![\"Iqbal](\"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/Iqbal-V.-Gandham-managing-director-of-eToro.jpg\")
Iqbal V. Gandham, managing director of eToro<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cSo, we didn\u2019t really need a \u201cuse case\u201d for the internet or go as far as to question why it existed. We never once asked: Will the internet scale? We didn\u2019t complain that we couldn\u2019t send a movie over it or that it was too slow at delivering information we needed. Even so, no one suggested that we should switch it off and go home. Instead, we suffered countless hours of failed connection attempts just because we could and because \u2014 some of us \u2014 had no social life. Fast forward this internet evolution and, eventually, we arrive at e-commerce. Contrary to the way it may seem now, e-commerce arrived slowly but surely. We didn\u2019t need to \u201cgo online.\u201d Instead, we just ended up always online. We started to shop. We started to buy and sell. Before we knew it, we had a mass-market use case.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added:<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, the key here is: How does this evolutionary path relate to blockchain and crypto<\/a>? In crypto, we first need the crypto. With the internet, we needed the connection. In order to access or acquire this crypto, we need the exchanges to sell it to us<\/a>, which is similar to the ISPs in the internet example. These exchanges will continue to grow, and like ISPs, they too will eventually become commoditized. Like with internet access, the first stage of blockchain is now done. The second wave, similar to broadband, is coming.\u201d<\/p>\n What Gandham means is that blockchain is following a similar evolution trajectory to that of the internet, and it is unfair to completely downplay its disruptive capacity based on its current inability to scale effectively. However, this does not mean that the criticisms leveled against the technology are invalid. All new technologies attract arguments for and against their viability. For instance, let us use AI and the recurring controversies surrounding the transparency of the decision-making processes of algorithms as a case study. Some are of the notion that it is imperative to identify ways to audit and introduce ethics to the analytics processes of AI systems. Similar arguments have emerged in the budding blockchain industry, especially now that enterprises have begun to find ways to introduce blockchain technology to existing infrastructures.<\/p>\n One of blockchain\u2019s biggest hits is its role in the creation of cryptocurrency<\/a>. Up until now, bitcoin remains blockchain\u2019s most successful app, and this will likely remain the status quo as long as developers and organizations are yet to register a breakthrough in their quest for establishing interoperability. As such, some believe that blockchain is too cumbersome to power other technologies apart from crypto networks. There is no denying blockchain\u2019s potential as an enabler of financial systems such that traditional organizations are intensifying their efforts to create variations of blockchain-based digital assets. Benedict Chan, Chief technical officer of BitGo, reiterates<\/a> this sentiment when he acknowledged the impressive capabilities of blockchain in the financial sector. He stated:<\/p>\n Benedict Chan, Chief technical officer of BitGo<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cWhile traditional finance payment rails are efficient at providing financial services within local regions to some individuals, blockchain technology is able to make financial services available to every person with access to the internet. There are now many more individuals than before in developing countries (from India to Indonesia) that have access to an account offering exposure to the movement of USD, commodities, and other financial products.\u201d<\/p>\n Furthermore, a recent survey by auditing giant Deloitte highlights a significant increase in the number of executives who are actively developing blockchain-enabled projects. The research, which surveyed senior executives and entrepreneurs across 14 nations, discovered<\/a> a 16% rise in the number of organizations embarking on deploying blockchain systems. While responding to this report, John Wu, the president of AVA Labs, described<\/a> the growth as an indicator of the intensified adoption of blockchain and digital assets. He said:<\/p>\n John Wu, the president of AVA Labs<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cInstitutions and individuals need to be best equipped to manage financial risks, protect investments, and even grow our assets when the next crisis hits. Widespread adoption of blockchain technology is a significant stepping stone in building a new system robust enough to cope with the challenges that lie ahead, and will reward innovators that take action today. This dramatic and rapid evolution of market structure toward decentralization is rapidly leaving the \u2018ifs,\u2019 and becoming a \u2018when.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Marta Piekarska-Geater, the director of ecosystem for Hyperledger, expressed similar views when she described blockchain\u2019s broad application as a reason why it has enjoyed mainstream acceptance. She explained:<\/p>\n Marta Piekarska-Geater, the director of ecosystem for Hyperledger<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cCompanies and organizations are turning to blockchain to trace assets and products, trigger and track transactions and create a layer of trust between parties that don\u2019t necessarily trust each other. Blockchain has been proven valuable for a range of use cases, including cross-industry collaboration and consortiums, provenance tracking, managing digital identities in new ways that actually increase privacy and enabling new models for digital financial transactions.\u201d<\/p>\n Notwithstanding, there are doubts that blockchain can produce the same impressive results in other industries. According to a spokesperson of HDR global trading, the parent company of Bitmex, it is hard to utilize blockchain for a majority of non-cryptocurrency uses. The spokesperson asserted:<\/p>\n \u201cDecentralised ledger technology<\/a> such as blockchain requires every node to have a full copy of the database, and to verify every transaction under consensus rules. This is a complicated data structure, which is slow, inefficient, and resource-intensive to process.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond being ineffective in other niches, the hype that brought blockchain to the fore has slowly given way. Now, stakeholders<\/a> are more in tune with the prevailing narratives of blockchain technology and the amount of work required to deliver viable products. Piekarska-Geater described this sudden change in perception as an indicator of maturity across the system and a catalytic drive towards steady growth.<\/p>\n \u201cWe managed to go past the \u2018blockchain will sell anything,\u2019 and now the industry asks \u2018what is the ROI?\u2019 It is not enough to just stick a DLT into your solution to sell your product. And this is a good thing. Initially, the main driver of interest in blockchain solutions was the fact it sold well. Now it is more about the actual business value they bring: the accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n However, she noted that this does not change the fact that blockchain remains in the early stage of development, and it will take a steeper understanding of the technology for it to make meaningful impacts. She asserted:<\/p>\n \u201cInteroperability is definitely on top of everyone\u2019s minds. Another aspect is the limited number of skilled developers. […] With time, we will see more and more students graduating from universities that will be able to join the workforce.\u201d<\/p>\n There is also the issue of ethics and regulatory compliance. A recent publication on Cointelegraph Magazine explored<\/a> the implications of blockchain\u2019s inherent capacity to provide immutable ledgers. In it, the author, Christina Comben, raised valid concerns over immutability and its effect on the very essence of humanity. Comben opined that immutability remains one of the most controversial features of blockchain technology. She wrote:<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve long been living in a world in which history is documented and human brains are wired to have selective memory. However, with the advent of blockchain technology, we now have a tool to record data that (ideally) cannot be edited, tampered with, or removed. Unlike the pages of a book or an entry in a database, data in the blockchain cannot be altered. In effect, records stored on a blockchain are immutable and live forever. The question of data permanence for many, though, isn\u2019t blockchain\u2019s most salient feature.\u201d<\/p>\n Issues raised in this article include the determining factors of the data stored on a blockchain, how true it is, and whether it is ethical or not to have sensitive information on blockchains without the means to delete it. CryptoKitties developer, Arthur Camara, had once detailed<\/a> the frightening outlook of immutability, especially at a technical level. He stated:<\/p>\n CryptoKitties developer, Arthur Camara<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cImmutability, the inability to be edited, is at once the blockchain\u2019s greatest strength and its largest barrier to meaningful adoption. The pressures of immortal code paralyze developers: you can tinker in a test environment forever, but there will always be real-world variables you can\u2019t anticipate. Covering your eyes and hitting launch is no way to make breakthroughs. It\u2019s more likely to produce breakdowns.\u201d<\/p>\n This assertion is even more frightening if we dig into the validity of the truth factor used to describe the data mining capacity of blockchains<\/a>. While using the birth of Ethereum Classic as a case study, Joshua Ellul, Chairman of the Malta Digital Innovation Authority (MDIA) and Director of the Center for Distributed Ledger Technologies at the University of Malta, argued<\/a> that the system that determines data entered into the blockchain and those that are omitted has some flaws. He asserted:<\/p>\n Joshua Ellul, Chairman of the Malta Digital Innovation Authority (MDIA)<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cWhen Ethereum and Ethereum Classic forked, which fork is the real truth, the real Ethereum? The records of that hack are still there<\/a>, it\u2019s more of a correction of history that took place. This raised serious concerns. Really, it\u2019s not the end users that get to decide (at least in this case). Ultimately the decision is dependent upon the node operators. Are they swayed by popular voices? So, it could well be the person with the most popular voice who decides which version of truth is written.\u201d<\/p>\n He added:<\/p>\n \u201cCentralized voices \u2014 even if it was seen as democratic, is it the popular vote that should be defining truth? Is that the right path to be going down? Some people think that the data in a blockchain is the absolute truth, that\u2019s not the case. The data in the blockchain is guaranteed to be as good as its input. It\u2019s the same \u201cgarbage in, garbage out\u201d principle that applies and that\u2019s one thing we need to make sure that we disambiguate.\u201d<\/p>\n Ellul further explained the implications of this framework, noting that it concentrates the power to establish the truth and determine what gets left behind to a selected few.<\/p>\n \u201cSay a country decides they will not accept transactions from a country that they do not want to do business with. Could such actors potentially minimize others from participating? It seems like we\u2019re moving to a reality where the majority of computational power writes history, at least for Proof of Work. For Proof of Stake then perhaps we are moving to a reality where the majority of money holders (crypto holders<\/a>) will be the ones who write the history\u2026 They cannot manipulate what you write or write on behalf of you; but they can choose what goes into the blocks. So, this leads to a problem of selective omission.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, he concluded that this does not necessarily mean that blockchain\u2019s immutability is the problem. On the contrary, it is the human factor that puts this functionality at risk of being abused just as bullying and fraud have become the bane of the internet. Ellul concluded:<\/p>\n \u201cBlockchains are not the problem. Humans are the problem. Blockchain exists whether we like it or not and, at some point, we are going to have to have the debate of whether we really want all that data living forever\u2026 And if not, who is it that gets to write history?\u201d<\/p>\n Closing Thoughts<\/p>\n From what we have learned so far, it is safe to say that knowledge is integral to the growth of the blockchain industry. Likewise, there is always a reason to doubt the viability of new-age technologies. And in the case of blockchain, it all boils down to human factors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Much has been said about the versatility of blockchain infrastructures and how they enable solutions that evade the bottlenecks prevalent in legacy systems. Although this sentiment remains a popular view, experts have begun to see beyond the hype and analyze the real value of implemented blockchain systems. In reality, the more we understand the benefits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1291,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2086,"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions\/2086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What Are the Arguments for And Against Blockchain Technology?<\/h2>\n
![\"Benedict](\"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/Benedict-Chan-Chief-technical-officer-of-BitGo.jpg\")
![\"John](\"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/John-Wu-the-president-of-AVA-Labs.jpg\")
![\"Marta](\"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/Marta-Piekarska-Geater-the-director-of-ecosystem-for-Hyperledger.jpg\")
![\"CryptoKitties](\"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/CryptoKitties-developer-Arthur-Camara.jpeg\")
![\"Joshua](\"https:\/\/cryptolinks.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/Joshua-Ellul-Chairman-of-the-Malta-Digital-Innovation-Authority-MDIA.jpg\")