“A blockchain is a magic computer that anyone can upload programs to and leave the programs to self-execute, where the current and all previous states of every program are always publicly visible, and which carries a very strong cryptoeconomically secured guarantee that programs running on the chain will continue to execute in exactly the way that the blockchain protocol specifies.”
-Vitalik Buterin, creator of cryptocurrency Ethereum, early software contributor to Bitcoin

Blockchain and its related system of technologies are often evangelized as some sort of magic machine that will catapult us to the next technological echelon. What started out as a fringe interest for cyber-liberatarians and tech-utopianists has turned into a formidable giant. Bitcoin, the first major cryptocurrency based on blockchain has a market cap of 122 trillion dollars and has spawned global server farms, financial institutions, and corporations solely dedicated to its industry. It’s attracted viral attention from celebrities — Dennis Rodman, a frequent visitor to North Korea had one of his trips sponsored by PotCoin, a currency for buying and selling weed. It’s attracted high profile attention from EU and US regulators, branding ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings – a way for blockchain startups to attract seed funding) as dangerous and highly risky.

I’m not the only one who is skeptical of blockchain and Bitcoin’s potential. I believe this technology is still in its infancy. The Andressen Horowitz podcast a16 discussed that it’s in its infrastructure phase, dealing with issues with scale, governance structure, and purpose. Unlike the internet protocols, whose governance structure is quite stable, the politics of bitcoin can be quite messy.

Andreas M. Antonopoulus, a scholar who is well known for explaining issues in blockchain to governments and engineers uses a good analogy for explaining the relationship between Bitcoin and blockchain by comparing it to apps and the internet. Just how apps run on an internet protocol, bitcoin runs on a blockchain protocol. Bitcoin’s blockchain protocol and related software and wasn’t designed to scale or mitigate unforeseen cybersecurity issues. As such, the protocol needs to update and change to accommodate with current issues and needs, like how a government needs to revise its laws to keep up with the times. The process by which large stakeholders in the technology come to an agreement about the protocol is called consensus. Newer cryptocurrencies and cryptoservices that run on a blockchain protocol look to Bitcoin’s blockchain protocol for history lessons in what works for better consensus.

Bitcoin’s major stakeholders are roughly divided into three types of actors:
Exchanges – These are corporations that provide services that exchange fiat (e.g. USD, GBP) into Bitcoin. They provide the basis by which Bitcoin can be used as an store of value (like gold), a speculatory asset (like stocks), or an exchange medium (like Venmo.) These comapanies are subject to governmental regulations that either impede or facilitate its function. Consumers of exchanges are responsible for driving the demand of bitcoin, which can be measured by its price in a fiat.
Miners – These are owners of enormous server farms that perform a computationally intensive service for the protocol called mining. The protocol requires a large amount of distributed computational power in order to be secure. In return for mining, the protocol creates new Bitcoin and hands them to the miners, thereby increasing the supply of cryptocurrency in the market. Because of the specifications of the blockchain protocol, Bitcoin mining is exponentially harder to do as more people use the protocol. A decade ago, it was profitable to use your computer to mine Bitcoin, but now, it requires server farms with acres of land, cheap electricity, and expensive dedicated hardware. Many of these server farms are in China, which has a government that tries to regulate and inhibit bitcoin mining.
Pretty much everyone else – Users of Bitcoin that use it as a store of value or an exchange medium play an important role. They develop software that increases its utility, or use it for financial services like micro loans, asset liquidity, and currency portability.

These three entities need each other, and although they have differing demands on what the blockchain protocol should provide for Bitcoin, they’ve been able to work together to address major flaws in blockchain’s cybersecurity, scaling issues, and governmental regulations.

However, the political drama starts when a subset of exchanges, miners, and users a have a different vision for the purpose of the blockchain protocol. If enough people agree on a different version of the blockchain protocol, they create a fork where a separate version of Bitcoin is created. (read: fork as in fork in the road) This happens all the time, and creates a large amount of controversy and volatility in the cryptocurrency markets. Some of the biggest forks are the split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, or Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash. It’s unfortunate, but these forks create currencies with similar names that involve extremely technical and nuanced changes that are hard to understand but have profound effects on the blockchains’ functionality. These forks means that exchanges, miners, and users have to make an irreversible decision between the two options of the fork. These forks are like the Wild West of the cryptocurrency world, where people embark on an uncertain journey into uncharted protocol territory, incurring risk in hopes of creating a better system of governance, consensus, and functionality. How will these forks affect the functionality of blockchain and its implementation in widely used, mainstream services? I guess we’ll have to wait to hear back from those brave settlers in uncharted territory to see how they’re doing.

 

 

 

 

blockchain

Blockchain is an exciting new technology that has attracted large amounts of capital and developer time. According to evangelist Vitalik Buterin, it provides the following affordances:

1. High Data Availability
2. Trust Between separate entities
3. Non-specific hardware required to access

Buterin gives blockchain a jargon free definition:
“A blockchain is a magic computer that anyone can upload programs to and leave the programs to self-execute, where the current and all previous states of every program are always publicly visible, and which carries a very strong cryptoeconomically secured guarantee that programs running on the chain will continue to execute in exactly the way that the blockchain protocol specifies.”

Sounds like a paradigm shifting technology! According to experts at Andressen Horowitz, this technology is still in its infrastructure stage, and requires myriad apps and implementations until its true potential is realized. The most well known and widely used application of blockchain is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin which is the first application of the technology. At the time of this writing, Bitcoin’s market valuation has been at the hundreds of billions, containing almost countless transactions. It involves a process called mining, where a miner can exchange processing power in return for some Bitcoin. This processing power is used to increase Bitcoin’s supply and provide security. You used to be able to profitably mine on small, cheap computers like microcontrollers. As bitcoin has scaled, it requires a system of global server farms that use highly specialized hardware called ASICs to mine bitcoin for a profit.

As it grew to its current size, it has encountered numerous issues that the community has had to collectively solve. These solutions come in the form of legislation called BIPs (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) that specify a change to the protocol that members must simultaneously adopt, facilitating its execution. This simultaneous adoption is called consensus, and it mimics the way governments must come to consensus in order to affect change.

endlessly scrolling

 

Last week in an interview, Facebook founder Dustin Muskovitz revealed and criticized that Facebook aggressively works to make its app addictive to maximize the amount of attention we give it. They’re not the only ones. Across all services, developers craftily give us series of cues and rewards engineered to make us swipe, tap, and scroll more. When you walk through Doheny Library at USC, you can see students sporadically switching their screens away from work to scroll on filtered pictures of hipster food to get a hit of dopamine. What are the ramifications to a society where mechanics of our brains are massively exploited to aggregate attention for corporate revenue? It’s not only attention that app developers have been able to hack — we live in a technology landscape where it is acceptable for Facebook to accurately manipulate your emotions to improve ad placement, and for game companies to encourage children to pay microtransactions and gamble away money. The internet generation is losing its capacity to mindfully use technology, and instead is having the technology use us.

This isn’t totally new — in the book The Attention Merchants, technology law scholar Tim Wu shows us that advertisers and media makers have been exploiting the neural mechanisms of our attention and social processing since the beginnings of our country.

However, in this modern hyperconnected generation, these technologies command inordinate sway over every aspect of our media, influencing our politics, our culture, and our relationships. Compromising and manipulating these technologies have huge adverse effects — just look at the capability of Russian actors and Macedonian teenagers in cultivating campaigns of misinformation, swaying our election.

The answer for our generation could not be a Luddite rejection of these technologies. It’s practically impossible to boycott these exploitative services because their network effects are too great. With tools like Facebook, I am two degrees away from anyone in the world, and I can instantly rally my community to events or coordinate logistics via group chat. I wouldn’t be able to give up scrolling through memes and cute cat pictures during idyllic moments.

The concept of digital rights is a new one, and to be honest, scholars, governments, and corporations are still trying to figure out what they should be and how we can properly implement them. The European Union has recognized digital rights that guarantees its citizens fundamental protections and services from technology companies — including privacy rights, the right to be forgotten, and protections similar to our First Amendment.

One part of the solution would be implementing digital rights in this country. Just like European citizens, we should demand transparency from corporate tech giants whose rampant data mining and news feed algorithms may be harming our society. We should ask that our First Amendment rights are not selectively curtailed on digital forums and spaces.

Another part of the burden falls on the coders and developers of technology. Engineers and designers must be mindful of the way a technology impacts individual lifestyles, and how its widespread adoption could change a community or society. Coders need to be especially mindful of the way kids and the mentally vulnerable could be affected addictive design features.

The rest of the burden falls on us, the consumer. We must ensure that we lead healthy digital lifestyles, making conscious decisions when and why we use applications and services. We should stave off the urge to scroll and swipe and curtail our use of addictive apps. Even though the technology environment is enormously powerful, most modern services have settings and options that allow you to increase your privacy and tailor the way the media is presented to you.

Navigating the new problems presented to us by modern technologies is going to be difficult as these services and apps become an irreplaceable part of our life. I’m confident that if we can start having the discussion of the role technology should play in our lifestyle, we can be a generation that has a mindful relationship with our technology, rather than on that is conquered by our screens.