Web 3 Challenges Part 2: Blockchain immutability and publicity
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In my previous post, I wrote a quick overview of what Web 3 is and the potential role Blockchain technology may have in the future.
In today’s post I am going to explore Molly White’s lecture, and how Blockchain may be potentially abused. Before we discuss anything though, it’s important to note that Blockchain is a technology, rather than a product or a physical object in itself. It’s a method on how to store and manage information, and other technologies can be built on the Blockchain. It’s a database, and like with databases, you can build applications and store information on a database.
Blockchain Characteristics
But first, we need to appreciate the main characteristics of Blockchain:
It is immutable - this means you can only add and read the blockchain. Deleting or editing is not possible, or if it is, it’s a long arduous process and generally not worth the trouble. Blockchain technology wasn’t designed to have modifications done to the information on there.
It is decentralised - the idea is that there isn’t a SINGLE storage of information. Everyone can download the latest version of the blockchain from whoever has the latest version. If someone’s Blockchain of information goes corrupt for whatever reason, that person can just download the latest version from literally anyone else with a verified chain. This way there isn’t a single point of failure.
It is public - anyone can see the latest chain of information, download it, add to it, verify transactions and keep the chain going. You can get private blockchains, but that then adds barriers of who can see the information, add to it, etc. and you end up creating a database, a setup we already have and isn’t in the culture of Web 3.
It is pseudo anonymous - in theory, you can be totally anonymous on the blockchain if you want (especially in the context of cryptocurrency).
The idea of the future is that data will primarily be stored using blockchain, with services being built on top of well known blockchain technology. With databases, you can get different types of databases, like SQL and NoSQL. The end product for the user is the same, but on a technical level, they are quite different. There is a similar concept in blockchain right now, the top two blockchain technologies are the ‘Proof of work’ (Bitcoin) and ‘Proof of stake’ (Ethereum). You don’t need to understand what they are, but essentially, they’re two different ways of verifying a transaction has taken place.
These characteristics all play into each other, but let’s explore two of the points today, immutability and the fact it is public.
Immutability and Public are not a great combo
Blockchain and Finance
The whole idea of Blockchain is that it's immutable. This means that you can only add to the chain, and read to the chain of information, but you can't change or delete the information on the chain (not without a large amount of difficulty). It’s also public meaning anyone can see what’s happening. It’s giving power back to the people.
This on the face of it may not be the worst idea, and in the concept of cryptocurrency/finance, one can accept why this would be a good thing. It’s very rare for you to change transaction information - even if there are events of cancelled/failed payments or refunds, these are still recorded in your bank statement as transactions, it’s just they are marked as failed etc. But adding in the fact the transaction list being public opens up a huge range of privacy issues that we currently take for granted given our current set up.
Right now your transaction list of your purchases are limited to strict individuals. We as a society really do take that for granted from banks (although this privilege of privacy will go soon, as banks have learnt that there is a lot of money to be made from knowing how you spend money - it will also explain why there is a huge push to get into consumer banking from big investment banks such as Chase UK current account from JP Morgan and the UK savings account Marcus from Goldman Sachs), but on the blockchain these transactions become public.
Imagine once someone works out what your wallet is they can see your whole transaction list. Would you be ok if everyone saw your local grocery shop? The charities you donate to? How about any political affiliations you may give money to? Any debts you have? Imagine if any prospective employees or advertisers could see your spending habits? What about an abusive family member or ex? How about a total random stranger who could see your spending at your local corner shop and work out where you live and what you are doing?
Blockchain and social media
But let’s look at blockchain for what it is, a technology. It is a technology to store information and for things to be built on top of it.
For most products currently built off ‘traditional’ databases, the act of modifying or deleting information within the database is one of the most important functions of the product - and not just for legal reasons such as the GDPR or CCPA which requires organisations to delete information of its users by law on request. If you were to build a product like a social media platform using blockchain technology, a huge range of problems are then introduced into the engineering aspect. How do you change information, for example editing a post? How do you delete a post? You could ‘hide’ the information on the blockchain, but all that will do is tell the social media platform that is built on top of the platform of the blockchain to ignore the information. It’s still on the blockchain.
If it’s on the blockchain, it’s public. So even if everything is public, it doesn’t matter if the social media platform says to ignore the post that you want deleted, it will always be on the blockchain and everyone will always be able to see it. Think of all the cringe posts you made when you were younger that you have deleted, any images or videos taken of you and uploaded by a friend that you have requested to be taken down or any posts made that accidentally gave away personal information and potentially doxxed you that you quickly took down. None of these posts will truly be deleted. They will forever be on the blockchain, publicly there for everyone to see.
We haven’t even touched on the truly horrific stuff on the internet that people do and the terrible content being removed on a regular basis, such as removing child abuse and violent content (which is already traumatic as it is for current moderators). The blockchain is already being abused to hide child abuse images, and building social media sites on it will just add to it.
Granted that not everyone has the technical expertise to go to the specific blockchain and look for the information (and know what the information is that they are looking for), but bad actors on the internet who are creating malware and infecting devices definitely have the capacity to learn how this works - talking about bad actors and malware, imagine someone could make some malware that embeds itself into the blockchain, gets distributed to everyone. If you want to delete the malware, you can, but it will always be on the blockchain. Using blockchain to distribute malware may seem a bit extreme, except for the fact back in 2015 people were already researching this stuff and presenting on it.
Moving away from more dramatic examples - a game developer recently made a game on the blockchain, but unfortunately there was a glitch. Normally, you would just patch the game, however as it was made on blockchain, the developer had to remake the game from scratch without the glitch in it. Nice.
There are work arounds to immutability
Blockchains can be ‘mutable’ in spirit. There are techniques and methods out there and currently being experimented with to be able to tackle the problems highlighted in this post. But they’re all work-arounds and have issues of their own. Immutability and making things public is integral to the blockchain technology - not being able to change the information on the chain and allowing everyone to see it adds to the inherent trust model and therefore it being the model that values ‘truth’ over everything. As soon as you make a blockchain private you are giving control to select individuals, and making the blockchain mutable means unauthorised individuals could potentially change the information on the chain, therefore adding doubt to the whole information management process.
With all this said, we haven’t even touched on the other two aspects, decentralisation and pseudo anonymity which have issues of their own. But that’s for next time.
If you have a better idea than I do, if I’ve missed out anything or you think I am talking absolute rubbish, feel free to reach out either by commenting on the post, or by emailing me on tanvirtalks@substack.com
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