(From the eyes of Blockchain)

The title best describes my personal tragedy, 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 crypto world.

Phew! Finally …may be, 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 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 [1] laboured on solving the problem of 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 and no, I don’t intend to indulge into the mystical riddle of his identity because remember, It’s me, who we are setting free here.  

Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper [2] 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 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 their 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, emphasizing 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 but 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 smart 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 digitizing 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 but 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, the trepidation that they have 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 properly I can create trust where none exists, I can be the connect in a disconnected world, I can go where no one dares to go and can be the force that binds different ideologies for a common Goal….

[1] Appeared, with minor editorial changes, in Journal of Cryptology, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 99{111, 1991

[2] Published on October 31st of 2008