Why Blockchains Matter for Students
“In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
In early October 2017, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Learning Machine, a Cambridge-based innovation firm, piloted a program whereby a cohort of 111 MIT students had the option of receiving an authentic and easily verifiable digital diploma. For students who chose to opt-into the program, diplomas were made available for download and timestamped on an distributed, global network with 10,000x the computing power of the world’s top 500 supercomputers. If this network were ever attacked and MITs servers were taken offline, graduates would still be able to have their diplomas verified because the network is powered by thousands of incentivized volunteers (nodes) from around world who are responsible for upholding it’s secure and immutable records .
Nothing like this has ever existed before and it’s an incredibly big deal as it solves one of the world’s most challenging computer science problems.
Bitcoin’s Blockchain is the underlying technology behind the verification, receipt and record of the diplomas and virtually every Bitcoin transaction in human history. This technology has spawned a wave of transformative innovations, mushrooming from the concept of an open, peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It’s a lot to wrap your head around at first, but so was the internet, and like the internet, blockchains will become ubiquitous, forever changing the way we securely register events, like the birth of a child, land ownership or the purchase of a concert ticket. Our world has much to gain from blockchain technologies, as its promise is to build a more trustworthy internet and solve important problems that aren’t being solved.
What makes MIT’s pilot program so exciting is that its software and many other blockchain-drvien apps are open source, meaning anyone can use, copy, modify, and distribute its source code, free of charge. There is no blackbox, everyone has access to the “recipe”. Non-traditional educators, artists and trading card companies like Upper Deck can create shareable certificates that are programmatically verified without a trusted third party or central registrar. This saves all parties involved a lot of time and virtually eliminates the threat of fraud on the system. If Upper Deck believes they can create a superior blockchain for their baseball cards, they are free to do so as well because the code is available for everyone to modify and build upon. Unlike many of the popular apps we use today, open source software is built by a community of developers from around the world in a collaborative environment, offering full transparency into every contribution and every line of code. There are no opportunities to hide features that deceive users and violate trust.
Blockchains matter for students, because you are the tip of the spear for the future.
Vitalik Buterin dropped out of the University of Waterloo to build Ethereum. Facebook was created in a Harvard dorm room, the first iteration of Snapchat was built by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Brown at Stanford and all of these products first hit it big on campus. We all have the choice of whether to accept or reject the next wave of innovations and it’s really important we continue to ask ourselves, is this application making the internet more free and trustworthy? Does the app respect my privacy?
If we look at the data below, many of the apps we use today do not satisfy this criteria.
- September 2017: Facebook is fined €1.2M in Spain for how it collects data related to it’s users’ ideologies, sex, religion, and personal preferences for advertising purposes.
- August 2017: Uber confirms it will stop collecting post-trip location data about it customers after Uber employees were caught tracking ex-girlfriends and celebrities.
- 2013: 3 billion Yahoo! e-mail addresses are compromised, allowing hackers to steal personal information from every registered Yahoo! user. Yahoo fails to publicly acknowledge the intrusion until 2016.
- 2014: Telecommunications giant, Verizon, is ordered to pay the Federal Communications Commission $7.4 MM for using the personal information of its subscribers to fuel advertising campaigns without their knowledge or consent.
- To understand if your information has been compromised in a data breach, please visit https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Unfortunately there will always be snakes in the grass, attempts by others to undermine our privacy and hackers waging unrelenting attacks on our infrastructure. In the not-so distant future, attackers will be thwarted off as more and more organizations transition from private and third-party data centers to highly encrypted, decentralized computing networks. Many users are also migrating from the monopolies to privacy focused alternatives, like DuckDuckGo for search and Brave, the blockchain-based web browser which prioritizes user interests by blocking ads and invasive trackers by default. Embracing blockchain technologies is a step in the right direction, but it’s not entirely the silver bullet.
While there is no shortage of hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchains today, it’s very important to note that there are a limited # of impactful decentralized applications (ÐApps) that are currently in-market today.
In a new report published by Deloitte, the consulting firm highlighted that in 2016 alone over 26,000 open-source blockchain projects were created on the Github software development platform, yet only 8% are active. This information should not come as a surprise or discourage when you consider 9 out of 10 start-ups fail ~100% of the time. What Deloitte’s findings tells us is that there is a large and growing community of developers and entrepreneurs that believe their ideas run better on a blockchain.
For many of us, the fast-approaching holiday season represents a time for giving. While many will make contributions to charitable organizations, there are those who will not due to the lack of accountability and transparency across many NGOs. Joseph Thompson and his long-time friend and colleague, Niall Dennehy have decided to do something about this. The two Irish entrepreneurs are at the helm of AID:Tech, the first company in the world to successfully deliver aid to Syrian refugees completely and transparently using blockchain technology. AID:Tech is working with governments and NGOs around the world to build traceability into the donation process. This is accomplished by providing digital identities to the 2.4 billion undocumented citizens around the world and issuing tokenized vouchers that donors can track in real-time to understand exactly where every cent of their donations is being distributed.
This is only Chapter One. Imagine if we changed our existing reality to a blockchain-driven reality where immutable and transparent supply chains were applied to gun control, carbon credits, conflict-free diamonds, fair trade coffee, sustainable seafood or other causes near and dear to your hearts.
I believe we can do it.
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