Joe, the Blockchain Hype Cowboy

Keep your daughters inside! Blockchain Hype Cowboy Joe is in town. He is sexy and persuasive, however he is relentless and greedy as well. Your daughters are in real danger and the reputation of blockchain technology is at stake.

Henk van Cann
Jan 10, 2017 · 7 min read

Joe: “Yes, haha, but I don’t care, if they want blockchain, I sell them blockchain”

….is in town to sell stuff you won’t need

The metaphor of Joe and your daughters applies respectively to the self-appointed blockchain-consultant and his naïve and/or ignorant customers.

A few days ago we had a Joe (not his real name) over for a presentation on a meetup that focusses on the technical aspects of one of the main public blockchains that we are proud to have among us. You see: I’d like to preserve Joe’s anonymity. Only insiders that visited this particular meetup could recognize Joe, because they might have seen me around too.

Before it gets too abstract: the main intent of this blogpost is to provide the reader with a few simple measures to teach wrongdoers the right way to handle customers in general with the do’s and don’ts, strengths and weaknesses of blockchain technology for the customer’s purposes. But please hold on, first I have to explain why we should stop Joe going after our precious daughters. And stress that I do not intend to fuel a fanboys war over private - versus public blockchains. Both tribes are under siege here. Lastly I have a confession to make….

So where was I? Ah, yes: The very meetup I mentioned above I realised that not only in this particular city in the Netherlands there’s some cowboys around, but instead there are Hype Cowboys everywhere in the world! Always have been.

In the past we had Internet Cowboys, Web Cowboys, Artificial Intelligence Cowboys and now we are seeing Blockchain Cowboys doing their best to lure customers into projects and products they don’t need, sell them solutions they already have and most importantly: they are (unintentionally?) forcing customers into a sure deception in the near future.

Two examples of Joe’s ways.

Joe explains a complex private blockchain solution for a seemingly very basic federated authentication system. A visitor in the room can’t stand it any longer and is so friendly to wrap his disdain in a question: ‘We have seen this happen in the Artificial Intelligence arena fifteen years ago’ the visitor mentions to the self-confident speaker, ‘and it has been only since a few years that people trust to invest in AI again, because of so many bad review, lost investments, and wasted time. Sheer deception all over the place. Why are you going down the same path?’. (Ouch, you could hear a pin drop)

However Hype Cowboy Joe is far from impressed by this wake-up call and answers: “I know, I know, all they need is a distributed system, but hey!.., come on, they want a blockchain!…”

How destructive this behaviour is, can be guessed easily. Customers want suitable solutions to their problems and not a solution that they have heard of. Or Joe here has to channel and filter the customer’s thoughts and enthusiasm about blockchain in an unbiased manner. None of that. Just because someone is selling blockchain services, he directs a customer into a pod and makes him or her spend money and makes believe that blockchain is the optimal innovative solution to this new problem. Neither the problem is new, nor is a blockchain the answer.

My appeal to the reader: stop Blockchain Hype Cowboy Joe whenever you can. Because apart from the ‘consultant/expert’ himself the newly invented blockchain technology, momentarily in its infancy, will get a bad name.

Joe’s second move: “I asked the customer what they did not like about public blockchains. And many of them do not like to have their data out on the streets. So that is where private blockchains comfortably come in; and moreover the private ones are faster and can be protected better.”

We can’t believe this blockchain consultant sold this crap to the customer, can we?

Firstly, Public Blockchain are open, open source, freely accessible, immutable etc, however perfectly capable of hiding information. In fact they are best at dealing with cryptographic proofs of (pointers to) data instead of storing the naked data itself.
Any blockchain consultant should know these features and tell customers of the real strengths and weaknesses of the technology.

another ongoing shame of human beings: caging birds

Secondly, a private blockchain is at its best a solution to optimize processes that we already know of. It comes not even close to the innovative power of distributed consensus and Satoshi’s Proof of Work invention that solved the Byzantine Generals Problem: a public blockchain.
In historical perspective (from 2009) a private blockchain is a decentralised trust machine brought back under central power.

It is like locking up a bird in a cage: it has wings, it will live, it might sing, but it won’t fly.

Thirdly and lastly: Considered at face value private blockchains will be useful though. For example for federated identity solutions, but there are many more good applications feasible. And private solution of this new technology might serve people better in the beginning, because they more smoothly tend to blend with current beliefs and the way we live, work, transact — and store our valuables. In the end the car replaced the horse, the internet swallowed the voice call infrastructure and so will public blockchains be the internet of money and value and serve our self-sovereigned identity in the next decades, and they will also gradually replace the trust and power in centralised organisations that we need to have nowadays.

In conclusion: its technique might be new (sparked off from the bitcoin creation), the problem private blockchains can solve have been there for decades and have been solved for decades by other means. We have a Dutch idiom directly translated saying: ‘So there is nothing new under the sun!’ And the question should really be, over and over again (because people in love with money or busy hyping blockchain are hard-of-hearing): “why don’t you use a database?”.
Peter Todd, a Bitcoin core developer has this great one-liner: “If you are not able to draw a Merkle tree to explain the merits of your solution, take a database.” I reckon our blockchain consultant (Cowboy Joe) at hand wasn’t even able to reproduce what a Merkle tree really features, let alone him imaginary translating a solution for a problem into a Merkle tree.

Do we need to understand Merkle trees and other cryptographic icons to be able to contain the effects of cowboys around? Do we really need in-depth knowledge to safeguard our dear customers (analogy: daughters)? No, not at all! So here my take-away.

Finally some tools to counterfeit Blockchain Hype Cowboys:

  1. Ask them “why don’t you use a database?”. Keep asking them “why don’t you use a database”. Because in at least nine out of ten cases the solution to a new plan or a new problem is not a blockchain.
  2. Urge consultants that appear to be fanboys to not talk rubbish and to thoroughly understand public blockchains first. It is not about money, they are about freedom. A wallet is not a wallet, it is a bunch of virtual keys. A crypto-coin is not about coins, it’s Unspent Transaction Outputs, and so on. The true value & meaning of public chains differs totally from the value of privatised blockchain ( <- use a database instead).
  3. Help customers to understand that blockchain technology is a vast playing field of expertise and opportunities. And that they should become knowledgeable to some extend about the distinctive type of blockchains to responsibly preserve their investment in time and money. The best way to keep Joe away from daughters, is the daughters themselves slapping Joe in the face when he is making indecent proposals.

However we do agree with Joe that playing around with customers and teach them about blockchain is necessary. And of course they need time to overcome their fears and shyness for new kids in town like blockchains. So we don’t oppose private blockchains, we just oppose to people selling private blockchains

as if they were better than public blockchains
as a good alternative to databases (because they are lousy at that job)
as a swiss knife to all your problems

…because customers will eventually track Blockchain Hype Cowboy Joe down as being a conman and ‘we’ are in the line of fire.

Confession

I promised to make a confession: I did not feel like correcting our presenter ‘Joe’ right on the spot. The reason I think is that I just did not know where to start. It had been so totally off track where he was so self-confidently going at in his presentation, that there were no signs that he might be able to self-criticise his approach of customers; at least not that night. Sorry Joe.

Colophon:
Picture Cowboy Joe — Mobilism.org
Alan Turing Quote — ‘Quotes About Artificial Intelligence’
Bird in cage — GettyImages / AsiaImages
Photo line of fire Baseball — Reuters

Happy Blockchains

Digital ‘me’: pro’s and con’s, do’s and don’ts, hype and de-hype of the invention Blockchain in the context of e-Identity. Normal human language (if possible :-) ), please!!

Henk van Cann

Written by

Open Public Blockchain tech, Bitcoin, Self Sov Identity, #BlockDAM Amsterdam, husband, father, musician; else?: open source minded, trainer

Happy Blockchains

Digital ‘me’: pro’s and con’s, do’s and don’ts, hype and de-hype of the invention Blockchain in the context of e-Identity. Normal human language (if possible :-) ), please!!

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