Preface – This post is part of the Blockchain Basics series.

Introduction

With all the advantages of Blockchain, there are various Disadvantages of Blockchain too that needs to be understood and diminished. We already know that a block gets appended to a blockchain needs to verified by a miner. Now, a miner needs to solve the difficulty of a block. A nonce also adds difficulty to a block verification. Due to these reasons a lot of time is spent in adding a block to a blockchain.

Disadvantages of Blockchain

Following are some of the noted and important disadvantages or demerits that blockchain brings with itself:

Latency (Network Speeds)

As we have discussed above, it takes almost 10 mins. to validate and add a block into the chain. For other leading blockchains this latency is almost 1 min. which is way more than what a relational database would take to append data i.e. within a few second. This high latency can affect the proper data flow in case of high volume and thus it will not be suitable for ERP solutions.

Regularity & Legal acceptance: GDPR

A blockchain appends all data and keep them always in the chain. No matter how long the chain gets, you can access the source of the data. This questions the compatibility of blockchain with GDPR.