The Four Quadrant Methodology : Is Blockchain the solution your problem needs ?
Blockchain is all the rage at the moment. Anyone who is anyone wants to implement their solution with the latest la deeda blockchain in vogue.
Blockchains have trust built-in into the platform. It brings efficiency by eliminating third parties and providing a common view of data to all participants. Its like a notebook that cannot be erased/torn or destroyed. However, blockchain is not a proper fitment for every problem. In fact it can at times be detrimental to the overall solution for the problem.
Here, I will give you a four quadrant methodology to determine if your problem warrants a solution in the blockchain space.
Quadrant 1 : Trust
For the problem statement answer the following questions with a yes or a no :
- Does your application have multiple parties that are required to trust each other’s data ?
- Is there a lot of information sharing happening within the participants of your system ?
- Does your system have multiple third party systems for data capture and tracking ?
If the answer to more than one question is yes, then you can move on to the next quadrant.
Quadrant 2 : Distributed
For the problem statement answer the following questions with a yes or a no :
- Is your system a multi-node system ?
- Does your system have multiple participants doing similar functions with a data set that is similar to each other ?
If the answer to any question is yes, then you can move on to the next quadrant.
Quadrant 3 : Data Intensive
For the problem statements answer the following questions with a yes or a no. Please consider the result of this quadrant carefully, as this may effectively decide if Blockchain is a fit.
- Does your system capture a lot of data and information ?
- Does your system need to store and refer to a lot of data ?
- Does your system do a lot of analysis on the collected data ?
If the answer to any of the questions is yes, then blockchain is not the choice of platform for the problem. Some of the reasons are —
- Blockchains cannot store large amount of data as the data is stored as a hash on the chain
- It is very expensive to store a lot of data on chain
- It is not very efficient to retrieve large amounts of data
Quadrant 4 : Realtime
If your system requires realtime update and processing of data where it is important for transaction time to be predictable and very small, then blockchain is not the platform to consider. Blocks are submitted for inclusion onto the chain, and the time of inclusion and thereby finality of the transaction is not something that is predictable or realtime.
This is my analogy and viewpoint that is an attempt to simplify the question of whether blockchain may work for your problem statement or not as the case may be. There are of course many more considerations for further choice of blockchain, topology which is a topic for my next post.
Let me know if this was helpful in the comments! :)
