The Push and Pull of Blockchain

Similar to almost everything in this world, blockchain has its pros and cons. It is undeniable that blockchains have the potential to revolutionize the way we conduct business, but they are far from a perfect solution. However, it is not an accident as to why a complex database mechanism is a household name, the advantages of blockchain are powerful. Let’s dive into some of the factors that make blockchain technology the seesaw of tomorrow’s tech wave.

A major benefit of blockchain is its transparency. Transactions on a blockchain are public and can be easily verified. This creates high level trust and accountability, which can be applied to a multitude of industries where trust is a concern. As one end of the seesaw goes up, the other side must come down. The downside of this advantage is the complexity of which the data is organized in the blocks. This creates challenges for most people to actually use and implement. The current solution requires a technological wealth of knowledge as well as multiple platforms and tabs to dig up the data. It would be a game changer if there was a no code translator to help bridge the gap between the encrypted blocks to useful data in one interface that most people can comprehend.

Blockchains can greatly increase efficiency by eliminating intermediaries and automating streamline processes. This allows for fast and cheap transactions as there is no money needed to verify the request and transactions can come from and reach anywhere in the world that has internet. Nevertheless, the scalability of blockchains can be questioned as so many people are accessing it at once to post transactions, listen for events, and update data. In virtually every use case, users go to the blockchain to observe a small fraction that they are interested in. Here is where the magic is. The scalability issue disappears if they’re able to capture the data that they’re there for and it is brought to a local database, API or wherever they want while the on-chain data is updated in real time. This would super charge the speed of their on-chain data and reduce the scalability concerns for everyone on the blockchain network.

The immutability of data on the blockchain is certainly an advantage. Blocks are difficult to change or tamper with. This makes it a secure way to store important information and helps prevent fraud. A famous saying, no good deed goes unpunished relates to this give and take situation. Blockchains do help with fraud, but they can also help to commit crimes such as money laundering, dark web transactions, and other scandalous events as the information is encrypted and wallet addresses are anonymous. You guessed it, another solution on the way. If there was a way to observe all of a wallet’s transactions or where specific tokens have been in a digestible way that users can then flag sketchy wallets or suspicious contracts to easily identify “the bad guys”.

As blockchain technology continues to mature and the infrastructure progressively builds these challenges will eventually be a thing of the past. In other words, over time the push of blockchain advancement will overpower the pull of the present-day issues.