[English translation] Blockchain technology, five weaknesses

I wouldn’t say I’m very knowledgeable about this, or rather, I’m mostly not familiar with technical details, but there was an article that looked at blockchain from the perspective of its weaknesses and seemed easy to understand for beginners.

Let’s take a look in Japanese right away.

Blockchain technology, five weaknesses

As a society, there are many benefits to be gained from blockchain technology. However, I am concerned that, dazzled by the hype around blockchain, we may be forgetting the advantages of traditional centralized authentication systems.

For example, we can verify educational certificates on the blockchain, but there is room for debate about whether we should want to do so. Let’s look at several reasons why we should combine centralized and decentralized authentication systems.

#1 Customers are not protected on the blockchain.

Blockchain technology functions as a push-based payment system. In other words, the individual has control over the assets they want to be authenticated on the blockchain.

Assets include, for example, cryptocurrencies, certificate authentication, land rights, etc. The problem with this system is that if some issue arises after a transaction has been confirmed on the blockchain, the only way to reverse the transaction is to obtain consent from the involved parties. However, with a centralized system like a bank, even after processing is complete, you can take appropriate steps to discuss the transaction.

Among the transaction technologies that operate on the blockchain, some adopt an arbitrator system to solve this problem. One example is OpenBazaar’s peer-to-peer network. In that system, trades occur between two parties and a single fair arbitrator. For more details on this system, please see the multi-signature transaction technology (English/Japanese).