The Real Importance of the Blockchain: It's Raging For Our Collective Future

This article presumes you have a working knowledge of what a blockchain is. You can look up basic info on it here. If you're reading this after 2016, you already know what it is.

Just like the computer, and later the internet, the blockchain is a pioneering concept: any number of records and data can be securely stored on a distributed ledger. Basically you went from paper to a computer holding your data, to more terminals holding and sharing data, then to a lot more computers holding pieces of that data. Similarly, from remembering everything you ever read or ‘downloading’ information to your memory, you now only have to remember the search words for an answer (its tags, categories), because you know you have access to this huge library of information that is the internet, connected 24/7. What will happen over time is that you will also curate that library, based on the blockchain.

Blockchain past

This evolution is important because it has a huge influence on your education and daily life. You had to go to a library in the 1950s to get information. That was the only repository of information, safe from some friend or person with authoritative knowledge on a subject.

Later on, you went on the internet and typed your search terms in Google, because you knew it had the authoritative knowledge for everything there ever was, including all the libraries in the world. As the internet grew and the web developed, you also got opinions on Quora from learned people, you could ask anyone on Facebook about your question, you could even pay a specialist to answer your curiosity. You basically had access to more information than you possibly could ingest.

With even a larger growth of the internet, you started realizing how there was no leading authority on anything, how popular culture redefined norms, started revolutions, how it spawned billions of opinions, so that your need for information, already hyper-saturated, also found no exact match in an answer; in truth. What is the unimpeachable, 100% accepted truth about global warming, vaccines, Roswell, whatever else you can think of? There are learned opinions and scientific facts, but those aren't accepted by everyone.

We already see how that is spawning a global culture that is easily swayed by populist politicians or interests with enough cash on hand to drive home any means of data, whether it's a Summer blockbuster or a piece of propaganda. Where is the filter? In 1950, you trusted the book in the library. In 2000, you trusted the blooming internet that only copied the data from the book, but as societies democratize and more and more people gain access to the internet, absolute truths become extremely rare; only opinions matter.

Blockchain Present

Enter 2016. Now, the blockchain is a ledger. A place on it assures that certain pieces of data become immutable. It's like the Bible, if you want to accept the idea. In the Evangelical faiths, if it's in the Bible, then it is literally true. That's the blockchain, a long list of truths, whether it's a financial transaction, or a smart contract, or the Bill of Landing for a ship carrying cargo. The blockchain is the unimpeachable source of truth. The combined trust in Bitcoin, which is marking 8 years of development, is 10 billion dollars. That's a lot of trust in truth.

What happens if history teaches you that 100 years ago, someone changed that code through a hack, or that the mistakes that happened in 2016 can have far-reaching implications into the future? Current crypto-currencies and blockchain platforms are still playing around with code, trying to make it universal and immutable. We are seeing the birth pangs of a new era.

A notable example in this sense is the debate currently raging inside the Ethereum community on the validity of a hard fork in the code. The Ethereum Classic (ETC) side, the group who believed in the immutability of code, is holding its ground with surprising and valiant success. It may very well be the defining historical footnote of the pioneering stage of blockchain development. More info on ETC here.

Blockchain Future

Now, imagine that the whole world is a supercomputer, that the blockchain runs everything, including smaller slave blockchains for each facet of life. Let's say you want to travel from your job to your house, but that you have to pass through a dangerous part of town, and that each night you pay a token amount of your credits for security. You have a smart contract that turns video cameras on to watch you, that alerts police of your presence, based on your GPS position, that even reduces your payment for life insurance a tiny bit if you make it home safe. It's a dystopian nightmare for some of us, maybe, but it's reality for you. And you might trust it because you know that you'll be safe on your way home, because you know that if someone was to use your data, it would be recorded and prosecuted. You trust the code.

The debate on our future isn’t just my own speculation, whatever dystopia I can dream up on a whim. Blockchain applications, distributed apps, are building more than a database of information, they are developing the basis for legal identity on the internet, with innate rights, obligations and representation. If we are moving towards a deeper integration of the internet in our lives, with the Internet of Things (IoT) being just an example, if we can’t dream of anything without it being some way connected to a global wave of information, it follows that we, ourselves, will be present there. Digital Identity is a few decades away, with attempts such as E-residency in Estonia, for instance, being a valid hint in this respect.

If your legal identity is securely stored only in a distributed database of information, or even your consciousness is digitized into the ether that binds, then you will want your ancestors to have had the foresight to leave code immutable. I think that we are all seeing something tremendous happening, well worth the effort of technical interpretation, and certainly interesting enough to look for ahead, in our children’s lives.