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Comment by justsaysmthng | Hacker News Reader

I've saved a couple of potential clients months of development time and probably tens of thousand of dollars just by convincing them not to use a blockchain.

So we have this great world changing idea which will transform, reinvent and disrupt ... and it uses a blockchain to keep track of ....

Why the blockchain ? Because ... distributed ... anonymous ...

But you have user accounts on your servers.. your project is centralized by design. Why not save yourself the trouble and use a mysql database ?

People like being involved in things which sound cool and they try to bend reality so that they can find a use for a cool sounding technology.

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Most 'blockchain' proposals I've seen, particularly in civic technology, would be satisfied with a public git repository containing a .csv file, and also generally ignore the social issues around data ownership and quality.

This is a tremendous issue in civic tech. We have spoken with many people in the space (being in govtech, naturally run into each other) and the level of "because it sounds cool" is above the Silicon Valley mean.

There are so many problems in government. A vast majority are not sexy, but if you care about impact the roll up your sleeves.

I think this story illustrates the thinking pretty well http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...

Programmers, hackers, mathematician, often tend to fall into this trap. It was pretty well illustrated by Swift, in Gulliver's travel. When the protagonist arrive in Laputa, the city of mathematician, they take his measurements to make him a suit. But they only take one measure! Because we can compute all other measures through fancy equations... and that's how everyone in Laputa ends up with suits that are not well-adjusted.

The problem is not that the ideas are bad (they are not, IMHO), but the opportunity cost of working on these problems instead of the original one.

Opportunity cost is a huge problem but it seems like an even more basic issue is just the suitability for the underlying problem. The hype around blockchains lead a lot of people to suggest them as alternatives for relational databases or digital signatures, and even if a high-quality, tested, easy to use, well-secured system magically appeared it'd still be an inferior choice for any problem which can be solved with those tools: transactions take orders of magnitude longer to clear and the capacity limit is orders of magnitude smaller, customer service and fraud are hard problems rather than routine operations, etc.

Even if the opportunity cost was zero, the choice wouldn't make sense unless you had a problem which cannot be solved well with mature tools.

> but it seems like an even more basic issue is just the suitability for the underlying problem.

Using unsuitable tools instead of working ones is also a kind of opportunity cost.

They're definitely related problems — I just find it fascinating how often enthusiasm leads people to completely downplay this category of problem, often while spending non-trivial amounts of energy trying to deal with them

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