Blockchain Smart-Contracts
I’ve been playing around with blockchain for non cryptocurrency. The smart-contract design is very intriguing as a true means to defining business contracts. I see a future where you have software engineers that specialize in building complex business contracts.
The speed and transaction capabilities of blockchain continue to be an issue. The big push for decentralization is to eliminate the major controlling factor like the Federal Reserve Bank. It should be noted that a recent article in MIT Technology Review actually suggested that this would actually have a larger negative impact from an economical perspective. I do not wish to debate the economics of a central bank for inflation concerns as this is not my expertise. I can say however, that whatever the outcome may be regarding currency this is not necessarily the case with smart-contracts or other blockchain applications.
I believe in decentralization through centralization with transparency and built-in checks and balances (programmatic regulation). If the framers of the United States Constituion were drafting the doctrine of the new nation of America today can craft a technological solution that would faciliate the balance of power in our nation. Imagine utilizing enterprise workflows and conditional logic to frame the scope of power for each branch of the government. If I remember my Schoolhouse Rock video “I’m just a bill” about how a bill is made into law there are lots of numbers but in the end the President has the ability to veto the bill. That veto power would be built into the bill workflow. The matter of constituional law interpretation will become moot. If there is ambiguity in a programmatic contract a revision may be made according to the revision workflow process.
In the end the most important system is the integrity of the capability to update workflows and rules. The core system has roles and permissions, who may modify a given workflow or set of rules. Each state has two senators. Since the senator is an internal matter as opposed to a national one. Each state will have their own respective SSO system that will authorize the elected senator with the proper national credentials. When a senator would vote in congress, they would be a trusted official through their respective state. I don’t know about you, but I just made CSPAN fun!
With my elaborate government scenario let’s go back to my initial point, decentralization. You don’t need to be fully decentralized if you have a well architected system that has regulation and proper authorization built-in. This doesn’t mean that there is a single mainframe like Fort Knox. You can have a co-located, distributed system that is self-contained.
The physical servers, databases and all the infrastructure are hardened and designed with extreme measures. The system is audited, and highly regulated. If you want to do a peer-to-peer concept you can also have regulation on top of the decentralization. Depending on the needs of the data isolation, the transaction may be more or less tightly bound. This is commonly called eventually consistant. Without getting into too much detail I would see a torrent style of nodes with tracker ids attributed to a given component of the network. In other words as the overall data corpus grows the number of identified pieces incease in size and require a certain health ratio in order to maintain operational. The data is protected with the same sort of cryptographic measures that are put in place for a block of blockchain. In this case however, the signature of the block is built upon its previous blocks. A DAG (Directed Acyclical Graph) is a more appropriate data abstracction for this approach. Using a DAG has been proposed for cryptocurrency as well. There of course it received pushback regarding the decentralization concerns.
One thing I need to point out about decentralization that is very important and non-trivial in nature. For those who are concerned about a nuclear event or some sort of worldwide event that shifts the power on a worldwide scale…and you are storing your wealth in cryptocurrency so that if your government is to fall your wealth is safe. There is a very significant measure that is not accounted for. Even if you are storing your cryptocurrency locally, what are the chances of there being a structured national electric grid to provide power. Having a generator won’t help if the government is truly in disarray. The extremely complex network that we call the Internet is not too resiliant at the core.
In the end their are risk and there is the likelihood of there occurence. I rather have a well designed self-regulating system that is centralized over the notion of complete anarchy sacraficing the integrity of the system.