Blockchain technology itself is not a scam, but it does not rule out the possibility of someone using blockchain as a guise to commit fraud.
Blockchain has the following problems:
The problem of excessive blockchain capacity.
With the development of blockchain, the amount of blockchain data stored by nodes will become larger and larger, and the burden of storage and computing will become heavier and heavier.
Take the Bitcoin blockchain as an example, its complete data currently reaches approximately 71GB. If users use the Bitcoin Core client for data synchronization, they may not be able to synchronize for three days and three nights, and the amount of data in the blockchain is still increasing, which brings a great threshold to the operation of the Bitcoin Core client.
Confirmation time of blockchain data.
The current blockchain system, especially in the financial blockchain system, has the problem of long data confirmation time.
Take the Bitcoin blockchain as an example. The current confirmation time of a Bitcoin transaction is about 10 minutes. In the case of 6 confirmations, you need to wait for about an hour. Of course, Bitcoin has come a long way when it comes to credit card confirmation times of 2-3 days, but it's still a long way from ideal.
Address transaction frequency issues.
The blockchain system faces the problem of low transaction frequency.
Taking the Bitcoin blockchain as an example, the average size of each transaction is about 250 bytes (Byte). If the block size is limited to 1MB, then the number of transactions that can be held is 4000.
At a rate of one block every 10 minutes, it can generate 144 blocks per day and accommodate 576,000 transactions. Divided by 86,400 seconds per day, the Bitcoin blockchain can process 6.67 transactions per second.
Currently, the actual daily transaction volume of the Bitcoin blockchain is close to the system bottleneck (picture). If the expansion problem is not solved, it may cause a large number of transaction congestion delays.
The average number of transactions in a Bitcoin block (Source: Block USD) compares to Paypal’s 729 million transactions in Q3 2013, averaging 93.75 transactions per second.
According to the official website of VISA, the world's largest payment card, VisaNet processed 47,000 transactions per second in a 2013 test.
Compared with major payment networks such as Alipay, the Bitcoin blockchain is more like a newborn baby in terms of transaction processing frequency.
Of course, this was also carefully designed by Satoshi Nakamoto in the early days. Bitcoin block size is limited to 1MB to avoid malicious actions by rogue miners that negatively impact people. The reason why the Bitcoin blockchain payment network has grown to a multi-billion dollar scale today is because of its decentralization.
The development of blockchain is restricted by the existing system.
On the one hand, the decentralized and autonomous characteristics of blockchain dilute the concept of state supervision and have an impact on the current system.
For example, digital currency represented by Bitcoin not only poses a challenge to the country’s right to issue currency, but also affects the transmission effect of monetary policy and weakens the central bank’s ability to regulate the economy. This makes the monetary authorities have no control over digital currencies. Currency developments are cautious.
On the other hand, regulatory authorities also lack full understanding and expectations for the new technology of blockchain, and the establishment of legal systems may lag behind, resulting in a lack of necessary institutional norms and laws for economic activities using blockchain. Protect. In fact, it increases the risks for market entities.
The cost of integrating blockchain technology with existing systems is relatively high.