Hard fork

The blockchain is a relatively new and wondrous thing. What could be better than a system that maintains absolute, objective truth? The essence of objective reality is any party anywhere getting the same result, without context or qualification. Mankind has advanced outrageously using this criterion in the scientific realm.

So it now goes for financial transactions. An exchange of value occurs, for example, a home is purchased for x bitcoins. The property deed is transferred to the purchaser who now has irrefutable ownership, as the proof is recorded and embedded in a block, chained to previous and subsequent blocks of recorded transactions captured by a multitude of independent storage devices. Once in the chain, the transaction can’t be altered or erased without going into every recording that captured the information, and into the many threads of activity that led to and from the transaction that transferred ownership.

This is great. No more theft, fraud, or any other means of illegitimately wresting value from its rightful owners. But we live in a world where might makes right. This kind of marketplace can exist only where there is enforcement. Picture your home seized by the IRS. They didn’t buy it, they took it. Let it be known that this happened in the blockchain. Now we have property seizures recorded.

A diamond ring is another example. You bought it, own it. You have proof of this, as the purchase becomes a matter of record. The ring is stolen, then sold to someone. That transaction is now recorded in a blockchain. Maybe this would become more difficult when the internet of things identifies every thing, so you can’t sell a ring identified as being someone else’s. We’re not there yet. This stolen ring is now recorded in a block as someone’s legitimate possession. Meanwhile, the first set of recordings about the ring continue as the owner claims its loss to her insurance company. The insurance company, after payout, becomes the owner of said ring, technically. But without a way to uniquely identifying the ring, it is unlikely that the will ever get possession of it. This then is a hard fork of sorts. Which is the correct set of information concerning the value of the asset?

In these heady days of innovation and growth, in the fertile grounds of a still stable global financial system that is still ultimately the arbiter of value, since it is backed by coercive capacity, it is easy to go off on utopian narratives about how power is no longer in the hands of financial institutions. Once firmly established as a means of generation and managing value, it is easy to imagine the appropriation of blockchains by the global financial hegemon (picture America “owned” by the Indians in the time of Manifest Destiny). The financial industrial military complex is already curating reality for the masses in politics, culture and religion. The transfer of control from the free incubators will not be an impossibility, especially since the strongest and most legitimized narrative will come from the hegemon itself. The transfer of ownership to, and redistribution will be duly inscribed in the blockchain without the necessity of altering any record.

We’re in the building and growth stage of crypto currency and blockchain and it’s exiting and fun. Enjoy it while it lasts.