What Blockchain Alternative Do You Need?

With billions of dollars spent on blockchain, there clearly is a need to determine if this technology should be used, as demonstrated by the many proposals for decision schemes. In this work we rigorously analyze 30 existing schemes. Our analysis demonstrates contradictions between these schemes - so clearly they cannot all be right - and also highlights what we feel is a more structural flaw of most of them, namely that they ignore alternatives to blockchain-based solutions. To remedy this, we propose an improved scheme that does take alternatives into account, which we argue is more useful in practice to decide an optimal solution for a particular use case.