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Tackling Social Negativity: Realistic Expectations for Blockchain Projects

by Benjamin HallJanuary 11th, 2019

Too Long; Didn't Read

In 2018 alone we saw $7,723,025,063 USD raised on behalf of 1252 ICO projects, not to mention a further $6,226,689,449 USD in 2017. These sums of money are significant and are indications at just how rampant the investment from institutional and everyday individuals like you and I has been.

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In 2018 alone we saw $7,723,025,063 USD raised on behalf of 1252 ICO projects, not to mention a further $6,226,689,449 USD in 2017. These sums of money are significant and are indications at just how rampant the investment from institutional and everyday individuals like you and I has been.

These figures don’t take into account already launched protocols and projects which are many years into development, majority with live Mainnet and upgrade road maps they are wishing to achieve. The most well known of these is Bitcoin and Ethereum, both of which have had “contentious” upgrades or forks in the past 12 months as the very nature of decentralised projects is hit by divine human intervention.

Both these projects are currently heavily scrutinised by the community, not because individuals want their ICO funds to go 10x but the ones I want to discuss are because they are “waiting”. This is where I have felt it is necessary to write this article in response to the over emotional, and undereducated folk who continually blast social channels with unwarranted gripes of failure because according to them the project teams haven't delivered on promises.

Give us an Example!

The two best examples is;

Lightning Network for Bitcoin (LN) and
Serenity for Ethereum

These two projects are HUGE. They are significant changes to the overall ecosystem, in the case of LN, payment scalability on Layer 2, and in that of Ethereum — a whole new world computer, new Virtual Machine, Cross Shard Communication and much much more, a simply mammoth task. Improvements which are still unsolved in such decentralised distributed computing environments and are requiring significant research.

It is at this point I must be clear, I am not here to argue with one track maximalists whether the LN follows Satoshi’s Vision. That’s a dead end philosophical argument so save it for your Twitter followers.

These two examples perfectly iterate the nature of how social keyboard warriors are unable to comprehend the sheer size, scale and requirements of such changes. It is this emotional attachment to projects which normally is great, it drives adoption, they are the advocates at Sunday BBQ’s spreading the good word of Bitcoin. However as they sit scrolling the threads of twitter in their own time, they strike!

“It’s an absolute failure, you promised this months ago. Bitcoin is dead. “ — Anonymous Angry Twitter Man

Any skilled ICT worked including developers, project managers, analyst or testers know how shocking the success rate of ICT projects are. You out there may not, but let me give you some cold hard truths. Research by the Standish Group for the Chaos Report found only 29% of IT projects were successful.

29% of IT projects were successful!

Let that sink in, these are development teams of established companies who have:

Elicited Requirements
Co-located Development Teams
Adequate Resourcing and availability in such
Funding
Established Change Management and SDLC processes

…and still can’t deliver a successful ICT project, that is fit for purpose, even when built on Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software aka prebuilt software you simply “configure” — which is meant to remove heavy lifting.

Let alone trying to solve the distributed computing dilemmas of Bitcoin & Ethereum who have:

Disparate groups not always working to the same goal
Unbroken ground on the technology front
Unclear requirements with no lessons learned
Shifting levels of funding
Non centralised computing platforms

It’s truly incredible the lack of understanding that is exhibited from these social warriors as they tap away with their ego intact hiding behind a cat profile picture. A common outage which causes up roar is when Banking Services go down for scheduled maintenance. These are teams with perfect DevOps processes, load balanced UI’s to allow multi instance cut overs, and all the money at their disposal.

Do you think they want to be down?
Do you think they just did it on purpose to peeve you off?

NO, they do it to protect the integrity of the data, and put Gateway blocks on to ensure no one is affected by such. You wouldn’t understand that though if you didn’t work in IT and been part of releasing software into production.

Well I have, hundreds of times, for software that could affect 20+ Million people and can confidently say: If you are akin to Angry Twitter Man aka Keyboard Warrior you need to be patient.

Unbroken Ground

These teams are fighting the good fight, and are essentially a social experiment in how we can as human beings work together across expansive distances to deliver software that will simply REVOLUTIONISE current banking and business processes. Bringing about financial inclusion, new financial tooling and overall a new way of working.

These teams are spending years needing to research every element from Micro and Macro Economic factors to Network Topologies and how to improve broadcast networks. It is a slow race and some understanding is required that it won't always go to plan. However it is always better to not force something to production, case and point: Ethereum Constantinople Issues

How Can Teams Improve

In knowing majority of the populous has zero idea about how hard it is to build software normally, let alone of this scale I go back to basic fundamentals which we need to see more of:

Education
Realistic Timelines
Continued Communication

Project teams need to get better at educating the masses to allow them to understand. This is crucial to all aspects of mass adoption. A saying I have always stuck to in my career as an IT Analyst is

“Engage Early, Engage Often” — Anonymous

This is a crucial failing element in every single IT project known to man, you can be funded to the nines, and have the best guys in the business but if you don't COMMUNICATE. You will fail.