The domino effect in technology
By: Thomas Abebe
Tags: IoT, Blockchain, Fintech, Supply Chain, Bitcoin

I remember the first time I went into a Best Buy and saw a 3D TV, and next to that a pair of 3D glasses. I put them on, and watched a 3 minute video that took me around the world. I was amazed. I thought, “Surely, this is a technology that will be transformational. One day everyone will have one of these in their homes.” This was 4 years ago. To this day, I don’t know anyone who has a 3D TV in their home. And if they do, they likely never use it (unless to impress their guests).

Why was this the case? Why was it that such a remarkable technology, with billions of dollars of investments from the world’s largest electronic companies, failed to live up to the hype? I explain it with a theory I have that I call the “domino effect of technological progression.” By “technological progression” I mean the chronological order in which technologies evolve. I’m fascinated with technology. I love learning about its history, but I love day-dreaming about its future even more. Over the years I started seeing a pattern in which new technologies get adopted, or not. Often times, new inventions and improvements are not adopted quickly — sometimes they’re not adopted at all. Some inventions get adopted very quickly, and others have to wait their turn. As someone who wants to know the future of technology, I needed to look at its history and come up with a model I can use to better predict the future. The domino effect of technological progression says that in order for a technology to succeed, there must be other technologies already adopted that create the perfect conditions for it. For a domino to fall, all previous dominoes must be lined up perfect distances away from one another and must have fallen.

With 3D TVs the dominoes of technological progression were not lined up correctly. And timing had everything to do with it. As a successful venture capitalist once told me (when I asked him what differentiates a successful technology from a failed one), timing is everything! 3D TVs wasn’t weren’t successful for one main reason: lack of content. These TVs gave us the opportunity to enjoy 3D content from the comfort of our homes. However, there wasn’t much content to consume. There were some 3D movies you could buy on Blue-ray, but they were few and far between. The technology that’s needed to record, edit and distribute 3D content was not very accessible — it was expensive and required specialized expertise. Sure, more production companies could have been able to make the investment. But at the end of the day, they faced the chicken-and-egg problem: there wasn’t enough incentive for production companies to make the investment in 3D content because the demand was not there. For the average person, there simply was not enough content to justify paying the high price of 3D TVs. While billions of dollars were flowing into the development of 3D TVs, there was not enough focus and strategic planning going into enabling the widespread creation of 3D content. In effect, they made the car before they made the wheel — so it ultimately failed to go anywhere.

So now, let’s look at a current example of an industry at it’s very early stages, still trying to map out a course for the future. It’s an idea that has been floating around the tech world. You’ve probably already heard of it: they call it the Internet of Things. By Wikipedia’s definition “Internet of things is a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data”(Wikipedia). What does this mean for our lives? This could connect different facets of our lives and create a highly coordinated and automated world. Imagine the follow scenario: The morning alarm on your iPhone 9 could tell your coffee maker what time to make coffee every morning. Your digital calender knows exactly what time you have to be somewhere. When it’s time, it will request a selfing-driving Uber that shows up at your front door. When you step in the car, it communicates with your phone to get data on what you like to listen to while traveling — it will then play a tune to your liking.

When you think about it, it’s basically copying the way we experience the Internet using a computer, and giving us those same experiences in the physical world. The Internet, a once novel and unknown technology, has completely transformed the way we work, play, and learn. As an extension, the Internet of Things is believed to take that same transformation technology and apply it to new smart devices all around us. The Internet of Things would be a remarkable achievement.

But with today’s Internet infrastructure, the vision for IoT could not and should not be realized. Today’s Internet is a far cry from what we wanted or imagined it to be. For all the great things it has brought us, it’s regarded as a highly insecure environment, a fact acknowledged by security experts, as well as political institutions (Benioff and Lazowska [Page 49]). Internet users are often victims of hackers who perform widely known attacks such as cache poisoning, man-in-the-middle attacks, malware infection initiated by malicious servers, and countless other. We are living “in an era of massive data breaches,” said Yahoo last week just as it revealed the company was a victim of a state-sponsored attack that compromised more than 500 million user accounts (Ng and Hautala),

At the core of the security issue with the Internet (which would extend to IoT) is authentication of identities on the protocol level. There are many layers of authentication on the Internet. One we’re most familiar with is the authentication of website membership by using usernames and passwords. For example, when you go to Facebook.com, you are first required to authenticate your identity before being given access to your account. This form of authentication, where usernames and passwords are used, requires an authenticating party — in this case it’s Facebook’s servers. Facebook keeps a record of all usernames and passwords and checks its database to verify that you have the correct username and password before being given access.

There also happens to be another layer of authentication that happens on a lower lever and so we often don’t think about. Have you ever seen a green lock icon to the left of the URL on a web browser? Most of us don’t know how or why that’s there, but it definitely makes us feel safe about the website. That lock icon is there to tell the user that “This website has been authenticated, it is the website you think it is. It’s safe.” This is the authentication of websites (or servers). But wait. In the previous case, Facebook was in charge of authenticating it’s users. So, who’s in charge of authenticating websites? Websites are authenticated by something called a Certification Authority(CA) — an entity that issues digital certificates used by a web browser (i.e. Chrome, Firefox) to verify the identity (thus, integrity), of the website. When a web browser receives a digital certificate issued by a CA, it will display the green lock icon. These CAs are private and/or state sponsored organizations fragmented all around the world, where regional and national providers dominate their respective markets. Thus CAs can be subverted by various means, through attacking their computers and taking control, by government pressure, or by bribes, to name just a few. Events like these would result in the loss of the security of the entire system — subverting all the computers that trust the compromised CA. And unfortunately this happens way too often.

This, along with other security holes in the design of the Internet, have resulted in a highly vulnerable system. To ignore these vulnerabilities and to increase this systems infiltration into our lives with IoT is misguided at best, a conspiracy to subvert our privacy at worst. In order to achieve all the good that can come from the Internet of Things, we must first fix the Internet. We must have a more secure and reliable way of authenticating identities of websites, devices, and even people. What is needed is a mechanism that doesn’t require “trusting” a company or institution to have our best interests. Ideally it would be an authentication mechanism that is based on mathematics, rather than human oversight. This is a problem computer scientists and mathematicians have been trying to solve for a long time, and the solution was recently discovered.

Suddenly, in 2009, a paper was released by a person under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto titled, “Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic payment system.” Bitcoin is a digital currency with a market cap, today, worth about $10 billion. Unlike fiat money issued by governments and handled by banks, Bitcoin is issued by a computer software run by a global network of computers. When sending fiat money digitally, our identity and bank account info is verified by banks. As a result, banks represent a central points of failure that can be subverted. This is the reason banks are high on the list of targets for professional hackers. Banks essentially perform the same function as Certification Authorities, providing centralized verification. Bitcoin had a novel way of avoiding this problem. Instead of relying on a commercial bank or central bank to verify the identities of account balances, it uses a system where a global network of computers use cryptographic algorithms and a data structure called blockchain. Blockchain is essentially a set of tools that allow for a globally distributed ledger, where writing into the ledger is done by what’s called a “consensus algorithm.”

Bitcoin gave us a monetary system that doesn’t have a central point of failure, that doesn’t depend on trusting a number of actors in the system for verification, and that can authenticate identities is a cryptographic and unalterable way. As it turns out, this breakthrough technology can be applied to far more things than just digital currency. It can be applied to any system that requires a sort of authentication or verification. And as we saw earlier, the Internet is in severe need of a better authentication system than the current CAs. Blockchain technology, the same technology that allowed us to make a secure, encrypted, decentralized payment system, can be used to redesign some of the core infrastructure components of the Internet (i.e. Domain Name System , Secure Socket Layer/Virtual Private Network’s Public Key Infrastructure, Certification Authenticity). The redesign of these components using blockchain technology would completely revolutionize the Internet by adding unprecedented security through democratized/distributed power and control.

This should be enough reason to re-architect and evolve the Internet. But there’s an even more compelling reason. Unless we are proactive enough re-architect and change our current systems, the ultimate vision for IoT will not be achieved. The wheel had to be made before the car was. 3D content creation tools should’ve been developed before the aggressive push to sell 3D TVs. The current unsecured, unreliable, and faulty Internet must be improved using properties of blockchain technology before we have every “thing” connected to the Internet. Only then can we have the benefits of IoT without having to experience the horrific negative consequences of the Internet at such a large scale.