BLOCKCHAIN: In the future History may stop being written/edited by the victor...
I was chatting with a friend here on steemit @thatgermandude and I found myself referring to the blockchain as like a new form of printing press, a new form of hard drive, a new distributed operating system, etc. This lead me to thinking of the future.
He mentioned that people should be able to splinter and quit the blockchain in the future and start up a new one. I told him the blockchain is not really about rules other than ideally the data is immutable. Once the block is in the chain it cannot be edited, it cannot be deleted, etc. The blockchain should allow anyone to explore these blocks. That means there truly is no secret when it is on the blockchain. It is an open audit trail. It is a hard drive that once the information is on the blockchain it is forever on the blockchain.
What does this say of history? Would we have the problem of "History is written by the victor" any longer. Would it also solve my personal variant of that quote "History is edited by the victor?"
I think it might. My prediction would be that though they could no longer censor or get rid of it the tactic would be to put so many pieces of information out there that paint their desired narrative that it would kind of BURY the history. Instead of sands of time burying ancient cities and knowledge, we would have the sands of misinformation burying the truth.
There is an advantage here though. They cannot erase or edit the truth. So it would still be there if we wished to look for it.
In the future will we have a new form of archaeology such as digital archaeology? I'd argue with the way the internet is exponentially growing there is already a reason for digital archaeologists and digital anthropologists. How much have we already buried in the internet?
The difference between the blockchain and the internet is the internet typically is built on servers that must be paid to maintain and they are centralized. So when that server or company running the server goes out of business whatever information was stored there is lost. So yes, while the internet is information expanding at an exponential rate, information is also being lost.
The blockchain can theoretically stop this loss. I truly find imagining the future with regards to history, secrets, governance, archaeology, anthropology, etc to be very interesting.
I thought some considerations on the phrase "History is written by the victor" were worth exploring in relation to the potential way that blockchain tech could forever change that.
My analog-world friends had been telling me for the last few years I should be online and expressing myself in writing for a larger audience if I wanted to impact the world in a more significant manner. One of them in particular, an existential philosopher, when I would express my concerns about how the world is developing would always ask, "Well, what are you doing about it?"
In my analog-life I do what I can in little or larger ways regularly. As an educator for many years and having the benefit of teaching in a relevant discipline, I have been able to reach out to thousands of young minds over the years and sow the seeds of critical thought about how the world is run.
But to do so digitally? It was (and is) daunting in a way that person-to-person interaction isn't, the communication isn't fluid, it is broken up into blocks. You can't see people's body language or facial expressions, something that I am very sensitive to. You don't get the fail-start sentences or innumerable other vocal indications that indicate everything from sarcasm to uncertainty and immeasurably enrich communication. I was concerned going digital would be like Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park with people just walking by.
Most relevant to your post here, Deva, I was also concerned about the ability to be silenced. Google instituted the memory hole, and while the websites are merely delisted from the search index, it is very effective for a vast majority of the population. All of the other social media sites have also instituted shadow banning or adjusted their logarithms to suppress dissenting opinions and perpetuate the illusion of consensus, which in turns affects consensus through the mechanism of herd-think.
I did try out Facebook, years ago, and one of the first things I did was share a link to Rivero's All Wars are Bankers' Wars. Within a week it hit the news feed that FB was restricting the link, YT also engaged in a removal campaign that ultimately failed because too many people kept reposting it (I was listening to Rivero at the time, I can't find a write-up on the event). To go with that, basically any centralized site can go offline etc.
When I found out about Steemit and its use of blockchain, my interest was piqued. I actually pondered the issue of joining Steemit for about three months. I was torn and it wasn't an easy decision. On one hand, whatever I wrote or contributed would be maintained for posterity, a sort of free-speech guarantee not available on other digital platforms. On the other hand, given the persecutory environment for politically incorrect, non-SJW, anti-authoritarian thought, contributing something that cannot be deleted could prove disadvantageous should a state actor decide to retroactively prosecute any new law passed regarding non-orthodox speech (the embarrassment of typos that last forever was also in the mix). As we see in the EU today, people are already being fined, arrested and harassed for having a non-politically correct opinion. In the US people are losing their jobs for daring to go against the mob tyranny of the SJW movement. (Imagine if I was at a US university and my discussion of meritocracy was lobbed into a safe space). The potentiality for raising my voice to have serious ramifications for a life hard-won (and hopefully with many years still before me) was concerning.
Ultimately though, it was the inability for my contribution to be irrevocably memory-holed (or at least the difficult nature of doing so) that convinced me to at least try Steemit. As you have seen, I have started cautiously. But some part of me suspects the world is ramping up to a showdown of sorts between the tyrants and the freedom-loving and I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I sat it out on the sidelines just to save my skin.
Blockchain technology, as you said, has the potential to revolutionize how history is viewed, written, edited, passed on, preserved and interpreted. It is a grand experiment the likes of which history has never seen before. Even if Steemit perishes, the information on the blockchain can be absorbed or integrated into another, a database that could in theory at least, last forever. That is an exciting opportunity, the very idea that these words could be read in a thousand or hundred thousand years. Well, that was a bit rambling, but I hope it was at least interesting! Yours - CZ
Well I for one am glad you are here. I also see you have a bit of a problem I share. We often write long replies that likely would have been better suited as our own post so as to potentially reach a larger audience here on steemit. On the other hand I like long replies at times. I will do so if the inspiration calls. If I then think it worthy of its own post I will sometimes go and write a post as well.
Blockchain tech can change the world, and I believe that is unavoidable. It is a tool. Like any tool it can be used for malevolent or benevolent purposes. We are on an open blockchain here, but that does not mean the government could not embrace blockchain and push one upon us that is not open. In otherwords, it could be turned against us. Thus, we must remain vigilant and continue to breathe life into the blockchains we like for as they grow and are used they become increasingly difficult for them to stop.
This blockchain for example they would need to find and stop around 100 witnesses (and growing) spread around the world. Some of these may be easier to stop than others (how many of them use Amazon for their hosting for example, those are actually easy to target, or Azure by Microsoft?). Yet they cannot stop them all and new ones can be created.
This is how it is kept alive. The top 19 witnesses are the active ones and they are rewarded a decent amount of steem for their work. That is pretty lucrative for them when steem is worth a good amount.
We vote on them and people run campaigns to be one on the blockchain.
With that said I've seen what I would call soft censorship here before, it is getting better. I call it that because a powerful person deciding they don't like something might vote it down so it only makes $0. If the person doesn't rely on funding for their work at all then perhaps that does nothing to them. If they do rely on the funding to be able to produce their piece then that can be just like someone pulling funding in real life. Were they technically censored? I think it is word play a bit, as I do see it as repression and potentially censorship when it happens. Fortunately this doesn't happen too often and with HF19 it is easier for us to counter than before.
People can also be down voted and their content hidden without clicking SHOW HIDDEN, or REVEAL. This is needed to protect against things that people should have to option to view and to rid the feeds of things like spam and such.
Yet it can also happen for disagreement which I am very strongly against. This technically is still in the blockchain if you DIG, but how many people will dig, or know how? This can be like your delisting you referenced with google.
However, this is totally open source. Nothing is stopping any of us that can code or want to learn to code from writing a variation of steemit that unearths that stuff.
The websites steemit, busy.org, chainbb, esteem, etc are themselves centralized. The blockchain (e.g. storage and file system) is decentralized.
So if they ever do attack this project they could take down steemit. Yet that is not destroying the data or the blockchain. It is open source and we could have another site up in very short time. That is much like someone walking into your house to smash your TV to stop the signal going through the air (back when we still did VHF/UHF) when all that really did is delay you until you found and tuned in another TV.
Yes, we both seem to like lengthy responses, when communication is chunked it just seems to work better for me that way. I did read between the lines there a bit that I should perhaps be formulating some of my longer replies into stand-alone posts, which is a really good idea. I don't generally know when I start a reply how long it will become.
Your insight into how the blockchain here works is really useful for me. Unfortunately I never had more programming than a bit of basic and c+ way way back in high school, and most people not even that. That is why I mentioned that for most people, very simple forms of data suppression are quite effective.
I have been reading valued-customer's "Steemit and the End of the World" series, and he has made some good points. One I raised in a reply was that any random oligarch with an NGO (Soros anyone?) agenda could buy a few million worth of steemit and staff it with a cyber downvote squad to suppress alternative narratives. This touches on the downvotes for opinions you mentioned, and I see that Steemit still has some development ahead of it. Nevertheless I am happy to have taken the plunge and be on ship.
Yes, that can and likely will happen at some point.
The only HOPE there is that purchasing so much steem drives the value of all the steem those of us that already have it up. You could power down. Such activities of down voting would likely drive some people away and cause steem to drop. You can wait for it to drop and buy more with what you powered down.
Also it is easier in the blockchain to PROVE they are doing that, and if need be to group counter up against such activities.
That said it's a pretty new world here... with it will come new problems we haven't even experienced yet.
Thanks for sharing
Your post is great, but your comment section is taking up a lot of space too.
I believe in this platform 100%. Block chain makes me think twice about what I post, because it isn't going away. I feel it preserves, at least for a bit, the integrity of the platform and prevents abuse in many, not all, but many ways. Thanks for posting!
Nice post dwin! i just wonder what how the world will embrace the adoption for segwit2X and maybe the hard fork! what is your guys opinion on that? here are two useful article that i found online and on twitter:
http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/07/16/viabtc-will-support-bitcoinabc
and this
http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/07/15/bitcoin-will-hardfork-big-blockers-will-chain-split-meet-bitcoinabc
I am not the best to ask about this. I actually am not too invested into bitcoin. I would have been if I had taken the risk long ago when I first learned of it (At less than 1 cent per coin). I can say as a user of it that they NEED something, and they need it fast. My biggest issues with cryptocurrency are the slow speed and delays. This is typically on the bitcoin side of things. So I'm all for them trying something new to see if it works. Bitcoin for me right now is just the intermediary I use to convert crypto to fiat when I need to make purchases, or as the intermediary when I feel like buying other crypto. I do not think it is the best, not even close. It simply was the first, and is the most established. You actually are using one of the best right now. The Steem Blockchain is one of the fastest in the world. I suspect EOS will end up faster, but other than that steem and bitshares are the fastest in terms of how many transactions they can do at a time. It is much faster than Ethereum, and light years faster than bitcoin.
So I am anxious for the bitcoin community to TRY something. If it doesn't work they just better not treat it like dogma and better be willing to back up or try something else.
with the lightning network we should get (near) instant transactions on bitcoin. try to beat that ;-)
hopefully we will get it though.. it's taking so long :-(
We shall see. :) If it is that fast it'll be good. Yet steem blockchain is also more than a currency. ;)
Some great musings here, friend.
I think history will still need filters and summaries... We'll still need historians with clear vision to do some interpreting, collating, and condensing for us.
But there will also be the possibility of forensic tools that will enable us to at least "spot check" the veracity of our favorite historian. I just found (or re-found?) one such tool today, a very cool "article history" display tool written by @furion. Instead of having to laboriously use http://steemd.com to check on the history of an article or comment, @furion's tool give the entire history in a nice, linear presentation. Here is the tool:
And here is an "example history" of a really nice recent article of yours:
😄😇😄
Yes, it will be harder to push out right fabrications than it has been.
Indeed! :) Have you ever read about the Xanadu vision for the internet?
I think that the blockchain is taking us closer to that early idea.
never heard of Xanadu before, thanks!
You're very welcome... it is an interesting bit of history.
Hmmm... Interesting. Somehow I missed that in my life. That's pretty odd considering many of the things I have done. I remember early Hypertext in the Mac labs. I was actually designing my own protocol I called Envision before the WWW explosion at the same time other people were working on HTML but it hadn't really come out.
They focused on human readability. I was focusing on packing information into small amounts of bandwidth so we could do big things with low bandwidth connections. I even invented my own Base 64 system to work with it and years later would find out I was only 1 digit different from MIME encoding. (1991-92 time frame I'd guess)
So why is this all Ironic? Considering the fact I was doing all of this I never actually encountered Xanadu.
That is somewhat ironic. But I guess we all view the vast array of life through the narrow slit of whatever tank we may be driving at the time... Not too surprising that we miss significant things.
I was never involved in the Xanadu project, but I admired the vision - a sort of "self-authenticating" web that would interlink all sources back to their origins, and also automatically provide access to commentaries on everything.
I had some ideas for eliminating newspapers... I was contemplating broadcasting news over FM radio sideband channels, using forward error correction to ensure delivery. I was going to build dirt-cheap decoders that used zero-crossing detection a-la Apple ][ audio input ports. You would essentially just need a radio subcarrier (think "Muzak") audio channel fed through a cable into your detector...
Big ideas, zero capital. Go figure! ;)
We could probably write some great "alt history" stories about your MIME encoding and my data distribution schemes... ;)
Yep. I had ulterior motives. People were playing MUDs and we were limited by bandwidth so my motive was gaming. I was coming up with ways to add controls, images, animations, sound, etc and be able to do it over a low bandwidth connection. :)
Mine definitely was not human readable though. You'd use my tools to produce the Base 64 feed that could generate whatever was needed.
It mostly was theoretical. My first son was born and that changed my world and I didn't do much for two years. It was in those two years that the WWW explosion happened.
Very interesting. Thanks for the backstory! ;)
Cool tool there... I'll need to remember that one.
Yeah, I hope to put it on my Library Steemit Shelf if the devs ever give us the editability that was promised six months ago... ;)
this is an awesome post. thanks for sharing@dwinblood
Our history will be written by the miner
There are no miners on the steem blockchain. :) There used to be, but they were not deemed necessary for the technology.
The blockchain has given us an opportunity to make our voice heard, the voice of the common man.
When I was watching G20 and they stopped the broadcast right when actual event/debate starts, I was like "U wot m8!?"
For me even the word "public" implies that the people are able to look into it without barriers.
The idea of achieving total transparency through blockchain is nice and we might actually have people learn from our mistakes if our history is not written by the victors.
However if Blockchain becomes the established currency people will find a way to trade outside of the blockchain to keep their secrets. Since you don't want to use force on people for non-violent behaviour it is hard to force them to use the blockchain.
Sure there might be that golden age where everybody agrees that monetary transactions should be transparent, but I think that is very unlikely to happen.
Anyone that claims to be acting on my sovereign authority, as government claims, has no right to conceal how it wields my authority from me. Either government uses the blockchain, or it abdicates.
big words much, mate?
=p
It is known
well, actually your argument comes from an emotional place. Why would others feel the same way? There might be a lot of people who argue that government should be allowed to keep secrets so that the "enemies of the state" can not easily attack it.
They are welcome to do with their authority as they wish, as long as they leave mine be.
In whatever the case may be regarding the actions of government, insofar as they claim to exercise my authority absent my agreement, they are not exercising my authority at all, and therefore have abdicated their claim on my sovereignty.
This is the natural consequence of not having my agreement to act on my behalf. I have sovereign authority, and they do not have my agreement, therefore my sovereign authority remains my own.
Under what theory can they be considered to act on my behalf absent my agreement? I am unaware of one of legal effect.
Parenthood would bea common example.
What if you are really sad and really want to press that kms button and I want to stop you. I can not stop you so i am calling an ambulance to help you. I am forcefully interfering with your right to decide about life or death of yourself, are you OK with that?
No. In fact there is a death with dignity act, IIRC, in Oregon.
Are you ok with people living, and dying, as they see fit?
The Fatherland is not presumed to be my parent under any legal theory of which I am aware. Are you stating that that is the relationship between the citizens of a nation and the government?