Blockchain Thinking

Don’t ape in !!

Just as the Internet was a revolutionary occurrence in reality that triggered a rethinking of self, world, materiality, embodiment, the individual and society, subjectivation, objectification, potentiality, temporality, and other philosophical topics, blockchains too warrant philosophical inquiry.

Satoshi Nakamoto realized that entirely different solutions would be required for permissionless public blockchains built on trustless transactions.

When we talk about blockchains we are talking about digital life.

Blockchains have limited interaction with physical life.

This distinction is important as people usually mix these two and try to apply blockchain into physical transactions.

P2P Peer to peer is basically a network term that describes a network or communication model where communication between peers,devices, nodes, individuals, etc. is managed directly and the process is not controlled centrally.

In other words, the network is decentralized and all peers have equal power and perform the same tasks.

With P2P, blockchains can be decentralized and distributed equally between peers without any central administration involvement.

A distributed ledger is in essence a kind of database that is shared across the network between peers.

A peer or a participant can access this database record and can also have an identical copy of that database.

Any change made to this ledger (database) is distributed (copied) between peers so that all peers can witness that change.

This is a very important feature of blockchains because it allows for a consensus between peers (nodes), meaning that peers must be aware and approve all changes made to the ledger.

A distributed ledger is in essence a kind of database that is shared across the network between peers. A peer or a participant can access this database record and can also have an identical copy of that database.

Any change made to this ledger (database) is distributed (copied) between peers so that all peers can witness that change.

This contrasts with centralized ledgers where a single (central) authority approves all changes.

Normally peers must have their own private keys assigned to ledger records of transactions, to be precise.

Those keys are used as signatures for transactions; if someone tries to alter the transaction on one node, the signature will not be valid anymore and the entire transaction will be invalid, not approved by other peers and thus discarded.

From a security standpoint, this means that cryptography has been used to provide security services that make this blockchain secure against tampering.

The most critical attribute of a blockchain is that it is updateable only via consensus. A consensus mechanism refers to any number of methodologies used to achieve agreement, trust, and security between peers across a decentralized computer network.

Consensus gives the power of decentralization where all participants agree on a consensus on the status of the ledger.

In this scenario, no central authority is in control of updating the ledger.

Instead, any update made to the blockchain is validated against strict criteria defined by the blockchain protocol and transactions are added to the blockchain only after a consensus has been reached among all participating peers/nodes on the network.

How do you decide what can be added to the blockchain?

A blockchain achieves consensus by its community members engaging in multiple rounds of voting until they achieve sufficient agreement, even if some members are not responding or are responding maliciously.

“It’s about reversing the plutocratic and autocratic trends of the physical world, where very small numbers of people have great influence and power, and instead creating a place where everyone has autonomy and agency.” S. Appelcline.

Just as we think that people should have autonomy in the blockchain world, we think they should have that control in the real world too and that means not censoring or controlling.

Transparency is one of the key issues in today’s world.

If everyone notifies everyone about the latest transactions and people in that blockchain marks every transaction as legitimate or fraud, nobody gets a chance to do any malpractice.

By My