Don’t All Jump on the Blockchain Bandwagon at Once

With the recent rise in popularity and price of Bitcoin more and more people are becoming aware of decentralised services, the blockchain and its use cases. Everyday I see a new post for a service claiming to be the ‘blockchain for the X industry’. Its stretching from the dental industry to app to record sexual consent all on the blockchain! However, before we throw all of our worldly possessions, notably your personal data, onto the blockchain we should be looking closely how your data is really secured.

Put simply a blockchain is decentralised digital ledger and it has been a revolutionary piece of technology. The blockchain is an excellent new way to store and secure transactional data and a radical new approach to ledgers but just because everyone is desperate to jump on the Bitcoin train does not mean that blockchains are the solutions to all of life’s problems. Blockchain are terrible mass storage containers; this leads organisations to store a data identifier on the blockchain and store the data somewhere else.

One of the main advantages noted by blockchain enthusiasts is the fact that once on the blockchain the information cannot be altered. However, as the actual data is stored in an another location a hacker could alter or delete the information and although the blockchain hash could identify that a change had been made there is no way to identify what had been changed or recover the originals.

We should be protecting the data not the pointer to it!

Blockchains are fantastic in specific use cases, and as the technology matures we should continue to work on improving it. The typewriter revolutionised writing speed but the word processor was a far superior upgrade. Could the autonomous data network be the word processor to the blockchain world?

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