What Even is a Blockchain?
“I just bought this sick NFT” or “I just bought (enter arbitrarily large number to show off my money) of a new cryptocurrency, you should too it’s going to the moon” are some things you may have heard around the internet recently. Inevitably, if you’ve looked slightly deeper into NFTs or crypto you’ve run into the term blockchain. You probably don’t even know what a blockchain is if you clicked on this article! On a surface level it may seem that blockchain technology is used exclusively for NFTs and crypto; however, there are a plethora of different scenarios where a blockchain implementation has proven to be useful, especially when it comes to security. Our lives become more digital by the day, which has inevitably made data privacy and security one of the key challenges that our society is attempting to perfect. To solve these issues we need reliable, robust, and decentralized security designs that cannot be corrupted by corporations. It is becoming evident that blockchain technology has the potential to aid in solving our current data privacy dilemma along with other societal challenges.
First, let’s talk about what a blockchain actually is so that we are all on the same page. In short, you can think of a blockchain as one glorified ledger. A traditional database may keep separate entities to represent each individual transaction. Blockchain does the same, but with a twist. Every transaction can instead be represented as a ‘block’ that contains a reference to the last created block, timestamp of creation, along with other information about that particular block. The real beauty of blockchain is this chaining process. Because all of the blocks are strung together, previous blocks cannot be altered after they are on the chain unless over 50% of the network approves of the change. This ensures accuracy and preservation at all points when attempting to retrieve data. One question that usually comes up around now is “what happens if the computer the blockchain is stored on goes down?” Blockchains are stored in a distributed system, a group of computers working together on a task. Since there are multiple computers that manage our blockchain, if one has some technical difficulties it will have a nonexistent or very negligible consequence on the system as a whole. This ensures the reliability and is a good design strategy for a lot of systems.
The process gets slightly more complicated when applied to cryptocurrency… Only slightly though! Remember when Bitcoin first came out and everyone and their mother was trying to ‘mine’ Bitcoin? Well, for a little while, it was fairly easy to mine Bitcoin. The thing with mining is that it gets progressively harder to do as the blockchain grows in size. In the case of a currency, this helps to prevent hyperinflation of the coin which would render it useless. During the entire mining process, individuals are attempting to use their computer(s) to solve for the nonce, or number only used once. The nonce is the solution to a math problem that takes a long time to solve, but is relatively easy to check its correctness. The first computer to correctly solve for the nonce gets the block and the rest of the blocks are notified of the new block’s creation, ensure its validity, and finally the block is added to the chain. This process is repeated over and over, only slowed down by the difficulty of finding the nonce.
Blockchains pride themselves in being extremely secure, resulting in there being a lot of trust backing them. For the most part this trust is completely warranted and only in a very specific scenario is the blockchain not secure anymore. As we talked about earlier, in order to change any aspect of an earlier block we would need over 50% of the nodes to approve of the change. This raises of the question of whether someone can hack the blockchain, take control of 51% of the nodes, and then go back in the blockchain and change the data to suit their desires. While it is theoretically possible that this can happen, in practice it actually ends up being extremely unlikely along with likely not yielding the results the hacker(s) would have hoped for. For a coin with any significant value, if such a drastic change in block-ownership was happening the abnormalities would be found very quickly. After the issue is found all that needs to be done is revert the blockchain to the most recent normal state and render the abnormal blockchain as useless. Even if the bad actor were to gain control of 51% of the nodes, there will be no value since that blockchain has no value after the revision. This idea of gaining control of 51% of the nodes is called the “51% attack” amongst people familiar with the concept.
The average person most likely doesn’t know what a blockchain is, and if they do they’ll immediately relate it to cryptocurrency. For developers to start implementing blockchains in unique, innovative ways, the public must first be informed. This is not the way that innovation usually happens; however, with the day and age of information that we are in, the public having a certain base knowledge about the technologies that impact their lives is essential. There are endless opportunities for technology to change our lives, and more people than ever believe that now. When technology is changing critical facets of our lives we need to keep everyone informed before, during, and after the development process. For example, using blockchain to make election voting more secure would result in total election transparency and a potential decrease in election/voter fraud, all without compromising user privacy. This would directly affect every American’s life and would indubitably face major criticism; however, criticism, discussion, and revision cannot come without the necessary prior knowledge of underlying technologies. There are also products in development to secure the process of sending legal documents and other data, along with a new system for storing medical records. These are just a few of many blockchain-based projects that are looking to revolutionize existing industries.
Now, knowing what blockchain is, you may be wondering whether this technology is valuable to companies and if it has helped return profits. In fact, it is quite rare to see or hear of a company implementing innovative blockchain structures for their needs. The reason? There are a variety; however, a large player is money. A company doesn’t increase their revenue with tasks such as rewriting their security codebase. So what does the company do? They skip over it and continue working on client-focused features that will bring in more revenue. To me, this as a totally missed opportunity. With a variety of studies showing that users are caring more and more about their data and its protection, having a new and secure solution to a security issue is extremely marketable. In reality, management tends to be short-sighted and puts their developers to work on other “more important” projects. It is imperative that moving forward companies listen to the consumer in all aspects other than just the ones that are profitable. Letting profitability and business agendas determine the rate at which we innovate is detrimental to progression and development of new technology in general. A slight aside, but this very reason is why there are plenty of software engineers not wanting to work for a “top” tech company. The projects are often not very interesting and even the work that is cutting-edge and engaging, the corporate development process is painfully slow. A slow and planned out development process is good for business stability; however, it often leads to bored engineers that would rather spend their time innovating than working a 9–5. In short, corporations are literally losing talent because of how they run their company and organize their priorities.
To be clear, blockchain is still a relatively new technology and it definitely isn’t perfect. There are a variety of reasons why you wouldn’t want to use it in your system. For certain companies it wouldn’t make sense to spend the time and money on implementing a blockchain. Plain and simple. Additionally, due to the nature of blockchain it is extremely inefficient. With several users validating identical operations there is a lot of wasted time and resources. It’s also not very applicable in a lot of contexts since it is an immutable ledger, meaning that only data that should never be changed could be stored on a blockchain. This limits the number of use cases and bears the question of whether it’s even worth the implementation. There are also some current ethical issues with blockchain. Because of the recent media boom surrounding cryptocurrency and NFTs, there is a lot of information out there. It is important to not give in to media manipulation, possibly claiming that blockchain can do more than what it actually can. A similar phenomenon happened at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were people who spread information of a “Plandemic,” some of which still believe that the pandemic was planned. Social media in the current age has allowed information, right or wrong, to reach anybody on the planet. Groups of collective like-minded individuals “were instrumental in spreading viral medical misinformation” according to internet researcher Erin Gallagher. Staying alert for misinformation and finding the real information is a challenge at times, especially during developing events or things that we don’t know much about.
To be completely transparent, I don’t know how likely it is that we see a lot of blockchain implementations that revolutionize industries. What I do know is that it is a secure, decentralized, ledger that boasts great data-privacy traits while maintaining anonymity. Anonymity is an interesting trait, and is often misconstrued with the narrow definition of “un-name-ability.” Kathleen Wallace in her paper Online Anonymity instead suggests that you can clearly identify someone without knowing their name if you know enough information about them. This information may come in various forms, but at the end of the day your data identifies you and is largely a result of your internet usage and corporate tracking. This comes back full-circle as to why we would want to implement blockchain technology in the first place: a place to store information without being tracked. Now whether blockchain can solve this specific issue of anonymity over the internet is a completely different discussion.
Blockchain isn’t going anywhere, and we will likely (very slowly) see developments in the technology and applications. I think it is likely that blockchain is merely a piece of the entire solution to our privacy dilemma. I hope to see more work being done by both researchers and corporations to adequately address the issues at hand. A secure, trusted, and well-engineered answer is precisely what our increasingly technical lives need.
Sources:
Class Sources:
Wallace Online Anonmity 2008
