Blockchain: The Private YOU

I'm Claire Evans. And this is You. A podcast about the intersection of technology, humanity and identity brought to you by Okta. This week, we're getting into blockchain. This new thing everyone seems to be talking about, but nobody seems to understand. Today we're going to answer all your questions about this mysterious piece of technology like, what is blockchain exactly? Why does everyone seem to have a totally different explanation of it? Will blockchain affect me? How do you use it? And why is everyone suddenly getting rich off of cryptocurrency? Let's start at the beginning and ask an expert.

My name is Saya Iwasaki, and I work at Bitski where we are making it easier for applications to bridge to decentralization to the blockchain.

Why is it called blockchain?

It's called blockchain because it's essentially a series of blocks being "mined." So, all the information is accumulated into a block that is mined every 10 minutes or so approximately. And so, it's a continuation of blocks of information, and therefore, block chain.

If science definition doesn't exactly clear up blockchain for you, you're definitely not alone. I honestly don't really understand it myself. And yet, blockchain is only becoming more pervasive. It's scary, I think, or is it? I mean, that's really one of the big open questions for me. Do we really have to truly understand how a technology works in order for it to become part of our everyday lives? When it comes to the internet, for example, how many of us can explain a secure socket layer connection? Or the difference between writing a program in Java and writing a program in JavaScript? The main reason any of us have even heard about the blockchain is because of crypto currencies like Bitcoin. On a very basic level, blockchain is the technology that makes Bitcoin work. Since there's no physical metal coin in your sock drawer, crypto currencies can exist only if you can show that a particular piece of digital information belongs to you and only to you: that's what blockchain does. It's a kind of digital accounting ledger that shows that I, an actual human person in the world, and the owner of this piece of digital information until such time as I choose to give it to someone else. And when I do give it to someone else, the blockchain will make a note of this and so on and so on and so on down the line.

If you still don't fully understand what I'm talking about, let's take a look at one way that blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are being used in the actual real world to help actual real people. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 465,000 unconvicted individuals are currently detained in jails across this country, many of them because they can't afford to pay bail. It's equal parts heartbreaking and enraging, which is why Grayson Earle and Maya Binyam decided to try and do something about it.

My name is Grayson Earle, I'm an artist and a professor at Oberlin College, and I'm a co-creator of BailBloc.

Hi, my name Maya Binyam. I'm an editor at The New Inquiry and the co-creator of BailBloc.

Grayson and Maya were tired of hearing the same old story play out around cryptocurrency like, rich white guy buys Bitcoin, gets even richer. So, they decided to shape a new narrative, one that can make a difference.

BailBloc is a software that you can download onto your computer, and you act as one of many people in this distributed project mining cryptocurrencies.

Crypto mining, that's the process that keeps the whole cryptocurrency system afloat. Using complex algorithms, computers verify every transaction that comes to the network and adds it to a long public ledger called the blockchain. The reward for doing this essential maintenance is what else? Cryptocurrency. So, what does BailBloc do with the money you mine?

All of the cryptocurrency that's mined, by having this application running in the background of your everyday computer use, goes towards getting people out on bail, paying bail for low income and marginalized people.

Low Income defendants, no matter if they're innocent or guilty, can find themselves sitting in jail for days, months or even years while they await trial. Earle and Binyam realized that with many bails set as low as $1,000 or less, they could make a real, tangible difference in paying them off. But they'd also found a way to insert the cash bail problem into the new cycle.

Something that we hoped to do was to route some of the attention that was being given to crypto currency mining toward bail.

There's a lot that sets BailBloc apart from your average activist project, by downloading a simple app that runs passively on your computer, you can join an army of users raising money with spare processing power to bail out complete strangers. The decentralized nature of this program, dispersed anonymous users working together to support dispersed anonymous beneficiaries, gets to the very core of the ethos that the blockchain was founded on. It puts the network in control, and it takes the vanity out of philanthropy.

Yeah, we tend to perform a lot of politics online: clicking like and sharing things, and that can be useful to some extent, but it's not going to seriously transform society or anything. So we need to dream up novel ways of using technology that doesn't just line the pockets of Facebook executives and so on.

Typical philanthropists, I feel, often want to, like, get the sense of personal gratification from like seeing the poor person that they've helped or whatever. We're really just trying to raise money and we're not trying to earmark any money for any specific kind of person who has been incarcerated.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly how many people BailBloc has helped, but with varying bail amounts and revolving bail, and progress is slow going, but Binyam estimates that they've been able to pay for at least seven people's bails since launching the app.

Because if 10,000 people use this, we would be able to potentially bail out like every single person in a small community somewhere or in its most recent iteration to seriously liberate people from this new sort of like Trump era anti immigration stuff.

We recently relaunched the project in November, so a year out and we partnered with the Immigrant Bail Fund, which is an Immigrant Bond Fund in New Haven, Connecticut. So, right now, actually, BailBloc is generating money to pay Immigrant bond.

The key to BailBloc's success is building a network of users.

If People feel like participating, they can go to bailbloc.thenewinquiry.com and download it.

That's Bloc, B-L-O-C, by the way.

Okay, from a benefit standpoint, I feel that yeah, it will ensure authenticity, okay, transparency, and it will take out most of the middleman, so everyone across the globe will be aware of what is happening.

Well, the upsides that I've heard of blockchain technology is that it's impossible to reproduce, so if you don't have the necessary keys, AKA the, you know, whatever part of the cryptology allows you to come to whatever is your blockchain, you can't reproduce it, so it's secure in that aspect.

Okay, the craziest application of blockchain which I did not think was practical was, I don't know if it's practical okay, honestly, but I thought was really weird was distribution of drinks through blockchains. There is some club or pub or something, they are launching a new service in which they can actually distribute drinks through blockchain, and I have no idea how that would happen.

This is You, a podcast at the intersection of technology and identity. Today we're talking about blockchain, and meeting people who are using it in unexpected and exciting ways. But let's take a step back for a second, blockchain is still a new idea to most of us, and that means that we're still figuring out how it can be used, and more importantly, when it should be used. Let's go back to Saya Iwasaki of Bitski, and hear some more about blockchain's potential impact on our lives. So, what are some of the most ludicrous, out there, applications of blockchain that you've ever heard of?

Okay, so there's a lot there. There's really powerful applications of it in finance, being able to cross borders, being able to move money without having trust, without having to trust the bank or pay really high fees. But at the same time, there are also applications of it that are ludicrous just because the tech isn't there quite yet, but the vision is really big, for example, putting refugees on a blockchain, which sounds very noble, and it sounds like it makes sense because, of course, for people who don't have citizenship or who don't have ties back to their country, how can they carry their information? But there's a missing part of the conversation where most people in that state, unless they're in a state where they have basic needs, they're hoping for water, safety, security, they're not really downloading an application and being like, "Blockchain is where I should store all my information so I can carry it around." So, in that sense, having a central authority still makes sense because they can manage that information, so that whomever is stuck or they need to survive, they can focus on their survival. Now, not to say that the idea itself is ludicrous, but it's just the conditions around it that make it a little bit challenging.

And obviously, there

I mean, that's, kind of, how it always is in early days of the technology, people get so excited about what's coming down the line that they, sort of, lose touch with what's right in front of them.

Right. Yeah, I mean, there's the whole,

Wait, can you define trustless?

Yeah, so the whole idea of blockchain is that it's a decentralized system, means that you don't have to require trust in order to interact with another entity because everything is basically logged in the network. So, when you all have information of what's happening in that network, you don't need trust, because you're all confirming that everything is happening, and everything is being vetted and everything, as a collective, is being decided that it's truth.

The idea of something being trustless is the question, what does it mean to be trustless?

To be trustless means that you don't have to go through a middleman to make any transaction happen. Trustless means that you can be in a room 100 miles away, and I can wire you money, and I don't even have to know who you are, what you do, what your bank information is, I can just say, "Okay, I'm sending you the money." And you in the other room can receive that money from me without knowing who I am or what my background is because you trust that okay, this money is being sent and I have the money now and the transaction is complete.

It feels like trustless is, kind of, a misnomer on some level, I mean, it's allowing us to trust each other without having to trust some intermediary.

Right? Yeah, it's less trustless as it is like peer to peer trust. The idea that right now, a lot of these bigger financial transactions occur through organizational interactions, but what if you could just completely distribute that so that it's more on a singular level, person to person?

So, how does that, I mean, not to jump immediately into the large philosophical ramifications of this, but I mean, how do these decentralized trustless peer to peer technologies change our relationships to one another?

Mm-hmm (affirmative). It can change our relationship for better and for worse. I mean, what put blockchain and Bitcoin on the map, early on, was Silk Road and the idea that people were able to buy weapons, people were able to buy like a hitman and drugs on Silk Road, and so, it did get this bad rep of when you don't have to know... when you can stay anonymous, you can do whatever you want. But at the same time, that also is the power in it, in that when you can have peer to peer trust, you can engage beyond just under some, kind of, country or organization, you have more power as an individual to decide what your actions are, and how you distribute your money, how you distribute your data, your information, all these things. And so, it does push power back to the people to decide what they do with themselves, and that is the power of it.

Do you see a place for blockchain on a sort of larger, perhaps even governmental scale? I mean, are there ramifications that are negative or positive for, I don't know, blockchains citizenship, for example, voting? I don't know.

I do know that there's a lot of conversations on self sovereignty, being able to have citizenship on the blockchain. But it goes back to everyone needs a buy in, and the government has to really pull the strings on that, and everyone has to make sure that they're on the blockchain, there's no missing citizens, and all of that. And the other thing is because whatever is on the blockchain cannot be removed from the blockchain, people also wonder, "Do you want your citizenship on the blockchain? Do you want your full identity on the blockchain?"

Once someone is on the blockchain, one is forever on the blockchain is what you're saying?

Yes.

Can you just walk us through that?

Yes. So, you might hear this word immutable, and the whole idea of blockchain is that it's immutable. Whatever goes on, the blockchain can never be removed. And so, it has a question of what do you want on the blockchain? What data do you want to live on the blockchain forever? When you add personal identifying information, then you can start tracing people to the transactions, the behavior is what they've done, and obviously people are working to be able to make that a little bit more private, to make sure that all that information isn't leaked. But some people, they don't want that on the blockchain, they don't want any of that on the internet. And so, if that's the case, if you have a population of that in a country that doesn't want that, then it means that not everyone has bought in, and it means that the country itself can't use that system. And I use 'country' because that's how the current global system is shaped: nation states.

It does get interesting when we think about how do we remove nation states? How do we start blurring the lines? There are no countries, we're just a citizen of the world, then that becomes a different thing. But at the same time, when you go to another... when you go to the US, you have border control, you have to go through immigration, as long as those systems are in place, they have to buy in as well into the whole idea of, "I'm a citizen of the world, this is my identity." So, right now a lot of your citizenship is to an actual place. And when that happens, there's a lot of moving parts that need to come together in order for that to actually be a thing.

Right. Right. So, we're a long way away from blockchain citizenship? As romantic as it sounds.

Yeah. I mean, it would be amazing if you're just like, "Yeah, I'm citizen of Earth, and I can go anywhere." And maybe one day we'll go to Mars and say, like, "I am from Earth, here's my information." But obviously, there's still so many political problems around that.

Blockchain is a relatively new innovation, but it's a solution to problems that have been around for a long time like, how do you assign ownership or value to an idea or a concept? But how can something be an original if you can make infinite identical copies of it? These kinds of questions are very real and very present for artists, musicians like myself, and other creatives. People who, for a long time, were only able to make a living by selling physical copies of things, and who now have had to adjust to what might be generously described as a post material marketplace. Mitchell Chan is an artist whose worked deals with these exact ideas, here he is.

I'm Mitchell F Chan, I'm a new media artist based in Toronto. A year and a half ago, I created an artwork called the Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, and that now exists entirely on the blockchain. As an artist I always deal with, I like to call it, Minimum Viable Materiality. I make sculptures out of water vapor and clouds, or I'll make sculptures out of just a single spinning string and see how much I can create the illusion that there's something substantial there. And I was thinking, "How can I make artwork out of something that's even less? What is even less substantial than clouds?" And I came across well, you know, monetary policy. It's something there's no substance to it whatsoever, right? It is only a promise, it is only an elaborate system, it's completely a societal construct. And so, I thought, "Well, that would be a really interesting thing to make artwork out of."

At first, Mitchell was curious about how financial systems are constructed, and how he could recreate them and use them as a medium for his art. He began to ask himself, "Well, how do you let go of the physical connections between our notions of value and material?" And then he stumbled across blockchain.

My understanding of blockchain comes from a counterintuitive place. And I really started to understand it in the context of conceptual art, and in particular, when I would look at this artist Yves Klein. What most people would know Yves Klein's work from, is his deep blue monochromes. This blue became so synonymous with him, he actually patented it, he patented a color, and now it's called International Klein Blue. And if you use it, I don't know probably one of his ancestors makes 30 cents or something like that, but important because we come back to the idea of ownership in conceptual art. So, it's the beginning of this exploration of really what can you own? Can you own an idea? Can you own a process? Can you own an aesthetic? Can you own a feeling? Yves Klein was always interested in how his artwork could be liberated from the physical thing, so his next idea is nothing at all. So, the zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility, and it's an empty space that he claims is imbued with the sensibility of the color blue. And beyond just this wacky idea, he also has this really interesting idea for how it should be transacted. So, he has this idea that you can buy the zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility, that's nothing at all, only for a quantity of pure gold, which is hilarious because that is the most physically present form of value that we have.

So, for a chunk of gold, he gives you this little receipt, okay? We could think of it as a token that says, "All right, on such and such a date you purchased one of these zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility." And he made a set of rules for how these could be transferred, and for how the cost would increase with each subsequent reissue of the artwork. And that seems, sort of, arbitrary, but I think that what he's getting at is he's trying to play up the difference between a transactional value and the arbitrariness of that, and a real fundamental value, a real creative... a like artistic value or spiritual value. And I think that his understanding that a transactional value is not even linked to any sort of physical reality, it is linked to how concise or restrictive the set of rules are that govern transactions, and how well they're enforced.

He was making sure that there was a system in place, and that's all that you need to make value out of something, and blockchain is the ultimate representation of that. Blockchain suggests a world that values rules in consistency and patterns more than anything, and actually actively distrusts central authorities, does not trust central authorities to keep their promises.

Simply put, value, at least in part, comes from scarcity, because scarcity creates demand. And this is exactly what clients project and blockchain, and really every currency in the world is based on.

Scarcity is one of the ways that you assign value, value is one of the ways that as an artist you make a living, and continue to make work, but how does it do that? Well, it does that through a mechanism that we've probably heard a lot about today: trusted third parties. If you have a trusted third party, you can be sure that there's only going to be, say, five copies of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle out there. And you can be sure that two of them always belong to museums. But it means that if you are an artist working in this, you got to get to the point where you are working with a trusted third party, where you are working with, you know, a Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone, a real trusted name. Blockchain would be exciting for someone who is interested in the value of digital artworks, who doesn't work with a trusted third party because you can, essentially, guarantee the provenance of your artwork, you can guarantee it scarcity.

Mitchell says it's unlikely that we'll see a massive wave of blockchain inspired art anytime soon. But for him, the intersection between art and blockchain has been fascinating to explore.

I don't think that blockchain has really led to a variety of different avenues for artists. If anything, it's right now, I think, providing more avenues for the people who try to sell or distribute digital art like for instance, last summer, Christie's auction house had a big summit on blockchain, and it's pretty clear what they're going to try to do there, right? They see this new way of ensuring value in digital artworks, they can create this new market but they got to be at the front of it.

Art is such a funny place for the idea of trustlessness to manifest itself. I think, it's an interesting and fascinating space to explore trustlessness because in art, we can break all the rules, and we can play these fascinating mental exercises, we can imagine Yves Klein in the current day with blockchain, but art is one of the fields that most requires trust because whenever you purchase an artwork or even whenever you view an artwork for free in a gallery or a museum, we are buying into the artist's story. Let's go back to the example of Yves Klein and his immaterial zones of pictorial sensibility. And it really just feels like someone who is trying to scam you, doesn't it? Like this character... You walk into this room, into this gallery, and there's nothing there at all, like nothing at all, it feels like a scam. And there's no way that you can't guarantee the provenance of the artwork, you can codify its transactions, none of that will matter, except that... For me, personally, I read books about him, I looked at the arc of his career over the five years leading up to this, and I see the in the context of his study, and I think, "Oh my God, this guy believes this. He actually believes in this." And then and only then do I want to participate in it. And unfortunately, you can't do that with an algorithm.

I don't want to keep anything online forever because, in my opinion, like, Facebook friends, I don't know half of them. And what's kind of creepy is that everyone's like, oh, the government this and FBI that and in reality, I don't want anyone to have something forever.

I would like to keep pictures saved forever because if it stayed online, it's always saved into a cloud, and it's always there, so you don't have to worry about deleting some pictures you really want to keep. Instead, you can always transfer it online and it'll be there forever: as long as you want.

What I would be scared to have saved forever online, I guess, would be personal information as far as Social Security number, stuff like that. I don't want that to where just anybody can get ahold of it.

I don't know it's a tricky question. You know, what to keep secret, what to keep safe and what not to, I don't know.

Blockchain may be difficult to understand, maybe, but we can all drive our cars without understanding the mechanics of internal combustion. So, let's make this as simple as we can, back to my interview with Saya Iwasaki. So, looking forward a little bit into the future, what is the utopian manifestation of what blockchain can be? And then what is the dystopian scenario?

The utopian version is that people own their information, people can move around the world freely, they can send money to whoever they want, they can send money to their mom living 5000 miles away without having to pay, like $200 in transaction fees. And people have this ownership, this feeling that they own themselves, their information, their data, they're free to move, and, you know, we coexist happily, very utopian. The dystopian world is where there's a really big gap between the people who have bought into the system and the people who haven't. For the ones who understand the technology and who can continue building applications on it or who can continue thriving on it, they get wealthier, and there is an income gap, there is two worlds: there is the advanced world and then there's the world that's left behind. And I can't really pinpoint exactly how that will look like, but that's always the problem with tech, is the gap: the wealth gap ever increasing? I mean, the internet has made that gap so much higher, so much bigger as well. And so, could that same thing happen at the same rate or even more exponentially with blockchain or any other technology with AI, Machine Learning, VR, AR? Who knows? But that's the big question. The dystopian version is that, the left behind population and the population thriving off of knowing.

Top three reasons why I should get into blockchain, like, what are the top three reasons that I should start caring a lot and reading a lot about blockchain and trying to figure it out?

So, the top three reasons why you should get into blockchain is that, one, there's a lot of people who are designing the system, so having a voice in it, regardless of whether you are an expert in it, can make a difference, potentially, in deciding what is usable, what is beneficial, what is necessary and what might not be necessary. Two, the idea of true digital ownership is really powerful. And being able to understand how you can contribute to that, and how you can also partake in that, you know, as a musician or as an artist, how can you own and gain from whatever you create? That's really powerful. And three, it's moving. The train is moving forward and decentralization is happening. There will be a future where, it will become a norm, so understanding it earlier, and hopping on that train early is probably going to be a good decision down the road. Regardless of whatever happens, at least, you know more about it, and you're prepared for whatever might happen.

That's perfect. You made it sound a little bit terrifying: get on the train.

I know, oh, well-

No, but you sold me on it. I feel more empowered right now after talking to you and understanding a little bit about the implications and also how this works.

Yeah, I'm excited for it. There is a lot of work to be done. And obviously, there are very dark possibilities, but equally, they're very optimistic possibilities as well. And knowing those two, I think, allows for a pragmatic perspective on deciding, okay, like, what is the future and how do we work together? So hopefully, I didn't scare anyone off.

Not me.

It's a very exciting space. The community is really strong and passionate.

This is You, a podcast brought to you by Okta. And I'm Claire Evans. Thanks so much to our guests: Saya Iwasaki, Mitchell Chan, Grayson Earle, and Maya Binyam for joining us. We'll be back next time, to talk about how governments are using innovative technology around the world, and how startups in the US are trying to kick start our own government into doing the same. Don't forget to subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.