What Blockchain Can’t Do

When assessing blockchain business models, it is useful to understand what blockchain can’t do. Think about the problem of tracking babies within a hospital ward and beyond. The effects of a baby being mistaken for another baby can be horrendous. Therefore, storing records that contain a baby’s current location in a way that makes these data points immutable and verifiable seems like a great use of blockchain technology. But there is a big problem with using blockchain to solve such a problem. The digital records may be immutable and verifiable, but how does someone know which digital record is attached to which baby? To link an entry on the blockchain to an actual, real-life baby, we would need to give the baby a physical identifier through a physical tag, or in a more futuristic world, a small chip or digital genome record that links the baby to its digital record. And this is where blockchain falls down. It can’t help with this process, and can’t ensure that perhaps the most important step of verification is happening correctly.