The Poetry of Blockchain — A Celebration of Lateral Thinking
I’ve always been into hacking since the late nineties, when being less than ten years old I casually discovered IRC. At that time, curiously browsing through IRC channels, an entire universe unrolled before my eyes, made of swirling stories of how, being clever enough, you could use computers to make them do things that they weren’t supposed to do.
I have to admit, I’ve never been a good hacker. Nevertheless this experience had, at least on me, an everlasting educational value: I learned the importance of lateral thinking and the fact that, just because something is made or sold to carry out predefined tasks, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those tasks are everything it can do. All in all, this is the underlying principle behind hacking: With enough work, experience and practice, you can bend things around you to fit your needs. This led me to the idea that computers weren’t just made to be used, but were also a mean to express myself, that I could use them to define my own ecosystem, that I hadn’t to necessarily live in someone else’s. Shortly after, I realized that this kind of reasoning applied also to mathematical models: They weren’t as dogmatic and inflexible as I had been taught at school, since the very own language of Mathematics allows for any sort of convenient modification of its structures to made them applicable in different contexts. Since then, I decided to dedicate my life to Mathematics, which is still what I basically do now at Statebox: In a way, one could say that hacking defined my entire way of living.
However, if you ask everyone that has been in the scene long enough, you will be told that now things are completely different. Surely, systems in the past were much, much simpler than they are now. To make a good hacker, this is fundamental: A simpler system can be better understood, and understanding things deeply is a key step to acquire the necessary skills to modify them according to one’s needs. Making meaningful and rewarding experiences on simpler systems allows novices to gradually venture towards more complicated ones, refining their skills little by little.
On the other hand, computer software today is incredibly complicated and overengineered. If, at least naively speaking, vulnerability of software tends to grow along with its complexity, it is also true that exploring it to spot said vulnerabilities becomes increasingly time consuming. This sets the bar high for novices, because it translates in the obvious fact that one needs to be quite skilled before any hacking experience will start bearing the first fruits. Moreover, the idea that “With enough work, experience and practice, you can bend things around you to fit your needs” has educational value only if things start bending — albeit just by a little — quite soon after you start working hard. This motivates people to stay focused on their progress and on their work. But if the amount of work you need to put in before you see the first results is huge, then you’ll probably lose motivation before you get there.
Another crucial difference is that, back in the days, one could learn the principles of computer and telecommunication hacking just by lurking on IRC, or via mailing lists. More importantly, the community was still small, and not really on anyone else’s radar. “Cyberwar” wasn’t really a thing back then and there was still a big chunk of incredibly skilled people that were just hacking for fun. Also, such incredibly skilled people weren’t too difficult to reach, earning their respect was easier, and, accordingly, getting incredible insight by interacting with them was easier too. Today many of the most skilled hackers out there use their skill for a living, they are often employed by government agencies, and are overall incredibly jealous of their knowledge. If this makes perfect sense from a market perspective, it again sets the bar very high for novices: Not only the required skills they need to hack are higher now, but they are also increasingly lonely in their learning process.
Add to the mix the fact that software today, albeit being often open source, is designed with a black-box philosophy in mind: It is meant to be used, not to be explored. To be aware of this note how the user experience in operating systems evolved: In a modern smartphone or tablet, even taking a peek at the filesystem is a non-trivial task, and basically no phone is rooted by default (this is a true WTF thing for any hacker worth their name). It is evident how we are moving towards systems where the machine’s inner workings are concealed, and this is backed up by the idea that “the average user doesn’t want know, you need to be a developer to really care” ...But how am I supposed to become a developer if I am denied — by design — the desire to satisfy my curiosity, if I cannot learn how a machine works just by wandering into it?
The last piece of misery in this story is given by the decline of IRC, in favor of other platforms first, and social networks then. In the past, chats like IRC were organized by means of thematic channels: You wouldn’t decide who you wanted to talk with, but what you wanted to talk about. You would join a channel— say, #mathematics — and you would find a bunch of random, often unknown people, with an interest for maths. When platforms such as MSN became popular things changed, since you would need to add people to be able to chat with them. This turned the internet into a lonely place, where users would chat only with people they already knew. Also, the chat experience shifted from being mainly group-centered to be based on a one-on-one kind of communication, further killing enriching interaction.
All these things have had an incredibly negative impact on hacking and on its inherent educational value, turning curious but still largely inexperienced people into a bunch of lonely renegades with little chances of meeting each other and possible mentors. When this is not the case, it still happens in a market-focused environment, which has nothing to do with building one’s skills out of curiosity. In this respect, any old-school hacker would consider hackatons just plainly repulsive: Most often than not, they are nothing but a way to harvest people’s will to learn and motivation to get sellable stuff developed for free.
Ok, but where does the Blockchain get in this story? Well, the poetry of blockchain lies in the fact that it is still wildly underdeveloped, that decentralized infrastructure still can’t do much aside of very simple things, and on the fact that almost no decentralized system is industry-ready at the moment. Yes, enterprises have a big interest in Blockchain and things are changing quickly, but as they stand now very few, well established enterprises would give making their system totally decentralized a serious thought before going for it.
Many people complain about this being the current state of affairs, but if you look at it from the perspective of this blog post, it is wonderful: People have again something moderately simple to study and understand; they can still obtain quite big results just by developing basic skills; communities are still open enough to allow people to learn from experts and one can still consider many of them as peers, not as unknowable demigods. Moreover, being economics an integrating part of decentralized development, novices have a huge drive in putting work into being curious: Never as today one could make a pack of money just by exercising lateral thinking, either by developing a new, simple idea, or by finding a clever hack.
Think about what happened to the DAO: The vulnerability spotted back then was remarkably simpler, and hugely rewarding. When the hack happened, I felt like I had traveled back in time: That something that simple could be so destructive had an intrinsically old-school-hacking flavor to it, and even made it somehow romantic.
If this makes me think that much has still to be done to make Blockchain usable — and we as Statebox are surely part of this process — it also makes me happy and optimistic when I look at the future: Right now, people have the chance to learn again, and to refine their skills by means of old-school experimentation.
How does Statebox fit into all this? Well, we strive to be as hacker-friendly as possible. If we aim to get industry-strong software, we also aim to keep it simple, to keep it open, and hopefully to maintain close contact with the community out there. We want our software to be reliable but we also want it to be easily modifiable to fit other people’s needs, so that anyone can experiment with it, and spot vulnerabilities if there will ever be any. All in all, we want to give people not only a chance to use it, but also to learn with it, and to exercise their lateral thinking.
The poetry of Blockchain will die eventually, as it gradually turns in the usual gray over-engineered blob of code, driven by financial interest instead of sheer curiosity. This is simply the natural course of things, and I don’t think much can be done about it. But until that happens, we have the chance to delay the process as much as possible, to keep software lean and open, to preserve the poetry just for a bit longer. And hopefully, we’ll be able to set an example, and to prove that in a sea of chaos there is still a way to do things right, by backing up a development philosophy that takes responsibility in considering coming generations of users not just as clients, but as learners and peers as well.
