BL0CKCHA1N
November 28th, 2017
Blockchain is the new wave of recording information in a way that is unchangeable and permanent. A popular use for blockchain recently has been to exchange things of value online in a decentralized manner using cryptocurrency. The issues that have arisen so far with this system is the fact that since it is open sourced, people who aren’t the most knowledgeable about coding these complex systems have access to changing the code and it isn’t as secure as it could be if there had been a few people that orchestrated the whole thing. Additionally, by having a few people responsible for the creation of the system, there is a sense of accountability that isn’t inherent when there are many people who had a role in the creation. If you take a closer look at the way the blockchain system is designed to stay decentralized, it lies upon the idea that at least 51% of people are well intentioned and paying attention to make sure things aren’t going wrong. It was this way of thinking and running things that allowed for the robbery of millions of dollars of ether, a virtual currency, in 2016. Since there were so many people involved with writing the code, there was ease in which a bug was found and exploited. By the time someone noticed that there was money at risk due to this bug, ironically on line 666, it was too late. The money was stolen in plain sight and there was nothing that anyone could do except feel sad that they hadn’t caught the bug in time. While blockchain seems promising, there are some fundamental issues that could be the crack in the foundation that causes the whole building to crumble over time.
December 5th, 2017 at 3:06 pm
You’ve hit on an argument that I’d love to see the Internet community debate: when is decentralization too much of a good thing? I believe that life is full of tradeoffs, and I find it interesting to watch when individuals get hooked on one thing or one principle as unbendable/unbreakable. The lure of the Internet and digital technologies is that you think you can control everything. You can bend the world to your will. Of course, when your perfect digital world interacts with the messy physical world, interesting things happen.
Thanks, Jay, for your participation in our class! I hope to see you around campus often. Stay in touch!
December 6th, 2017 at 3:44 pm
I’ll go a step further– decentralization is hard (I’ve spent my career figuring out how to build distributed systems, both centralized and decentralized; believe me decentralized is hard). So if a system is going to be decentralized, there needs to be a really good reason to build it that way.
I’m not convinced that blockchain has given us such a reason. It would be nice if we really could have a system where we trust no one, but even there we need to trust the implementers of the system (a level of trust I’m unwilling to give from the evidence I’ve seen).
But maybe I’ve just become a grumpy old guy. Well, I have, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not also right.
It was great having you in the seminar this semester– please stay in touch, and enjoy the rest of your Harvard career.