Lessons from Blockchain Week NY: It’s Hard to Build a Good Decentralized Protocol
Our woman in the United States, Business Development Executive Liesl Eischholz, reports back on a harsh truth that the blockchain community is facing.
When I rediscovered Bitcoin in 2016, I was elated to find copious news articles and think pieces claiming that the novel internet money I’d played around with as a teenager many years previously was now posed to stamp out inequality, quell privacy concerns, and generally solve all manner of global crises. It felt as though the more equitable world I’d dreamed of co-creating was just around the corner, and everyone from libertarians to corporates to hippies could be a part of the movement.
I still believe blockchain will solve these problems — but on a radically different timeline from the one I think we all imagined. It was at New York Blockchain Week that I realised this sentiment has been adopted by the core blockchain community.
Don’t get me wrong — we’re making incredible progress, and these goals are still well within our reach. But after all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
The Evolution of “Blockchain Hype”
In 2016 it seemed like we were just days away from solving world hunger and bringing down the financial system that has dominated for over a century. There’s still a relentless stream of new enthusiasts jumping on the bandwagon, but few people with gravitas in the blockchain space are still promising that achieving the lofty, world-changing, humanitarian goals of the past few years will be simple.
2017’s influx of money has seen dot-com-esque attempts at money-grabbing outnumber well designed use cases. But there is a stark and boldening line between the opportunists and the dedicated foot soldiers of the decentralization movement. The typical blockchain hype has been continually escalated by the former, but the latter appear to be growing ever more patient; creating real world-changing use cases will take time.
From Hype to Hard Work
This was particularly apparent early on during Blockchain Week at Ethereal Summit; peers who, in the past, have spouted revolutionary rhetoric are now starting to revise their timelines. To my mind, this move from hype to hard work within the core blockchain community can be attributed to the community’s acceptance of one simple truth:
It’s hard to build a good decentralized protocol.
This may seem like an obvious statement, but it’s taken the community a long time to fully appreciate this fact.
Remember when even serious blockchain people thought that Bitcoin was just a step away from reinventing our entire financial system? Remember when we thought Casper would be running on Ethereum by late 2016? Even Ethereum’s core team mistakenly thought that the move to proof-of-stake would be so easy and seamless that there was incentive enough to implement a difficulty bomb (which, incidentally, was quietly delayed with the Homestead hard fork).
But in the past 6 months, I haven’t heard anyone question the timeline on Casper. People seem to have stopped probing so incessantly for exact details on the DFINITY launch date. Filecoin investors appear nonchalant when faced with a total absence of updates this year. Ultimately, the community seems to have accepted that building a truly robust decentralized protocol is a slow, hard process; one they are willing to wait for.
At Centrality, we’re on our own journey towards accepting this fact as we continue build our native blockchain and cross-chain protocol, Plug — which has been in development for almost half a decade.
Plug aims to fix many of the security and scaling issues that have plagued cryptocurrency-based blockchain technologies, such as insecure language design, reliance on a globally-shared blockchain, and contentious governance problems.
To read about our philosophy and features, check out our whitepaper. For more technical info, read our technical documentation.
