Re: <nettime> Josh Hall: Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead (Guardian)

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

I have hard time understanding how is blockchain special, unique, and 
apart from other technologies, relative to dystopian outlook in the article.
The only difference between blockchain and prior technologies (public 
cryptography, including signatures and certificates, databases, etc.) is 
the verifiable permanence of the previously unknown commitment: once 
something is put there, it is hard to modify later. I want to be very 
specific here: if someone has committed something to blockchain in the 
past, and the verifier knew nothing about that commitment until the 
present, the verifier can verify the commitment once it gets interested 
in it.
This is the *only* difference. There is nothing else.

Blockchain is specifically redundant if:

a - the verifier knew about the commitment at the time of committing 
(just keep the hash);
b - the verifier wants to check authenticity of the commitment 
transported over untrusted channel, from a trusted authenticated 
committer (use committer's public key);
There are more, but these two are relevant.

While the article elaborates on real issues when computing machines 
start to mediate the totality of human interactions, these issues have 
nothing to do with blockchain, that's bs. Using popularity of the 
'blockchain' meme to prop them up is misleading and will fire back.
Every single of the enumerated mechanisms can be better executed without 
blockchain. Immutability of previously unknown commitments is not a 
factor in any of them. In each of them either (a), (b), or both, hold true.
This includes smart contracts, which are programs ran on distributed VM 
where the majority of identical results wins. The results mean 
something, but who cares? The only things the results affect are inside 
the VM itself (like transfer of funds of blockchain-based currency 
between accounts.) For anything outside VM we are back to (a) and (b).
For example, the smart contract stipulates that you must have sex with 
person X if account Z transfers specific amount to account Y. This 
happens, but you don't feel like it. So X sends the police to force you. 
This is much easier achieved by registering the contract on the sex 
police computer.
And so on.



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