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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