The summary.
PUT THE MINIMUM ON THE LEDGER — A FINGERPRINT, WITH DATA HELD CONVENTIONALLY
Immutability conflicts directly with erasure obligations, and every node stores everything forever.
Hybrid architectures use the ledger for what it uniquely provides and nothing else, which is usually right.
IF FALSE INFORMATION IS RECORDED, IT IS IMMUTABLY FALSE
The difficulty in supply chain and provenance applications is never the ledger; it is verifying reality at the point of entry.
A LEDGER CAN RECORD; ONLY A LEGAL FRAMEWORK CAN CONFER RIGHTS
Tokenised real-world assets reintroduce custodians, vehicles and jurisdictions — which may still be worthwhile, but not because intermediaries were removed.
NEVER ASSUME A SUBMITTED TRANSACTION SUCCEEDED
Design for varying fees, delayed confirmation, failure and congestion. And requiring users to hold network assets to use your application excludes most of them.
ALWAYS VERIFY CONTRACTS YOU DEPLOY
Users cannot assess an unverified contract.
ASK WHETHER THE TECHNOLOGY IS NECESSARY — THE HONEST ANSWER IS USUALLY NO
Be prepared to recommend against it. A shared ledger with one participant is a database.
