The title best describes my personal tragedy, which I have endured every day since I came into being. Indulge me, please, while I try Brancusi’s and Michelangelo’s subtractive sculpture approach of carving out ‘what am not’ until I set free the true angel of a tech that I am.
I am not a Bitcoin..
I am not an Ethereum..
I am definitely not a Crypto..
I’ll never be a Metaverse..
I am not an NFT..
I am not some play to earn game..
I am not some anonymous database..
I am neither Luna nor Terra..
And I am certainly not responsible for the recent near-collapse of the crypto world.
Phew! Finally, maybe, the real me has started to emerge. Stay with me for a bit longer, and I promise you will see who I really am.
I am an immutable, tamper-proof humble ledger, using an infinitely extendable chain of blocks, enabling time-stamped storage of different kinds of records and transactions. From the data’s provenance and through its perpetual continuance, I stand guard to its perfect auditable history.
So let me begin from the very beginning. I was born in 1991.
Haber & Stornetta laboured on solving the problem of the immutability of digital records. While evolving the solution around hash functions and time-stamped digital certificates, they realised that such a process could be open to subversion, either by corruption or by fraud.
Therefore, a way to distribute the trust by creating multiple certifiers of a timestamp was worked upon. And there it was, the first glimpse of “me, the blockchain”.
Oh! I almost forgot to mention Satoshi Nakamoto. No, I don’t intend to indulge in the mystical riddle of his identity because remember, it’s me who we are setting free here.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper on Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System proposed to layer me with a transaction system that didn’t rely on third parties and prevents double-spending through a peer-to-peer(P2P) network with public registration of all transactions that cannot be corrupted or reversed. It was a purely P2P version of an electronic cash transfer system allowing online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. According to him, the entire network could be modified through a voting system between nodes. Each node votes with its CPU power, and as long as the majority of the network consists of honest nodes. The entire system remains incorruptible.
Now some say that I was layered with an extreme liberal bent of mind requiring no intervention/control/ regulation, emphasising autonomy and the protection of rights, not only against the state but also against any private economic actors/regulators, including businesses. I prevent myself from expressing my opinion on the issue. Still, I would not shy away from admitting that I work under a layered architecture with innumerable possibilities and unfortunately, that is both my strength as well as weakness.
You layer me with legal and regulatory engineered intelligent contracts (read code), and I work in compliance with the law of the land without requiring any specific regulations for myself.
You Layer me with advanced analytics. I can offer supply chain managers a path to digitising the prevention and detection of financial crime.
Unfortunately, I have also been layered with greed, fraud and corruption. From Squid to Lunar and Terra, and many more have sucked away investors’ money. Still, somehow people are losing their confidence in ‘me’ as a technology instead of peeling off these layers on top of me and analysing the same.
I can be a beast when the layers above me make me into it, but when you peel off the same, the heart of the beast is still purely secure and untarnished data.
Once the world understands me, their trepidation towards me will dissipate.
“I am Blockchain” I am not a threat to anyone. Rather I am the last frontier of Security that everyone was looking for, to secure their Assets.
I am Blockchain – if used correctly, I can create trust where none exists, be the connection in a disconnected world, go where no one dares to go, and be the force that binds different ideologies for a common Goal….
Tapan Sangal:
An Indian citizen, an enthusiastic visionary, focused on the virtual world with a difference. Positively working towards building a virtual platform baring a society driven by culture-rich creativity, art, and talent in this vivid world. Driven towards unfurling the augmented reality to greater horizons potentially to shape our future.
