Hi Everyone,
This is the second dose of learning blockchain.
Excitement has no limitations, I remember when I started learning Servicenow I try to create every app on Servicenow but sooner I realize it's equally important to select the right platform for your use case. For instance, ServiceNow is definitely not a good platform for game development. In this session, we will understand how to identify if blockchain is a perfect match for your use case or not. Understanding this is important before we move into the technicalities of blockchain and learn to harness the collective power of ServiceNow and blockchain.
Note: This is based on my personal learning and you can have your own way of filtering out.
Question 1: Does your application required to store, retrieve, or process transactions?
Now if the answer is no, it means that you don't actually need to store a database, then in this case, usually, we will not go for Blockchain. Okay, let me give you some examples, then you will understand what I'm talking about. For example, a bank may want to provide a service to help the customer to calculate the interest for a mortgage loan. This service usually is anonymous, right? Because they do not want to remember or store any details of the input given by their customers and usually, their service is free. Then, in that case, we do not need to store anything, and the service just wants to calculate the interest for a particular mortgage loan. Then in that case, we usually will not use Blockchain. There are many, many similar examples. For example, the audit department may want to provide free services for people to calculate the tax, or you can provide a website to help students or professionals to calculate the answer for some math problems, etc. In all these cases you are not going to store all the transactions. You just provide a service for calculations. Then, in that case, we will not go for Blockchain.
Question 2: Okay, the second one, also, we refer to a characteristic of Blockchain. You should ask yourself, do you have a trusted centralized authority?
In other words, in the whole application, do you have a party that you trust, and he can actually control the system for you? Now, if your answer is yes, then again, you don't need to use Blockchain.
Let me give you a common example. I think we all trust the immigration department of the government, to maintain our traveling records for going in and out of the country. And also, they actually have the authority to know about it and in this case, you can see that the privacy issue is not a major concern, and in fact, we will believe that the authority will handle it properly. So in that case, we do have a trusted authority that can handle our records. Then, in that case, we do not need to use Blockchain.
Question 3: Now the third question you should ask yourself is about the transaction fees?
Now even though you might have a trusted authority, for example, the bank, who can handle the transaction for you, but if the transaction fee is too high, then you need to think about whether you should go for the Blockchain platform or not. Okay, let me give you some examples. If you want to transfer the money between banks or you try to trade data, buy and sell data, or try to rent an apartment, you will see that the agent in between may charge you a high transaction fee. Then, in that case, you may think about whether we can go for the Blockchain platform in order to eliminate the centralized authority to handle all these transactions
so that you can enjoy a lower transaction fee. Now of course, usually the trust authority will try to provide additional services or add-on services to you in this kind of service. So you need to evaluate whether this service is worth the high transaction fees, or will this service be so critical that a Blockchain platform may not be able to provide a similar service to you.
I know it's too much text to read but it's kind of important to build an understanding. I apologize but let's continue. I will try to cover the rest of the three in short.
Question 4 and 5 are kind of interdependent. Blockchain works on trust models where the users who are part of blockchain need to have a consensus about the approval of a transaction now imagine if my app has just 10 users and out of which 6 decide to monopolize the system and start adding fake transactions the system won't work. Now consider a case where I have multiple departments being involved in making a decision and they all want to hide their data from another department and its all a systematic process then its a perfect use case for blockchain but now if one department does not want to be part of this then this whole use case will have a bottleneck and that is that particular department hence in that scenario don't go for blockchain.
Question 6 This might be contradictory if your app/use case needs a high transaction rate then it's my personal analysis that we should not use a blockchain network as per the current capability of blockchain. I may consider hyperledger or fabric but yaa all need some more maturity as per my understanding.
Now, if you are feeling like or if you are confused then what am I supposed to build or what could be good use cases in the world. Well if you ask me about ServiceNow specifically I will recommend going on the first blog and having a look at the image of use cases if you wanna know about what could be use cases for blockchain refer to this one
Enough for today. I hope you got the big picture if you have any queries please feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin Would be happy to help and discuss. And don't forget to mark this blog helpful it will keep me motivated for writing more.
Happy Learning !!
