Hi,
 
It’s Monday, a new week begins! My talk today is about blockchain: critical aspects but also (and above all!) solutions.
 
Like any new phenomenon, also the blockchain presents some problems, which must be taken into account in order to understand its limits but also its future prospects.
 
If today I buy a package of wine, whose description is inserted in a blockchain also for the purpose of its traceability, I can rely on its unchangeability, but when it was inserted it might not have been accurate, for example about the type of grapes used to produce the wine. The actual underlying truthfulness therefore depends on a third party, called an oracle, which may be a person or even an automated information gathering system. Using existing structures, such as DOC consortia, to increase the truthfulness of information to date is too expensive. New technological and even legislative solutions will be needed.
One of the possible solutions represents at the same time another of the limits of the blockchain. Many of them were born and are being born, either open (permissionless, the most widespread) or closed. But they’re not connected.
 
So the data cannot be cross-referenced and in the example of the wine pack, I would have to consult more than one blockchain to get all the information I want. Finding a mode of interconnection between various blockchain will be a necessary and very impressive step. Because it would allow a huge use of the blockchain, much easier and more complete than it is now. Currently the most significant interconnection project is Hyperledger Cactus (www.hyperledger.org). Generalised interconnection would have very important economic repercussions, given that products that would be traced with interconnected blockchains in the future and for which there is absolute certainty about their characteristics would provide them with enormous added value and extraordinary appeal for consumers.