On the morning of Friday, October 27, 2023 I had the opportunity to present to the ACT-IAC Blockchain Working Group.

The topic was "Blockchain as an event source."

I emphasized the implications that blockchains have on IT systems and modernization efforts. Specifically, blockchain does not replace existing systems, but will likely become a dependency to existing applications. Many (I'd say a majority of) enterprise software systems can be described as CRUD applications, meaning they consist primarily of a single database and some number of application servers. That single database is both written to and read from and serves as a source of truth, local to the application.

However, a blockchain becomes an event source; an additional system that may be written to, and which existing software systems may need to both write to a blockchain and listen to specific events from the blockchain.

Reasoning about a datasource outside of a system owner's control raises additional concerns regarding application design, development, and ultimately the value streams of information in which a given system sits. Economics and social implications should be primary considerations, along with technical aspects of software systems development and re-development (modernization).

The (83) slides are available here.

Slides here.