Reflections on Things Offline

As a web developer (a technical person of sorts) I've always nurtured a mild fear of things being outside my control. Since I have to watch and maintain a bunch of web servers, as well as the web sites sitting on those servers, I fear the day when I can't connect to one of my servers to do something critical. These servers aren't sitting in arm's reach next to me where I can just push a reset button or swap out a bad stick of RAM; they may be in St Louis or Washington or Phoenix.

If they go down, I go down. If they go down and I can't do anything about it, I'm at the mercy of others. I have to contact the network facility where my servers are located and hope their tech support folks can find a solution. Or wait for them to pass the buck and blame something out of their control, like some poorly-paid temp construction guy who cut a fiber optic line up the street from them. And then I wait, nervous, fielding calls from my clients who ask what the problem is and what the ETA for a resolution is.

In the case of a blockchain outage, who do you go to in order to file a complaint? If the blockchain goes offline and you have your business built upon it, and your data there, and your contracts there, and your digital assets there, and suddenly it goes away, there aren't any doors you can pound on or phone numbers you can call to give some harried secretary a piece of your mind.

Granted, these blockchains don't exist in a vacuum, and there will be some level of community support and developer interaction that presumably seeks a resolution. But they don't know you. They don't owe you anything.

You're just another funky address on someone else's blockchain.