Blockchain Applications to International Affairs: Reasons for Skepticism
- Blockchain Applications to International AffairsReasons for Skepticism
Can you start by giving us an over-view of what blockchain is and why it is so revolutionary?
The easiest way for me to describe blockchain is that it's a form of group record keeping. A group of parties, small or big, gets together and decides to keep a joint record together rather than delegating that responsibility to one of the parties in the group.
That is said to be significant because by doing it together, you eliminate the need to rely on the particular third party you're delegating to. It spreads the trust around, in some ways.
Another reason that people say that block-chain is potentially revolutionary is because this record that's created is distributed. It sits on the computer systems of all of the computers in the network. There's some variation on how particular ones are structured—some choose to let only certain more powerful computers in the network have a copy of the record—but the general premise is that it's distributed among everyone.
Right now, we delegate to governments the responsibility for keeping track of birth records. You don't keep track of every single person's birth certificate in your community. The government does that. So, blockchain is different from that in that all of the nodes are keeping a record. That's one of the reasons why there are potential scalability concerns—if everyone's keeping a record of the data instead of one party doing it, that's a whole lot of data we're keeping track of.
Another reason people say that blockchain is potentially transformative is because the record that's created is supposed to be very hard to change. You'll often see the word immutable or permanent to describe this record. I've critiqued that concept in the past; I think there's quite a bit of overstatement about just how hard this record is to change. If that's true, that's an incredibly powerful concept. If no one can mess with it once the record's been created, you've eliminated one way that people might commit fraud. Having a record that is very robust and difficult to change is a really attractive thing. [End Page 27]
There are some other characteristics that it's said to have. You might notice the way I'm phrasing it—it's said to have this, it's said to have that—I'm saying that because the technology is still extremely immature and very poorly understood, and there's a lot of experimentation. People are still working out what its actual characteristics are.
Another powerful characteristic it's said to have is that you can rely on this record because it's going to reflect truth. With block-chain technologies like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies that actually have a token built into the system, I think you can count on it being true that one bitcoin or one ether was actually transferred to someone else, and you can trust the record of those transfers. The moment that you start building things on top of those blockchains, like property records or voting records, then you're still very much reliant on processes outside of the technology to ensure the truth and legitimacy of the record. If you don't control who gets to make changes to it, someone could easily put something untrue into the record.
Also, it's said to be very secure. There's a debate among technologists about where the security comes from. One of the places it may come from is the cryptography that's used in the systems that link these records together in a way that's really hard to break. Essentially, as each record is added, it's linked to the one that came before, that's linked to the one that came before, and so on. This chain of records means that if you tamper with it, the change would show up because you're tampering with this entire chain of data.
As I said, there's...
