The Digital Clone Wars
Blockchain and the Battle for Authenticity
It’s safe to say that, as a relatively young technology, we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of all the possibilities and use cases blockchain offers. Today, many people say that blockchain is a solution looking for problems to solve. But actually, this technology already solves one of the biggest problems inherent to any digital space. It gives us, for the first time in history, a way to assign the label “original” to a digital artifact.
Finding originality among digital debris
It is sometimes difficult to wrap one’s head around, but in the digital world, where you can just copy any string of data or file with a few keystrokes, and where these copies can not be distinguished from each other or the original, this ability to assign origin is a big deal. For example, if you copy a PDF file to a USB stick, delete it from your disk, then transfer it back, is the file the same as original, or has the original been destroyed when you deleted it? When you attach a file to an E-Mail and send it around the world, is it the original that you’re attaching or a copy? How do you know?
While this might sound like a non-issue to some digital natives, the problem of originality and authenticity is actually an old one predating even digital technology. The German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin’s famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction considered this very issue back in 1935, and the problem still stands, especially when value is at stake. In today’s digital world of tokens, originality, scarcity, and authenticity are vitally important factors in determining value. And as our lives, and our stores of value, become increasingly digital, these factors will only be more important.
Blockchain technology solves the problem of double spending naturally, by time stamping a signed transaction and safely freezing this moment in time in a decentralized storage network. Because this is a natural byproduct of the technology, the very same system works with any kind of digital artifact, allowing you to immutably prove which version of a digital entity came first.
What about NFTs?
Originality and ownership in the digital space have become increasingly important as the digital and physical worlds of value start to overlap more and more. We hear a lot about the game changing potential of NFT’s these days, but mostly their use is still pretty much limited to making money from gullible buyers who think that everything labeled “NFT” must be valuable because, hey, it’s an NFT. But apart from speculation and hype, NFT’s also allow us to uniquely assign indivisible ownership over a single digital artifact. The difference here is that NFT’s define the rules of ownership; they don’t affect the digital asset itself, and so the value is ultimately not worth much (in many cases) if the artifact can still be downloaded or accessed without needing the NFT, for example if a musician makes an NFT of a music video that has been out for several years. This is a gap that can be solved eventually. Already some artists are making new, NFT-only pieces, but the problem of digital ‘uniqueness’ is unchanged. The file can still technically be copied and shared millions of times even if the token holder is officially the artwork’s owner.
We can see from the NFT example that a good which can be copied to infinity has no value, outside of what is ascribed to it by the Twitter masses. This same rule applies to any traditional asset. Whether it’s gold, oil, or diamonds, none of these would have any value if we could just make them from dirt in a pot at home, and it’s the same with digital artifacts. Historically speaking, the only area where the replication of digital content was technically possible but could be effectively controlled was with software and licenses. However, this is a very centralized example, with manufacturers like Microsoft or Adobe able to carefully control their IP. But in the open world of the WWW, this sort of control is both unthinkable, and impractical. Short of a dramatic rethinking of our definition of “value,” a solution to this issue of authenticity is becoming increasingly necessary as more and more our lives become digital. Already our money lives a digital life, and soon traditionally physical things like identity and health documents or assets will too. The line between our physical and digital worlds is only getting blurrier.
ABBA-tars and the problem of “double-presence”
One example of this is a sci-fi favorite. For decades now, avatars have been roaming the digital space in one form or another. The popular game Second Life is just one closed example, but you could even think of your social media identity as a kind of avatar. Some companies have even started to experiment with AI powered avatars, so it is possible to create an alter-ego of oneself which is technically “living” in the digital sphere. The breakneck development of AI is creating even more exotic opportunities.
Just recently, it was announced that the classic pop band ABBA has been revived through Avatars, and will play a series of concerts in digital bodies that look like their 1970’s heyday. The problem of digital duplicates, which in this case could be thought of as double-presence, becomes clear in this example. If you have a music group playing live on stage in London, then it is physically impossible that they could play at the same time (physically) in Stockholm. This makes the event special and gives it a value; fans will travel thousands of miles to be in the audience when their favorite artists play live. If a simultaneous live concert was being sold under the same artists name in another city, then obviously it’s a cover band. Fans want to see the real thing.
But what about avatars and the digital space? Without any physical barriers it is perfectly possible that avatars of a music group could play in multiple venues at the same time. With digital worlds becoming more and more immersive through consumer VR, and people spending more and more of their time literally in a parallel non-physical world, the difficulty of telling one copy from another is a problem, especially when issues of value and IP are concerned.
The blockchain solution
How can blockchain help solve the double-presence or digital-duplicate problem? There are actually several ways. Blockchain is, for example, an ideal tool for notarizing data. But the simplest solution to our examples is by leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs to track the movements and state-changes of data. A location can be determined by URL, IP address, etc. A precise timestamp can be obtained from Network Time Servers around the world, and is very reliable. All that is needed to track a digital artifact is to record its movement from one such location to another onto a blockchain. Once it’s recorded, it cannot be altered. In this way, blockchain technology can help record the authenticity of digital artifacts, regardless of how many times they may be copied or changed; the original will always be identifiable because it was the first in time, the first on the chain.
The good old software license can also be beefed up with blockchain technology. The software industry is booming right now, with more and more intellectual property in need of protection. Usually, a software program will “call home” to check if it has been properly licensed. This is how companies ensure that their software isn’t just being shared between users. If hundreds of thousands of programs are being installed on millions of devices, this is a case study for a DDOS attack waiting to happen. The solution would be that instead of calling the license server when it is booted up, a program just updated its latest location on a dedicated blockchain. It would then initialize or not depending on if there was another instance active on the same chain. Looking things up on a blockchain, in this case on a special purpose sidechain, and writing an update does not require much effort and syncing the data can be done by generic providers. This distributes the load to a highly scalable number of servers and removes stress, and potential vulnerabilities, from the licensing system. Double presence, in this case whether a software program is in use on one or multiple computers, can be securely solved.
Even though we’ve been talking about proving authenticity in the digital space, double presence can also occur in the real world in the form of counterfeiting. If products, especially important or high-value ones such as pharmaceuticals, are forged then it can have a massive impact on real people far beyond any financial loss the producer experiences. Blockchain can help to solve this by tracking the geolocation, timestamp, and ID of products as they move from the factory to the store or distributor. Now, if a forged product enters the market and lacks an audit trail or has a fork in its history, it’s easy to see that it’s not the real thing. And because of blockchain’s inherent security, it’s virtually impossible to fake a decentralized audit trail.
What started out as double spending prevention with Bitcoin can be applied very efficiently to a number of other areas with real industrial and practical relevance. As a young technology the best is yet to come, but it’s already very easy to debunk the myth that blockchain has no practical purpose.
At CoreLedger, we believe that blockchain is a practical technical solution to improve and solve a wide variety of issues across industries and sectors, which is why we try to cut through the hype and focus on real world applications, not just what’s technically possible.
CoreLedger’s mission is to help businesses of all sizes quickly and affordably access the benefits of blockchain technology. From issuing a simple token, to enterprise- grade token economy solutions, we have all the tools you need to quickly and affordably integrate blockchain into your business whether you’re a new startup or a big multinational enterprise.
Interested in our results-focused, real-world approach? Then visit our website for more information, or get in touch with us directly to discuss your project.
