:date: 2015-02-25 11:44 :tags:
This is a review of "Blockchain", an O'Rielly book about the technology behind modern cryptocurrencies:
Perhaps the reason I have organized my life to be biased towards more freedom and less money is that money is, to me, unpleasant stuff. It's unhygienic and stressfully complex. Cryptocurrencies do seem to have the former under control, but, to me, they do nothing for the latter. I'm no stranger to public key cryptography (my PGP key is from 1999) and while I think it's great that the fundamental ideas of asymmetric cryptography are being applied with enthusiasm in diverse fields, I'm not sure LaZooz and its ilk are really the harbingers of profound progress that this book seems to think they are.
To start with this book was filled with grand but hollow language. For example.
"Blockchain technology can potentially unleash an important element of creativity and invention in anyone who encounters the concepts in a broad and general way. This is in the sense that it is necessary to understand the new ideas separately and together."
"Blockchain technology could be used in the administration of all quanta."
"The specifics of how they might be different or similar are emerging, and there is presumably a lot of functionality fungibility..."
"...blockchain could become a mechanism for applied ethics."
"...just adding blockchain technology as a feature to existing... activities could be enabling."
"The concept is 'blockchain technology + in vivo personal connectome' to encode and make useful in a standardized compressed data format all of a person’s thinking."
"...units of synaptic potentiation in brains..."
"...reunderstood..."
Once past the style issues the book was pretty much a non-technical advertisement for using blockchain strategies. There is a lot of hand waving such as, "Tomorrow, the contract could be automatically completed by a software program..." While a bit nebulous, more interesting to me is the tone of this next bit, " participants... should satisfactorily inform themselves of the security details." Take that, lottery-winning Nigerian princesses! Security details would have been a practical use for this book had it contained any. On the contrary, it had problems like proposing the idea of a "Blockchain Passport - Proof of Existence" while using the unfortunate example of person who we know has at least some other form of "proof" of existence as a different person (i.e. Satoshi).
I personally am interested in blockchains for attestation. But the concept is invalid without the monetary incentives of cryptocurrency (as far as I can tell). If that cryptocurrency is victim to a mania, panic, or crash, the attestation (and loads of wonderful things this book promises) will go down with it.
One of the more grander promises the book makes on behalf of blockchain technology is more freedom. Perhaps the restrictions on consumer genomics are indeed "a classic case of personal freedom infringement". Perhaps they are a classic case of medical fraud amelioration. But is this the place to cogently worry about such issues? The idea that purer capitalism will make health care markets optimal is facile without some deeper philosophical discussion about medical ethics. Or as the book says "We do not want to reduce the qualitative aspects of life to a purely and nakedly economic situation."
Speaking of facile, thinking that blockchains will be fundamental in curing the deep problems of scientific publishing is nonsense. That problem was specifically targeted and completely cured in 1989 with a brilliant invention called the World Wide Web. And yet, astonishingly, scientific publication seems to be the last obvious application to be tentatively migrated to the web. I fail to see how blockchains will somehow overcome the scientific community's inability to use their own technologies. (Disclaimer - I work in a university research lab.)
I was actually hoping that this book would have a good technical introduction to blockchain technology without going into actual coding (the O'Reilly SSH book is a good example of that) but this book had almost nothing of value in that respect.
Although the technical details of blockchains remain somewhat vague in my mind, I did learn that Bitcoin uses elliptical curve cryptography. I'm no expert but on November 6, 2013, Bruce Schneier wrote, "I strongly believe that the NSA has a significant advantage in breaking ECC." Not exactly inspiring confidence. But let's assume this is an implementation detail which will be ironed out in the glorious blockchain technologies that emerge on solid cryptographic principles. The same solid fundamental cryptographic principles which make PGP such a broad success with everyone you ever email. You're all using PGP and having key exchange parties, right?
Though this book was mostly dreamy cheerleading, there was a tiny bit of circumspection. The Mt.Gox fiasco was begrudgingly mentioned with the understanding that such a fate is not inevitable. In fact, "Other self-regulating industries include movies, video games, and comic books." That's certainly not very strong. First of all, I truly hate to mention it but there is a despicable movie industry involving children that isn't so good about self-regulating. Of course the main industries which can't be trusted to self-regulate, (or correctly, can be trusted to not self-regulate) are banks and other industries that handle other people's money.
The book ends with pure speculative Kurzweilian science fiction. "For example, if you are an AI or a digitally uploaded human mindfile, smart contracts could possibly..." And (spoiler alert) "Even beyond conceiving of blockchain technology as a core infrastructural element to scale the future of human progress, ultimately it might be a tool for increasing the information resolution of the universe." It's not completely inconceivable that the singularity could come from blockchain technology (obviously since this book conceives it). However, after reading this book, the idea still seems frivolous to speculate about.
At the end of the day, money is about trust. Whether it's your country's central bank or Mt.Gox, the flavor of that trust tastes the same. This book tastes like Kool-Aid.