Put down the pitchforks and torches people.

Before you attempt to rage comment or click off because you think I don't know what I'm talking about (and I don't half the time anyway), just listen this one time.

We've all heard of blockchain messaging platforms, with the most famous one being Keybase. They recently concluded their Stellar Space drop, of which I was a participant. I got ALL my holdings of Stellar from them(about 1500 XLM) for free, and I'll keep holding it to see what happens.

However, I've never once used the built in chat feature.

The thing is, most people feel that they need more privacy when chatting or something like that. However, no one is ready to move over to a brand new messaging service just because it's based on a blockchain, and even if they do, their friends and family won't readily do so.

Blockchain messaging platforms mostly say that they're more secure, and can prevent data breaches and whatnot. But the point is that regular messaging services have become much better, as well as more secure, and these blockchain based ones don't have as many features as the regular ones.

For example, the Keybase user interface is 100% confusing. It took me a while to figure out what I was doing, and when I eventually started chatting with someone I met, I instantly regretted it. 

You actually have to hit the send button every time you wish to send a message, and there's no feature to configure the "enter" button to do so.

Equally, the experience wasn't the best, as the app kept on increasing in size for no obvious reason, although I hardly used it. For instance, I use iMessage, but that's a stock app. I equally use Whatsapp for some business related reasons, and my WhatsApp takes up a manageable 750MB of space on my device. Note that I've been using it for a long time. The keybase app spent just two weeks on my device before eating up 500MB. I can't think of why.

But this post isn't about Keybase. So why are blockchain based messaging apps useless?

• They don't really offer anything novel apart from being based on a blockchain.
• They're usually slower than regular messaging apps, and consume much more data. At least for the ones I've tried.
• They'll have a hard time with mass adoption, simply because you might be crazy about blockchain, but your grandma who just figured out WhatsApp might not be.

Many people might say that the way to solve the problem would be to have the ability to use your regular messaging app through the blockchain based app.

But that would simply defeat the whole purpose for having a blockchain based app. And it still won't solve the problem of glitches and constant hanging.

I don't believe that blockchain based messaging platforms would reach adoption any time soon. At least not this year.

Got any reasons why I should think otherwise? Let me know!