2019-03-21
Enterprise Ethereum - 4 Myths debunked
Ethereum is often coined unsuitable for banks and financial insitutions because of the lack of privacy. "Banks will never go public with their data, it's simply not possible, regulatory issues, can't do" - you might have heard or even said something like this a lot of times.
Privacy, indeed, is one of the many concerns larger corporations have when it comes to Blockchain Technologies, not just Ethereum. But isn't Blockchain here to solve many of the data governance, privacy and trust issues?
This video will clarify the four biggest myths of why Ethereum can't be used in an Enterprise environment and why it's a good idea to add Ethereum into your portolio of Enterprise blockchain solutions.
Reason number one: All data on Ethereum is always public. WRONG! The Ethereum-Main Net is public, but the Ethereum protocol can be used across permissioned consortium or private networks with different consensus algorithms, just the same way other distributed ledger technologies like Hyperledger or Corda can be used. This way your data stays exactly where you want it to be.
Reason number two: It has not enough throughput and doesn't scale well and is therefore not suitable for Enterprise environments. WRONG! When used within a corporations consortium network then the consensus algorithm can be different to the proof of work algorithm used in public networks. With the right consensus algorithm, without sacrificing security and trust in the network, it's possible to achieve up to tens of thousands of transactions per second.
Resaon number three: It not backwards compatible, too many updates. Also untrue. The very first smart contracts deployed on the blockchain are still running and working just fine. There is a finite set of instructions on the EVM. Yes, Solidity, the programming language evolves rapidely. Yes, the tooling evolves. Yes, the protocol gets upgrades from time to time too, but nothing so far broke any backwards compatibility.
Reason number four: It's inefficient by design. Ethereum on the main-net need to scale across thousands and thousands of nodes without breaking any of its Blockchain-promises: having trustless, peer to peer transactions. This happens across the planet, overcoming low-level and high-level issues, such as package loss or malicious actors modifying block-data. It's not inefficient by design, but considering all factors of a "world computer" it becomes clear that the public network in it's current version cannot be any more efficient. This is why next versions will include sharding etc - but all of this doesn't concern you if you are not running tens of thousands of nodes in a private or consortium network.
And lastly, I believe the biggest benefit of using Ethereum in a corporate envrionment is the amount of tooling and libraries available. The same tooling meant for Business to Consumer or even Consumer to Consumer interaction can be used in Busienss to Business relationships. There is no need to re-invent the wheel and it can be a considerable time-saver when implementing solutions for supply-chains, financial insitutions or within governments.