Cryptocurrency Art Gallery, public domain image by Namecoin
I am interested in blockchain as a distributed way of organizing things through software. I have questions that center around in which situations that distributedness, having a public ledger, and having a permanent ledger is actually useful. Also in general for any defined user group, available blockchains are all global by nature. This takes away any agency that group has concerning ensuring the availability and soundness of the technology they use. This is a threat to a group’s resilience basically (e.g. when a group in northern Poland runs their transactions on something that is dominated by opaque Chinese computing clusters). So I am interested in how to deploy blockchain for a specific group (that can then run their own nodes for the needed calculations.) The potential to subvert a blockchain in such a situation is theoretically bigger, but at the same time it is also more strongly embedded in existing social relationships which provides its own robustness.
Here’s a number of links concerning blockchain I came across and read the past few days:
Explaining blockchain
- A good read, ‘A Letter to Jamie Dimon‘, which takes as perspective that the distributedness is less effective than centralized solutions but also the key aspect for the intended user groups, as this is the only way to avail themselves of specific affordances. Distributedness is a tool to increase resistance to censorship (also read as ‘access’), and blockchain allows creating fully distributed applications.
- A talk by Richard Bartlett at Re:Publica Dublin, on whether a blockchain is decentralizing power or not.
The ICO hype is unfolding
ICO, initial coin offerings are campaigns to sell tokens for your specific blockchain application. You can buy them usually only with Bitcoin or Ethereum. What amazes me is how much money (millions) are getting invested in short times (the term vaporware comes to mind), and that minimum investments are often in the 5.000 or 10.000 Euro range.
- ICO going wrong, the Tezos example
- An ICO for trading your genome data
- An ICO for dispute resolving, that will only deliver code or apps well after the ICO
- An ICO for Electroneum, meant for mobile use and mining, getting 40 million in a short amount of time.
- Market authorities, in this case in Switzerland, getting worried
Examples
- A tech consultant using his own blockchain and tokens to determine who wants his free time the most (an interesting blockchain for a specific group example)
- Dutch Digital Delta diving into blockchain (Dutch).