Travels in Cyberspace – Homepage of Leonard Forlanini

2018/10/03

Blockchain and the Crisis of Trust

This post will be short for a simple reason: there are fewer reasons for blockchain technology to exist than you think. And it is one of those few but fundamental reasons that may drive such a technology towards global adoption.

If you think I’m talking about cryptocurrencies, then think again. True, cryptocurrencies were the initial impetus behind blockchain technology, but they may also end up threatening it. Moreover, it has been proved that crypto assets have required blockchain based ledgers to exist.

With this brief caveat in mind, I propose that we move on.

The one reason that could really drive the paradigm shift of Internet services is the crisis of trust. Only if (and when) people realize that the services they use every day are no longer affordable will they demand a technology that supports the data ownership shift. The cost of their social media connections, purchases, emails, document managers, chatting systems and financial transactions is paid in kind, with the currency of personal identity and private data. If people do not understand such a flaw – or just accept it – there are fewer applications that justify the existence of public ledgers and blockchain protocols. Period.

From a technological perspective blockchain is expensive, resource consuming, slow and will always have more impact on any other component of an engineering system. Blockchain is not a shortcut. Nothing can be made sustainable, except in the case in which an entire society feels obliged to shift towards the tech that solves the crisis of trust.

Not even ICOs are sustainable. In fact, they are the polar opposite of sustainable. An ICO is a way to fund the development of a service that might be used in the future, provided

it makes sense
it works
it is efficient
and there is a need for

Those who invest in an ICO are supposed to be the ones who are going to use the service they are putting their money in.

Otherwise they would be engaged in little more than speculation, which means that it is more apt to characterise them
as speculators rather than investors. Those who are interested in the service and pay for its development now are not
supposed to pay for it in the future, when/if the service is available.
How is this supposed to make sense, from a
financial perspective? How sustainable would such a company be?
As it turns out, it is financially impossible to pay back ICO investors if not in kind, by letting them use the decentralized platform.

With this said, it becomes natural to think that the many accelerators, Venture capitalist firms and investors who have been pushing to ICO everything are usually looking to cash out by selling the dream to someone else, as soon as the project they invested in becomes more credible (Usually, the project never gets more credible. The team might do).
In those rare cases when such people act honestly, it turns out they know very little about the engineering aspects and the societal impacts of blockchain technology. Nor it seems they care.

In both cases better staying away from them and hope for consistent forms of punishment whenever they egg on folks to throw money in their own pockets.

There is no blockchain without people. There is no ICO without blockchain. Got it?

2018/05/282018/09/29

Cryptocrash is inevitable

The only reason why bitcoin is still alive is because nobody is really linked to it, except for the imaginary Satoshi Nakamoto. The biggest fault of ethereum and the entire crypto ecosystem is having a leader, someone who is considered the ‘inventor’.

Whatever has an identity is vulnerable and subject to attacks, critiques and censorship. Terrorism is yet another phenomenon without a face. Hence, powerful and impossible to defeat.

What really is blockchain?

Blockchain is a (super hyped) technology that is actually very simple to implement, despite what they want you to believe. Make a block, hash it, make another block in which you store the hash of the previous and the current block. And so on. That’s basically it.

As for consensus algorithms, there’s not really much to say, except for some weird assumptions that are considered in two major schools of thought. One is “we do not trust everyone and everything will be fine as long as there is a majority of honest nodes”. Another is “as long as we trust a few validators everything will be fine”.

From these two extremes one can build consensus algorithms that sound fancy but are in fact just a mix of the two.

Blockchain is the least engineered technology ever created. Forcing the participants of a network to manage an append-only storage and keep crunching numbers to stay secure is the result of a very poorly engineered concept that cannot scale, is not sustainable and is slow. Doomed to fail as more participants adopt it.

What is happening?

Novelty has mesmerized only those who are not really familiar with the basic concepts of cryptography and computer science, namely hashing and distributed system (p2p and the like). Hype is doing the rest, since March 2017, with a long series of so called ICOs (initial coin offering). I’d better define ICO as the acronym of the most creative exercise to raise capital by promising innovation and disruption from a colorful slide deck.

This in turn has given word to an increasing number of charlatans who populate the many meetups and conferences. These very people pretend to tokenize any business and usually propose such nonsense blathering about technologies they barely understand. As if there were anything to understand. Armed by mottos like “we are changing the world one block at a time” they usually speak with the same energy and enthusiasm of those who know the Truth.

In fact, too much money and resources have been allocated for a technology that is only promising without really executing. Think about the hours spent on hackatons and programming stuff that many times makes little sense, and electricity consumed mining blocks that provide no value to any business.

What will happen?

A gigantic crash. Just like the dot-com bubble of the late 90s that wiped out a number of companies and almost annihilated those that eventually survived but took 10 years to get back to business. For sure it established a new order, frankly a better one.

The world keeps repeating itself, and those who are lucky/old enough to have seen it the first time should not be surprised. A cryptocrash is the antibiotic against charlatans and garbage. As all antibiotics, it is inevitable. Be prepared.

2018/03/102018/03/14

A reminder on (your) security

Read this as a reminder.

Speaking about security, privacy and encryption, companies and governments have always made dirty deals (especially in USA).

How cryptographically signing content will protect us all

The idea that AI can create content that humans are less and less capable to distinguish from reality is no longer sci-fi. As it happened for images, already well counterfeited by photo retouching software, the next will be video and definitely sound.

Soon it will be impossible to claim the authenticity of what people watch and listen from the Internet. The problem of fake-news is only the beginning.

Asymmetrical cryptography can solve this issue by signing any message that one sends into cyberspace.

With asymmetrical cryptography, two communicating peers – Alice and Bob, will have a (pub, sec) keypair each. Any content encrypted with Alice’s pub key can only be decrypted with Alice’s sec key. Equally for signing, any content that is signed with Alice’s sec key, can be verified only with Alice’s pub key. No other keypair is required to verify that content has been truly created by Alice.

Signing audio, images or video before publishing will make it impossible for AI and malicious actors to manipulate content and create realistic data on behalf of someone else. If AI can create one’s voice and speak on her behalf, it will never sign the fake voice with the signature of that person. Unless that person’s secret key has been stolen or loss.

Signing content must become a habit. For this to happen, signing content must become approachable to the masses and easy to do.

2018/02/232018/03/14

Genesis

Let’s start from the beginning.

The world has gone towards unpleasant directions.

People have not embraced cryptography.

Banks do still exist.