We've just started the year and thousands of script kiddies have become (on paper) rich by investing in cryptocurrencies and buying JPEG images of hyperventilating monkeys (NFTs). The buzzword they keep repeating is "Web3", promising a decentralized internet where users own their data.

Today, a junior developer asked why we don't migrate our databases to a blockchain to "ensure their immutability". I had to count to ten.

The worst database in history

Isolating the financial noise and the marketing smoke, let's look at the blockchain through the eyes of a database engineer. A public blockchain (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) is nothing more than a decentralized, append-only linked list.

To get that database to work without a central administrator (Trustless), you sacrifice absolutely all performance. A well-tuned traditional database like PostgreSQL or VISA's engine processes over 60,000 transactions per second. The Ethereum mainnet, right now, processes about 15. Fifteen. And every transaction (inserting a row) costs tens of dollars in "gas" fees for the redundant computation of thousands of mining nodes verifying the exact same thing.

Furthermore, the technical concept of NFTs is a botched job.

// El contenido real de un NFT en la Blockchain
{
  "name": "Mono Aburrido #1024",
  "description": "Un mono muy caro",
  "image": "https://servidor-centralizado.com/mono1024.png"
}

People think the image is "on the chain". No. Storing 2 Megabytes on the Ethereum blockchain would cost thousands of dollars. What you are buying is a cryptographic receipt containing a sad URL (an HTTP link) pointing to an Amazon server or an external IPFS node. If the central server gets turned off, your immutable token points to a 404 error.

Reflection: Efficiency requires trust

Decentralized cryptography is mathematically beautiful and is the only solution if your goal is to avoid state censorship. But for 99% of commercial applications and corporate databases, censorship is not the problem.

Companies use centralized databases because they trust an administrator (AWS, Google, or your company's DBA) in exchange for scalability and performance. "Web3" is a brilliant technical solution in search of a problem that the real business world simply doesn't have.