With the blockchain hype machine at full throttle, David Birch of Consult Hyperion pleads for some rationality in the reporting and discussions of the shared ledger concept and its associated technologies.
Exciting news arrives from a friend. “Check this out” he tells me, “they’re using the block chain to replace the Pound Sterling / create a land registry in Ruritania / cure cancer” (*delete where applicable) and there’s a URL attached. I click on it. It says that a company has signed a memorandum of understanding to create a working group to examine the possibility of a pilot to use a database that has the "potential seamless integration with blockchain technologies”. I emailed him back, pointing out that my backside has potential seamless integration with blockchain technologies but that doesn’t make it a blockchain.
How many times has this happened over the last few weeks? It’s getting out of control. A client tells me that one of their competitors is using bitcoin to manage some asset or other. I look at the website that she points me to. What it actually says is that the competitor is looking at a “bitcoin-inspired” system (what you or I might term a “database"). Then I go to another meeting where someone says that the blockchain could be a potential solution to a particular problem, but says it in such a way as to drive suspicion that they don’t know what a blockchain is. But of course, because I’m English, I say “that’s an interesting idea”.
It seems to me that in a relatively short time the word blockchain has become detached from its technological roots and from its location in the spectrum of shared ledger implementation options to become one of those almost generic chromewash terms, like “big data” or “cloud” (there is no cloud, […]
