This one is particularly interesting. Blockchains are only capable of verifying data which is directly related to the blockchain. One example is Bitcoin. All bitcoin miners can verify the entire chain of transactions along with the precision of the current balances. However, there’s no kind of blockchain that can certify that the price of some particular share was X dollars at a particular exchange on a particular date. As such, blockchain cannot verify that the soil temperature of the tulip fields in the Netherlands never fell below 0 degrees C in winter. As you can see, this myth is quite widespread, while the underlying idea can be proven wrong in the easiest possible way.
Myth № 4. Blockchain isn’t a technology for ensuring the confidentiality of data; quite the opposite actually. There’s nothing that prevents including encrypted data in blockchains (or even in the future, using homomorphic encryption). So, by default encryption is not involved in the blockchain.
Finally, we come to the fifth myth. Although many firms would be very keen to cut down the costs of maintaining servers and admin staff that manages them. However, blockchain won’t help you with this. With blockchain you can automate some or most of your business processes, but the servers aren’t going anywhere. Blockchain is a new way of managing the database. This ‘way’ allows you to increase such factors as fault tolerance, integrity, and non-repudiation of the database, significantly improve its uptime and get rid of the single point of failure of the system. Yet, you still need servers for maintaining such database:)
Illustration by Katerina Krashtapuk