Blockchain attitudes according to the 2019 Stack Overflow survey
Most think it’s useful, but Europeans worry about energy use
Bitcoin consumes more electricity than the entire country of Ireland. But the technology behind it, Blockchain, has spawned hundreds of new services, from startups and financial institutions alike, that promise to revolutionise everything from currencies to stock markets and fish trading. So, is Blockchain useful? Or is it an irresponsible waste of resources? Or is Blockchain just a passing fad?
What if we ask the technologists? The software developers who build the tools and platforms we rely on every day to go about our business, the people who actually develop the technology itself, Blockchain? What if we ask almost ninety thousand of them?
Blockchain, according to 90 thousand developers
Every year, tens of thousands of developers express their opinion in a giant survey run by Stack Overflow, the world’s largest online software developer community. This year, almost 90 thousand developers from all over the world answered the survey. Stack Overflow kindly makes this data public, so we went ahead and imported it into Quantipy, the open source Python library for survey data (see below for some technical/software details).
Blockchain, useful or wasteful?
This year the Stack Overflow survey included questions about Blockchain for the first time. How do people who work for organisations close to the Blockchain feel compared to everyone else?
Developers within organisations that are using or plan to use Blockchain are less worried than the rest that it’s wasteful, and only 10% think it’s a fad. But where are these people based? What countries are developing for the Blockchain?
Most of the survey respondents live in the United States, where Stack Overflow is based. The interesting part in the chart above is to see where Blockchain developers have a higher proportional representation amongst the respondents. These place include India, Spain and Switzerland. India represents 10% of overall respondents to the survey, but represents 13% of the Blockchain respondents.
An irresponsible use of resources?
Bitcoin uses a similar amount of energy as the entire country of Ireland, according to estimates. The chart above shows that those working within organisations implementing Blockchain technologies are less worried about this than the average developer, but what about developers across different countries?
The ten countries that worry the most about Blockchain are shown above. Overall, developers in Europe (and New Zealand) are most worried, with one in four developers worried about Blockchain’s use of resources in Germany, France, Norway and Finland. This is more than the average of one-in-six developers who see it as a waste of resources.
If attitudes towards Blockchain are analysed across how much coding experience respondents have, we can see that the more experienced coders are, the more worried they are. It’s worth noting that this trend is stronger in coding experience than age, where the most worried age group were 40–44 year olds at 22.3%.
Overall, developers are generally optimistic about the usefulness of Bitcoin, with reservations rising with experience and in certain countries. We assume Stack Overflow will include this question in their survey in the coming years, so it will be interesting to see how people’s attitudes change over time.
One caveat on the results is that the participants in the survey are self selecting (see more on self-selection bias). This means that certain demographies are less well represented than others. For example, only 7.9% of respondents are female, even though the percentage in the developer community is higher. Stack Overflow applies weights to correct this for the US population, and in a later post we will show how that can also be done with Quantipy.
How we worked the data
For a detailed look on the code behind the above results, check out the Jupyter Notebook we used to create the analysis. The survey asked respondents two questions about Blockchain. The first one was whether their organisation was thinking of implementing the technology. I was so excited by this when I was taking the survey, I shared a screenshot on Twitter:
We used the above to group respondents into those who were working with Blockchain (“implementing our own cryptocurrency”, “implementing crypto-based products” and “non-currency applications of Blockchain”). We didn’t include “Accepting bitcoin” in the Blockchain group.
The notebook we used to get our results doesn’t show how we imported the data into Quantipy, how we used it to group responses according to age, experience, attitude to Blockchain or how we filtered the data. All those details will be covered in later posts, along with the notebooks that were used. Send me an email (geir at Datasmoothie dot com) if there are any particular aspects of this that are of interest and I’ll start with that.
