8 Foundations of Blockchain DNA Architecture
In the second part of this article, I look at blockchain’s key concept of trust.
The most important innovation put forward by blockchain, is the one of trust. In order to understand deeply what is radical about blockchain’s model of truth, I am firstly outlining 4 models of trust, as described by academic Kevin Werbach. These are:
The first model, peer to peer, was the first one that happened over times and it still works very well, particularly in close-knit communities. In our global world, due to the internet, peer to peer trust systems have been revitalised, but their capability for scalability might be limited. Then, the intermediary model, corresponds to a trust model based on a mediator. It has been able to scale itself due to online platforms, and their systems of digital reputation. One possible example of this is airbnb. The third model is the trust model entitled Leviathan, which is based in the political ideas outlined by XVIIth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
Thomas Hobbes’s book “Leviathan” is considered to be one of the most influential work of political philosophy. Written during the English Civil War (1642–1651), the book describes what is a social contract and rule done by an absolute ruler. Hobbes thesis was that civil war and the situation of the conflictive state of nature (“the war of all against all”) could be avoided if there was a strong, undivided government. The frontispiece to the first edition of Leviathan was done by Hobbes in collaboration with an artist, and it represents his concept of a commonwealth, as a gigantic human form built out of the bodies of its citizens, having the ruler as its head. That gigantic human form is the artificial man, the Leviathan. This is a being that humans create out of their will for a social contract, and by endowing this being enormous power: a total monopoly on the use of force and violence. Taken to modern times, the symbology of leviathan’s model of trust is the idea of trusting governments and its institutions, for example, as mediators and reinforcers of contracts.
Finally, we have blockchain as a new model of trust, which some call as a kind of modern leviathan, particularly due to the way its smart contracts operate. The metaphor has its upsides and downsides. As Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wrigh write, in their book “Blockchain and the Law, The Rule of Code”:
This, evidently, raises all kinds of questions, including important ethical ones, which would imply a whole new regulatory approach and innovation in terms of legal thinking.
In this article I describe more in detail the 4th category of trust, Blockchain as a trust structure.
With blockchain, theoretically, the trust in the system happens without the need of trusting any actor within it. This trust is based on a consensus derived from consistent behaviour over time, across a network without central control.
This solves one of the current issues of the present system which is, when a single organization or key player controls the information. If something happens to that organization you have a single point of failure. A recent example of this was Equifax 2017’s data breach.
In September 2017, Equifax reported a gigantic cyber-security breach, that alarmed the world. The company claimed that it occurred between mid-May and July 2017, when cybercriminals accessed approximately 145.5 million U.S. Equifax consumers’ personal data, including their full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver license numbers. Equifax also announced at least 209,000 consumers’ credit card credentials were taken in the attack. 6 months later, on March 1, 2018, Equifax also reported that 2.4 million additional U.S. customers were affected by the breach.
Potentially, with blockchain, a better trust system could be implemented, as automated processes of reconciliation and auditability could reduce the cost and effort of human intervention, particularly when we think of a large scale.
