Blockchain Disadvantages-Ledger Technology Limitations


Blockchain has become a movement now, maybe even a revolution. Blockchain evangelists would make you believe that it is the panacea. Since advancement in the technology of Blockchain has been progressive since 2009, we’ve come a long way even though we are still in the infancy. Along the journey we have rendezvoused with the imperfections Blockchain comes with.
There are treacherous passes in any technological revolution.
Some people in the blockchain industry have pointed out that blockchain has become overhyped, when, in reality, the technology has limitations and is inappropriate for many digital interactions.
But through research and development, success and failure, and trial and error, we've learned the current issues and limitations of blockchains.
Complexity
Blockchain technology involves an entirely new vocabulary.It has made cryptography more mainstream, but the highly specialized industry is chock-full of jargon. Thankfully, there are several efforts at providing glossaries and indexes that are thorough and easy to understand.
Network size
Blockchains (like all distributed systems) are not so much resistant to bad actors as they are 'antifragile' – that is, they respond to attacks and grow stronger.
This requires a large network of users, however. If a blockchain is not a robust network with a widely distributed grid of nodes, it becomes more difficult to reap the full benefit.
There is some discussion and debate about whether this a fatal flaw for some permissioned blockchain projects.
Transaction costs, network speed
Bitcoin currently has notable transaction costs after being touted as 'near free' for the first few years of its existence.
As of late 2016, it can only process about seven transactions per second, and each transaction costs about $0.20 and can only store 80 bytes of data.
There's also the politically charged aspect of using the bitcoin blockchain, not for transactions, but as a store of information. This is the question of ''bloating' and is often frowned upon because it forces miners to perpetually reprocess and rerecord the information.
Human error
If a blockchain is used as a database, the information going into the database needs to be of high quality. The data stored on a blockchain is not inherently trustworthy, so events need to be recorded accurately in the first place.
The phrase 'garbage in, garbage out' holds true in a blockchain system of record, just as with a centralized database.
Unavoidable security flaw
There is one notable security flaw in bitcoin and other blockchains: if more than half of the computers working as nodes to service the network tell a lie, the lie will become the truth. This is called a '51% attack' and was highlighted by Satoshi Nakamoto when he launched bitcoin.
For this reason, bitcoin mining pools are monitored closely by the community, ensuring no one unknowingly gains such network influence.
Politics
Because blockchain protocols offer an opportunity to digitize governance models, and because miners are essentially forming another type of incentivized governance model, there have been ample opportunities for public disagreements between different community sectors.
These disagreements are a notable feature of the blockchain industry and are expressed most clearly around the question or event of 'forking' a blockchain, a process that involves updating the blockchain protocol when a majority of a blockchain's users have agreed to it.
These debates can be very technical, and sometimes heated, but are informative for those interested in the mixture of democracy, consensus and new opportunities for governance experimentation that blockchain technology is opening up.
PERFORMANCE
Because of the nature of blockchains, it will always be slower than centralized databases. When a transaction is being processed, a blockchain has to do all the same things just like a regular database does, but it carries three additional burdens as well:
Signature verification
Every blockchain transaction must be digitally signed using a public-private cryptography scheme such as ECDSA. This is necessary because transactions propagate between nodes in a peer-to-peer fashion, so their source cannot otherwise be proven. The generation and verification of these signatures is computationally complex, and constitutes the primary bottleneck in products like ours. By contrast, in centralized databases, once a connection has been established, there is no need to individually verify every request that comes over it.
Consensus mechanisms
In a distributed database such as a blockchain, effort must be expended in ensuring that nodes in the network reach consensus. Depending on the consensus mechanism used, this might involve significant back-and-forth communication and/or dealing with forks and their consequent rollbacks. While it’s true that centralized databases must also contend with conflicting and aborted transactions, these are far less likely where transactions are queued and processed in a single location.
 Redundancy
This isn’t about the performance of an individual node, but the total amount of computation that a blockchain requires. Whereas centralized databases process transactions once (or twice), in a blockchain they must be processed independently by every node in the network. So lots more work is being done for the same end result.

 
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