COCA-COLA, STATE DEPARTMENT EMPLOY BLOCKCHAIN
“There is just so much it can do,” said Bradley Tusk, a former campaign manager for Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, who has recently thrown his weight behind several blockchain projects. “I love the fact that you can transmit data, information and choices in a way that is really hard to hack — really hard to disrupt and that can be really efficient.”
Tusk, founder of Tusk Strategies, is an investor in a number of large virtual currency companies. He has also supported efforts aimed at getting governments to move voting online to blockchain-based systems. Tusk believes that blockchains could make reliable online voting possible because the votes could be recorded in a tamper-proof way.
“Everything is moving toward people saying, ‘I want all the benefits of the internet, but I want to protect my privacy and my security,’ ” he said. “The only thing I know that can reconcile those things is the blockchain.”
Blockchains assemble data into blocks that are chained together using complicated math. Since each block is built off the last one and includes information like time stamps, any attempt to go back and alter existing data would be highly complicated. In the original bitcoin blockchain, the data in the blocks are information about bitcoin wallets and transactions. The blocks of data in the bitcoin blockchain — and most of its imitators — are kept by a peer-topeer computer network.
The novel structure allows people to set up online accounts that can securely hold valuable personal information without having to trust a single entity that can hoard, abuse or lose control of the data, as happened with Facebook and the consumer credit reporting agency Equifax.
A range of corporations and governments are trying to apply the blockchain model — for projects from the prosaic to the radical.
Various departments of the United Nations now have blockchain experiments looking to tackle climate change, the delivery of humanitarian aid and the identity challenges faced by stateless people.
Coca-cola and the State Department recently announced a project to register foreign employees on a blockchain in an attempt to eliminate forced labor.
These experiments have drawn skepticism from bitcoin aficionados, who say blockchains are being applied to problems that could be more easily solved with old-fashioned databases.
Most of the biggest internet companies make their money from collecting personal information and using it to sell targeted advertisements. This kind of massive data collection makes them vulnerable to hackers and outsiders who want to leverage the data — as was evident when Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to 50 million Facebook profiles. And startups are using the blockchain in an attempt to pry control of all that data out of their hands.
Blockstack has built a way to record the basic details about your identity on a blockchain database and then use that identity to set up accounts with other online projects that are built on top of it.
The animating force behind the project is that users — rather than Blockstack or any other company — would end up in control of all the data they generate with any online service.
But Berners-lee has warned that the development of the blockchain could come with unintended consequences, like more activity from criminals operating outside the oversight of governments.
Even blockchain advocates say the hype has conditioned people to think that good answers are close at hand, when it could take five or 10 years for the technology to properly develop.