"I did this, I did that" - But what did you learn?

 This is a bit of a pet peeve: very often I encounter situations where upon asking of experience around certain topics people answer "I was part of this project where they used tech X, did things in Y way".

...And that's it, they leave it at that.

There is nothing wrong with that formulation - as long as it's a premise for the more important part: why. Why did you do it like that? What did you learn? Was it great? What could be improved? Did it go awry? What considerations were made? What was the context? How does that context reflect to our current situation and why the topic is being discussed at the moment in the first place?

So very often this actually valuable part of analyzing and providing value based on the experience is missing entirely.

Someone who repeatedly utilizes the "I did that and this" without analysis gives the impression that they either haven't or cannot analyze the pros and cons - or don't even realize that doing that would be beneficial.

This is sadly prevalent in work interviews where upon trying to improve understanding of the prospective employee's capabilities by discussing their CV lines / projects they end up just listing the trite trivialities like above. This is also not just a technical matter - whether it's business leadership, product ownership, architect or coder - they should be able to analyze the scenarios at the level and perspectives relevant to the role in question. Not being able to do that (i.e. just listing CV factoids) is basically an automatic NO in work interview context. 

This of course works the other way as well - if you're being interviewed and the interviewers don't show analytical understanding of their own relevant context then that would be a yellow flag at the very least to avoid the company in question.

The more common scenario regarding the above is the everyday discussion on various problems that we face in our work and spare time. If you notice yourself saying "we did it like this in the previous place" then be sure to always follow that with some context-specific valuable analysis. After all - the aim usually is to solve the problem at the moment or at the very least create additional meaningful mutual understanding.

Distributed Blockchain - After the Hype

The reality of distributed blockchain is starting to set in and it's a far cry from the hype. Of course there's always a big difference between hype and reality but it seems that in blockchain's case the gap has turned out even larger than in other megatrends.

I've been very interested in the phenomenon but remained on the lookout for actually pragmatically value-adding use cases for many years so now is an interesting time to look at some of the fundamentals. The increasingly prevalent view is that distributed blockchain is a solution looking for a problem and I count myself in this camp more and more every day.

So what is the core value proposition of distributed blockchain? What does it provide that previous approaches couldn't? This really only has one fundamental answer from which everything else derives: de-centralized trust. That's it.

From this premise the various visionaries have projected a new world in many ways - from a utopia without centralized governments to just a bunch of everyone use cases that are like nowadays "but better" in some fashion.

De-centralized trust actually does turn out to be pretty valuable in societies where corruption is high and institutional maturity & rule of law is at a questionable level or perhaps not even actively sought for. In these types of circumstances the ability to bypass the corruption for a grassroots driven economy to take place is truly valuable for good faith actors.

Much of the focus on the other hand is naturally on use cases in the more modern western world with  on average strong institutions and rule of law - for the most part the centralized institutions are trustworthy and serve the interests of the people in whole. Societal development over centuries has created a functional ecosystem for commerce, legal rights and other foundations of our modern world along with capability to deal with the various exceptional and corrective cases.

What is the value of de-centralized trust in these modern western societies? It's definitely significantly lower than in the third world on average. For the good-faith actors that is. 

There are several illicit use cases - cases that society as a whole has deemed to be detrimental at large - where the usual societal mechanisms actively inhibit these activities. These naturally are again scenarios where those bad faith actors benefit from the de-centralization of trust that enables bypassing of the regular safety mechanisms. That's not to say that there aren't overreaches by the traditional institutions but it's rarely looking at things purely in black and white. It's the support for these illicit use cases that often end up aligning the traditional institutions against the de-centralized trust model - or regulating them to the degree that they effectively lose the value add compared to previously existing solutions.

But even if there's some additional value from the de-centralized trust shouldn't that be enough for more significant propagation?

The value unfortunately doesn't come free. Exact costs and downsides vary from specific technology to another but often include irreversibility (which is mostly lauded as a feature), poor scaling, huge resource utilization, high requirements for users to actually utilize without centralized actors providing the easy-of-use layer, etc. 

Irreversibility especially is a highly two-edged blade with the amount of news of crypto currency thefts from major exchanges etc. It's almost an assured certainty that 99% of people do not (perhaps even could not) possess the capacity to store the private keys safely enough to actually be decently protected against malicious actions and theft. By design there are no retrieval mechanisms or a larger institutions carrying the risk (e.g. regular banks) when talking about most cryptocurrency use cases.

There are good reasons for regulations for anti-money laundering and regulators are increasingly applying KYC and other compliance requirements for the crypto exchanges as well.

More and more the remaining western world de-centralized trust use cases get restricted to either large enterprise use cases (where trustworthy enough centralized source might exist especially in international trade) - or use cases that are currently flat out illegal (with some gray area around legal-yet-problematic). There are of course plenty of use cases where no established highly trusted centralized party exists but in emerging business areas trust is not the only factor and the downside tradeoffs often end up marginalizing distributed blockchain's benefit.

I talked very little about the actual technologies themselves - some of which are nearly genius feats of engineering worthy of high praise - because the issue aren't the solutions. It's that it turns out they really are mostly trying to solve the wrong problems.