A lie that you were told about what blockchain enables

There is a widespread lie that blockchain attests to the authenticity of documents, such as birth certificates. Such tech exists, but it doesn’t work through blockchain as you were often told.

First perceived as a scam, today, blockchain is believed to reflect ownership of things.

It is true for any purely blockchain asset. Recall that Bitcoin was the first blockchain allowing one to assert their ownership of … bitcoins.

That’s why Mr. Craig Right, my neighbour in Gordon, Australia, was not widely regarded as Satoshi Nakamoto himself, since he failed to produce a valid cryptographic proof of his ownership of Bitcoin.

Craig Wright’s home, a few meters away from my place. He has moved since.

I would have asked him for a proof myself if I met him walking his dog past my house… but he has moved since the saga.

When you ask for a proof, you create a message as a challenge, to which only the correct bitcoin owner can provide a valid respond. Mr Craig answered challenges of no one. ATO — Australia tax office — challenged him too for a proof and he failed to produce one. The Australian world is so small that I met, in a bar, the officer who challenged him. Given that he likes challenges so much, I shouldn’t have drunk with him.

There is another belief that blockchain is a truth machine when used with smart contracts. It makes a great deal of (yet limited) sense in the context of web3, but that is for another article.

So, people managed to combine these beliefs, and somehow conclude that blockchain could validate the authenticity of documents.

That way, you could verify that a certain JPEG or PDF document you received was not only from its author, but also not tampered with. In practical terms, it could establish that you hold a driver’s licence that wasn’t self-made, or that your graduate diploma is authentic.

There’s just one problem: blockchain does not enable this.

It was “enabled” by cryptographic attestations. One tech framework that uses it, called Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), began its life in the 1970s. PKI was used in many government offices, businesses and opensource communities well before blockchain was even conceptualised. I put the word “enabled” in quotes because the attestation of documents accords with PKI’s intended purpose.

If anything, blockchain is enabled by the cryptographic attestations.

Saying that blockchain allowed the attestation of authenticity is like saying computers enabled algebra.

You may ask yourself, “But what’s the harm?” Fair question. You can write a smart contract to validate attestations— though on its own it’s unnecessary and expensive, it’ll work. If someone is willing to pay for premium gas when they don’t need to, then, sell it. That’s free market capitalism at work.

Nevertheless, allow me to set the record straight.

A South Korean man aged in his twenties committed suicide less than a year ago because he improperly invested in new coin sales. Cases like him can be found everywhere in the world.

People sell their houses, cars, and kidneys to buy coin sale tokens under false claims such as blockchain enabling one to assert the authenticity of various things. They believed this technology never existed previously; therefore, the market will embrace it, revenue will come, and investors will get rich.

A list of people died or suffered with crypto investments. I kept a journal.

Suppose people discovered on their own that cryptographic attestation techs such as PKI has existed almost as long as boomers, and its adoption hasn’t yet picked up. In that case, they would realise the adoption barrier is somewhere else; for example, not the lack of tech, but rather, the lack of identity attestors (such as Estonian’s E-Residency issuer or our in-progress project attestation.id), or the lack of a revenue model, or the organisational interlocking dependency on paper documents. Hopefully, that makes them more cautious.

Blockchain is, in essence, still completely new, which makes it an vessel to fill with assumed new ideals. Any lack of adoption can be explained away as, “it’s still in its early stages…”

Not every conceivable idea is a good investment.

It has become a running joke in our company; someone goes to work and says, “Hey, do you know about that venture fund that put another million into a new project for document authenticity?”

Personally, I don’t care if a venture fund invested in a project with needles use of blockchain. It’s the ordinary people falling into this kind of scheme that breaks my heart.

With the new knowledge, now let’s circle back to the beginning of this article. You may think, if blockchain allows people to assert the true owner of Bitcoins, as Craig Wright’s case demonstrated, isn’t that assertion a blockchain technology?

It’s easier to understand blockchain if you view it as a ledger. Whenever someone spends Bitcoin, it adds a record to the ledger in the form of a cryptographic signature. Consider it a written cheque. The cheque’s authenticity isn’t repudiable or disputable, even without blockchain; what blockchain does is to record it in a ledger so that you know the person who received it is the new owner. The innovation is the ledger, not the assertion of the cheque’s authenticity.

Ultimately, the original blockchain is an invention to allow the transfer of ownership without a custodian. The keyword is “transfer”. Blockchain wasn’t an invention to tell whether a document is genuinely from a particular individual; it is a ledger, to indicate the change of ownership authorised by such a document.

What this means, simply, is that blockchain isn’t a critical part of use-cases that doesn’t involve the transfer of ownership. Examples are birth certificates, diplomas or residence certificates, all non-transferable. These are better solved by cryptographic attestation techs.

Will blockchain help to advance the attestation tech use-cases? Yes, in 2 ways.

1. By changing the perception. Mind-opening blockchain use-cases buoys related gas-free technologies that have already existed.
2. By dependency. Although attesting document does not depend on blockchain, some blockchain contracts depend on it instead. If blockchain gets popular, its dependency technology gets popular too.

Is cryptographic attestation (to the authenticity of documents) something new that is worth your hard-earned savings and can potentially pay off your kids’ college tuition?

It’s age-old tech, and any increase in its use is either buoyed or depended by blockchain use-cases. Anyone selling it as new is not being sincere. We actually do much tech development in this space, see the attestation framework in TokenScript. Our work in this area is solid and use-case driven, but not a ground-breaking new discovery.

Anyone selling it as new is not being sincere.

I hope this clears things up a bit. If you see a friend or family member led astray by misrepresentations and outright lies related to blockchain, please forward this article to them. Fewer people not investing in these “opportunities” means fewer houses, cars and kidneys sold pursuing them (or at least, I hope that’s the result).