be one of the best innovations positioned to solve the problem of verifying our data. It aims to become sort of like the TCP/IP of data integrity.
It has this concept of a “two token system” which completely removes the need for companies to ever touch cryptocurrency while still inheriting all of the benefits of Blockchain. This is an article written about the “two token system” which dives deeper into the economics around it (https://factomize.com/the-genius-of-the-factom-two-token-system/).

All in all, I think a movement towards a more transparent web is needed. I think our standards of trust as a society are shifting, and both the consumer and corporation are going to be demanding more transparency over their data. Blockchain can help in this regard. A discussion is needed around our current engineering practices to support this evolving requirement in the responsibility of data ownership.