Joining Blockchain — initial expert question set

By Maciej Marut, Krzysztof Bury, Bartosz Dluzen

Simple answer for case mentioned in the subject lines would be: What is your success story in similar organizations?

Unfortunately, if you want to be in blockchain now, you have to do better than that. Most probably no answer you will be given can be used. In all fairness blockchain hype in its current stage does not allow those answers.

So what options we have?

Reading through previous articles, plenty of work has been done so far. We already counted millions we are planning to save. We have built our stakeholder and partner base to work with. We have them identified inside and outside of our organization. Among those that we think highly of as blockchain experts there are some we want to work with. And then the challenge comes. All those people are busy mining cryptocurrencies and spending their large profits on new servers or cooling systems for their data centers. We expect them to do regular work for us for limited amount of money. They are focused on changing the world and making billions that will allow them to avoid this kind of plebeian activity.
The next possible option — large corporations that included our desired buzzwords on their webpages. But guess what — they did not attract those special people either. They hired somebody who was able to present himself on 60 minutes long interview where person interviewing knew nothing about the subject of the work itself.

So, it seems we have to start from scratch. And that might not be the worst thing in the world. The work in front of us will also address a question for next article :How to build successful blockchain team internally.

Getting back to the questions list. Let’s start compiling a simple initial list the way we usually do approach similar challenges.

1. How much does this cost?

• What kind of infrastructure we need?
• How big are the teams?
• What is the skillset we need?
• Is this supportable after all key developers go?
• Do we get benefits over time i.e. can we make a team smaller?
• Mining concept to share the cost — does this work in private blockchains

2. Does this scale?

• Currently publisched charts show increase of cost with the number of transactions — is this true for private blockchain? (https://blockchain.info/pl/charts/cost-per-transaction)
• Cryptocurrency — is this a must?
  If we have to go with cryptocurrency:
  how we will manage interaction with current currency market?
  can we centralize benefits from Fx effects and use them smarter?

3. How we will see transparency

• Around cost structure?
• Transactional — consensus protocols what is this?

4. Risks

• Can we be hacked from outside?
• How about frauds? (read AML article to understand more)
• Are we going to experience exchange rates fluctuations?

Depending on your business and business case you will have much more. Fortunately 75% of those will fit into cost / scale / scope / transparency / risks schema.

At this stage there is no stupid questions so I suggest you ask them all to at least couple of partners you plan to choose from. Take notes and build a table with answers so you can compare together with your stakeholders.

Good Luck!