Is it socially irresponsible to reject the proposition behind blockchain technology?
With six decades of scientific work in asymmetric cryptography, that public-private key pairs can be used to give people control of mathematically proven identities, within a global state that can support billions of people, all authenticated not by human oversight, e.g nation-state institutions or government, but rather by a branch of mathematics that has decades-long roots, built by the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, what reason is there to fully reject the proposition that “mathematical norms” can replace social norms for authenticating transactions?
Bitcoin has operated for a decade now, Ethereum for 4 years, the use of asymmetric cryptography and hash-linking has provably created a trust system based on the math and incentives that is was built on, with a decade of data to back that up. The technology works, but since it is still in its infancy it cannot support massive amounts of transactions per second, which the BitLattice project as a third generation is addressing, with the use of “proof-of-structure” to verify the integrity of “shards” of the state, using mathematical proofs made possible by intrinsic properties of lattices as metric structures.
So, Bitcoin from 2008 led to the Ethereum project in 2014, which added an idea from 1997 for smart contracts, as in, a turing complete “world computer”, and with “sharding” (Buterin, 2014) being introduced in BitLattice now 2018, this new “technology of trust” is beginning to take shape.
The amount of support, globally, has been huge. Organizations that are part of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance include IBM, Intel, Hewlett Packard, J.P Morgan, Mastercard, Microsoft, National Bank of Canada, Thomson Reuters, Samsung, Santander, Toyota, UBS.
The use of mathematical consensus makes it impossible (up to the reliability of the cryptography) to input incorrect or false data, every single state transition is mathematically proven, and most of that predates Bitcoin and blockchain technology, hash-linking for example is an older idea (with blockchain technology, the major innovation is in social consensus mechanisms, not mathematical consensus as those ideas predate Bitcoin. )
Read more
The promise of the blockchain The trust machine - The Economist, 2015
Ethereum: Towards A New BitSociety - Forbes, 2016
The Network State - teleport.org, 2015
yes i agree with you sir,awesome blog post once again.
Block chain should be encouraged at any cost,thanks a lot for your feedback.
What no, not at any cost, it should be weighed just like anything else. The theme of the post is that the technology is new, and unexplored, and also not widely understood, so it is natural that people overlook and reject it, most people have not studied cryptography in depth, nor do they understand public-private key cryptography, and so it would sound odd to them that a technology could authenticate transactions without the need for human oversight.
Blockchain is the future everyone has to come up on it in the end why not adopt it now :)
Why is the blockchain important today and will it be important in 50-100 years?