Blockchain’s Utopia
By: Tom Farren
Tags: Future, Technology, Future Technology, Blockchain, Progress

When Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the revolutionary technology we now call the internet in 1989, he could never have known that 30 years on, his brainchild would support platforms that directly contribute to the rising number of depression and suicide cases amongst teenage girls. He could never have known that Islamic terror groups would use the global connectivity to broadcast their message of hatred and in the worst cases, human executions. He could never have known that hackers would be able to target individuals for their most private information and companies for their data, tearing a whole in the fabric of trust that our species had taken millennia to develop.

He — as an individual, or even those working on the project around him — could never have known the implication this advancement would bring, positive or negative. Or could they?

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Humans are hard-wired to seek out progression, it is deeply embedded in our molecular structure to evolve and develop on a constant hedonic treadmill. Our long-standing pre-requisites of advancement are that our creations must be a faster, more powerful and more a cost-efficient way of reaching the same destination. Cars were the advancement of horse and cart because they met these idealisms. Television was perfectly placed to take the place of radio because it solved the problems of its predecessor and then some.

When Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency in 2008, he had these motives in mind. He solved a previous financial issue, the Byzantine Generals Problem by the use of distributed ledger technology whereby consensus was reached before a data block could be added to the existing chain. In that, he created a currency which indeed offered faster transactions, a more powerful network and a more cost-efficient system.

Everyone’s focus is on the new advancements that these revolutionary technologies can bring to our world, whilst attentively neglecting what problems we may face further down the line. On approach to a new technological advancement, our state of effervescent and anticipation clouds our rational forward-thinking judgement so that we begin playing without planning our first move. Top chess players are known for their ability to store multiple moves and their corresponding future scenarios in their head. Why can we not adopt this mindset when creating our future as a global society?

Social media causes depression amongst young people, cars cause air pollution which affects the levels of carbon in our planetary atmosphere, space exploration causes orbital debris.

“Progress creates problems. That is the Frankenstein effect, that whatever you create has the potential to control you.”

And so, the question I pose is, what will be the tarnish on the legacy of blockchain technology? In other words, what will blockchain cause?

Many commentators have predicted blockchain technology to have a greater impact on humanity than the internet. If that is so then, like a chess player, we need to forward think our moves. How can we prevent these unintended negative occurrences by stopping their progression at the source? This perspective is not with the attitude of glass-half-empty but more with a cautionary mindfulness.

The internet is the underlying technology, the foundation for platforms such as e-commerce social networking and content-centric sites to be built upon. When explaining blockchain I find it helpful to compare it to the internet and point out that they are both base-layer connectivity networks for platforms to be built upon. Blockchain supports cryptocurrencies, which like websites, all have different end use-cases for the consumer. One of the core principles of this new asset class is that of cryptography.

“By passing our trust from the volatility of human emotion into the artificial arms of mathematical algorithms, we are effectively giving up control.”

There will be no hiding place in a decentralised tech-fuelled world where each and every user of the network is extensively monitored and critiqued on even their smallest habitual actions. If we become so data centric and concerned of our metrics that every last point of information is scrutinised in a full-proof database from our food intake, to our exercise regulation, to our travel, then our very free-will will become questioned. And this time, not be one of our own.

Emotion of our species will become a highlighted flaw, a rusty cog in the machine. Currently we live in a society where the elite are sheepdogs and the people are the sheep. The powerful direct the people into eco-chambers of captivity which they are able to be control in mass numbers. What happens when this suggestible direction turns into dictatorial demands by species with the pre-requisites needed to outperform us? In this case we would enter a truly utopian nightmare!

Eventually, humans may very well become obsolete creatures, excessive consumers of the planetary eco-system because we are devoid of the skills needed to create or even maintain our hyper-tech infrastructure. In his book ‘Money’, acclaimed author Yuval Noah Harari said of this century that “we might witness the creation of a ‘useless class”, one that “will not be merely unemployed — it will be unemployable.”

Will governments, banks and the world’s elite let loose of the reigns they have held for so long leaving a gaping hole in their stomach which power once filled? Or maybe they will place their attention with the technology and join them in this power shift. Currency is the glue that sticks us all together and, in this move, to adopt blockchain technology on a mass scale, we are taking the stick out of our hand and placing it into the hands of the unknown.

“In the original Bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi said of central authorities that “they will go with the flow, or they can build barricades.”

Maybe that is not just true for one corner, but for all sides of the trust-triangle.