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January 12, 2018, 12:05:17 PM |
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PLATFORM LOCK-IN
As with the early days of any computing technology, blockchains have critical “platform lock-in” problems. Developers have to decide which blockchain to support, then implement platform-specific code that makes it very difficult to switch an application to a different blockchain later on. Developers don’t want to be locked into working with a certain blockchain technology. They need the freedom to evaluate, use, and switch between options. Some applications may even need to run on multiple platforms to provide the best user experience.
LACK OF FEATURES
People have high expectations for blockchain—the news media, evangelists, and journalists paint a bright future for decentralized applications for the public, especially with the increasingly high prices of cryptocurrencies. In reality, however, blockchain technology is still in its infancy. Most blockchain
services lack rich features and don’t have a mechanism to encourage the community to contribute to the feature stacks. Blockchain protocols make them very easy to fork, and there’s been a recent spike in forks created for various purposes. Unfortunately, forks typically only improve on the forked branch, splitting the community and computing resources. The incentive mechanisms for blockchains just aren’t designed to encourage contributions to the blockchain tech stack yet.
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