Why even Big Tech’s Blockchain narrative doesn’t make any sense | by Dirk Songuer | Nov, 2022

It is a kind-of, sort-of follow-up to “Why I don’t believe in the Web3 narrative” and “Why I don’t believe in the Blockchain technology narrative.”

I wrote this thing about how Blockchains aren’t a scale expertise and that their narrative is usually driven by criminals and investors.

Now Meta got here out with a collection of function bulletins and folks began going wild how that is validating Web3 and blockchains:

Effectively. No. Even when Meta believes on this blockchain future for creators, there is only one minor drawback.

Like, actually SLOW. The problem is the best way Blockchains obtain a distributed system with out central authority: Consensus Mechanisms.

These are the mechanisms by which all taking part nodes within the blockchain community have a look at one another and go: “I wish to add these transactions to the database. Do you all agree? Yeah? All of us agree? Nice — it’s added now”. They periodically cease to have these discussions, then proceed.

It’s somewhat bit extra difficult, however technically talking all nodes within the blockchain should be synchronized to have the identical state and confirm the state collectively. This suggests that blockchains are working synchronously and blocking, that means their pace is restricted by the “tick” of that consensus mechanism.

This “ready” makes them horrendously sluggish in comparison with common databases, to the purpose the place it’s mathematically provable that they cannot scale.

What scale are we speaking about? Effectively, Meta has this to say:

As we have a good time Creator Week at Meta, I’m sharing why we predict the growing adoption of web3 tech, like blockchain, is helpful for the 300 million people around the world who now establish as creators, and anybody who aspires to hitch the burgeoning creator financial system.

Nice, in order that they wish to allow 300 million folks by way of Blockchain. Extra particularly the Polygon blockchain.

In keeping with their own blog post, Polygon has a theoretical restrict of seven.200 transactions per second (TPS).

What occurs if all 300 million content material creators wish to create only one single merchandise, roughly on the similar time?

300.000.000 / 7.200 = 41.667 seconds = 694 minutes = 11 1/2 hours

So, all of them press the button to create their content material factor and the final one will see their content material go up 11something hours later.

However wait, that’s solely the theoretical most — why don’t we have a look at the precise efficiency? Even Polygon themselves admit that the extra real looking quantity is round 1.000 TPS (or 3 1/2 days to settle all transactions). In the meantime Polygon Scan reveals that the precise TPS of Polygon proper now’s round 40 (or 12 weeks to settle all transactions).

Let me repeat that:

Meta constructed a function that, when their total target market makes use of it, takes between 11 hours (greatest case) and 12 weeks (worst case) to react to a single enter.

It gained’t work so as to add extra blockchains and to distribute the load over a number of blockchain networks. Polygon is definitely one of many sooner ones. The mighty Ethereum faucets out at round 24 TPS and in case you embody all aspect chains it’s a pair dozen TPS. Sure, really.

Effectively, your complete factor is primarily good advertising: Launch a few flashy articles and information, give the function to some influencers, journey the factor so long as they will after which quietly bury it. It’s not a bad strategy to money in on the present Web3 / NFT / Metaverse hype.

However let’s say the function does get vast adoption. The one solution to make this function scale to all potential customers is… to not use a blockchain. To take away the consensus mechanism and substitute it with one thing easier: A community of belief. The place Meta will emerge as a “trusted entity”, working “their very own blockchain” with “their very own particular wallets” that’s “completely open by way of these APIs”.

In different phrases: A conventional database with Meta as the principle controlling entity.

Make no mistake, when Meta states their objective is to “assist creators attain an viewers, develop their communities and earn a residing”, what they imply is: “personal the viewers information, phase them for focusing on, promote adverts and in addition earn cash by taking a reduce of all different platform creators.” As a result of that mannequin works. They need an App Retailer for folks.

That’s why the Meta bulletins don’t change something essentially for Web3 or blockchains. Blockchains may be helpful for very particular, extremely area of interest issues, however they don’t seem to be a scale expertise, not to mention a revolutionary paradigm shift.