Blockchain, Jellyfish, and a developing obsession with transaction permanence.

As the people who have been following along will know, I have a photography show currently hanging at a hospital in Hudson, WI, of metal prints of my close-up jellyfish photos. They look like this:

Or, if you prefer to see them in situ, like this:

Now, the jellyfish have a problem, or rather the first batch of jellyfish prints have a problem. These photos are a couple years old, so the jellyfish themselves are almost certainly beyond problems by now. But the first seven prints that I ordered, back when I was first working on these and figuring out if they worked as metal prints, came with a very non-standard hanging system, one that just doesn't work with gallery standards for security.

This was a technical problem, one that was easily solved in the long term by ordering the majority of the prints for this show from a different supplier who could provide standard hanging hardware. But for those particular seven, I jury-rigged what I thought was a solution using command hooks.

It hasn't turned out to be a solution. In fact, they've been falling off the wall. The show coordinator has had a much better attitude about this than I deserve, and as of today we decided to just take those seven down and keep them in her office until I come to pick them all up; the remaining seventeen with proper hanging hardware serve well enough as a display.

Blockchain doesn't come into this at all on a technical level, but this is where it comes in on a personal, attitude level. I find myself obsessing about making sure that all of our communication is in a form that I can keep a permanent record of. In this case that should be more important to the hospital than it is to me: they're insured against damage to my work that isn't my fault, and this is damage to my work that is my fault, so it's probably good for them to have a record of it.

But because I'm now interacting with blockchain systems on a daily basis, I'm thinking a lot about whether there's a permanent record of things, and I'm making it more and more important in the choices that I make in the rest of my life. So when something like this happens, I'm making sure that my communication is in email rather than over the phone, and that I keep a copy of that email. I'm making sure that I communicate clearly in that message what has happened, that it was my responsibility, and that I have consented to the solution that the coordinator has suggested. I'm doing that with the current situation of them falling down, and I did that when I mildly damaged one of them before taking them to the show in the first place.

Because it just seems like everything is easier on everyone that way. I don't know if this gets me anything in the short run or the long run. I don't know if this is appreciated or if people just see me as weirdly obsessive. I've occasionally tried to nail down bets with normal people in ways that are standard in the gambling industry, and I've gotten a lot of weird looks over that. I'm guessing this might be a similar thing.

But I also think I might be among the first in a sea change where everyone starts thinking this way as blockchain becomes a more commonplace part of the logistics of their lives. If you get used to having indelible records of every transaction, pretty soon you get to expect it, and want it whenever it's possible.

I'd certainly like that with my medical records, where I only notionally have access to them and other people can alter than whenever they like. A few years ago I managed to talk a friendly physician's assistant into removing a bunch of old misdiagnoses from my records. Even though that's good for me, it probably shouldn't have been possible. But I also should have been able to record that they were misdiagnoses.

Records management is not sexy the way money is, but it's one place where blockchain is almost certain to have a huge impact in how we relate to each other and how we think about the things that we do. The more adoption cryptocurrency gets as money, the closer it becomes to existing money on a conceptual level. Even if it's wildly successful, mostly it's going to be as a technical underlayer for doing all of the same things we already do.

Records management, though, is a field that blockchain could change the entire conception of. I think that's pretty exciting.