Just wanted to mention this to our followers as an illustrative example of where the understanding of blockchain is within the market.

In preparation to our last week’s enterprise blockchain event in Doha Qatar I have tried to launch some Facebook and Linkedin ad campaigns to raise the awareness and have more people in Doha learn about our free educational event. The event has been a great success by the way, but not thanks to Facebook.

Facebook has came back with this (screenshot below). Basically they have banned our ad from running. This is based on their assumption of our event doing some ICO promotion or offering some crypto investments. This of course couldn’t be farther from truth – it is clear from our Eventbrite page our event is about blockchain technology and its enterprise use cases. No ICO, coins or tokens were to be promoted. Naturally I have appealed the decision explaining the above, but surprisingly Facebook employee has decided to keep it as “not approved”:

Figure 1. Facebook does not approve blockchain related post. Screenshot.

Clearly this confirms serious lack of understanding and is affecting adoption of useful distributed ledger technology (DLT) worldwide. As bitcoin, ICOs and crypto token speculations may be forbidden or unregulated in some jurisdictions, it is a common pattern across individual and organisational decision makers to apply same level of precaution to everything to do with blockchain / DLT.

Blockchain startups have difficulty opening bank accounts, bidding for contracts and generally doing business due to such decisions where decision-makers do not bother to investigate and/or understand the difference between blockchain and cryptocurrency. This of course is absurd and shall be addressed. Banning the promotion of blockchain educational events is similar to banning the study of MySQL databases or P2P technologies. It simply does not make sense.

I’ve been looking for an illustration on internet to visualise the difference between bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. It would be good if people realised at least that bitcoin or cryptocurrency is a small subset of blockchain technology products, similarly for example to drugs being a subset of chemical industry produce. You cannot ban the whole chemical industry just because its knowledge and technologies can be used to produce some drugs that are addictive or illegal. Not that I’m making a parallel between bitcoin and drugs, but you get the idea. So I’ve made this picture and I hope it helps for educational purposes. Dear Facebook, you’re welcome.