Searching For Blockchain Ubiquity?

Blockchain momentum is growing in a way that seems to be unstoppable, and that’s okay. I’ve seen so many commentators now heralding its arrival as the dawn of a new internet era, and so many people announcing that they’re going to be basing everything they do from now on around it that we’re going to have to deal with whatever flavour that era happens to be for the medium term at least. I’m not here to argue the pros and cons of the trend, just to deal with the consequences that it might bring.

Whenever we decide to make anything ubiquitous we need to also make sure it is available.

The internet is a perfect example. There can be absolutely no doubt that having everything connected to everything else is likely to result in a net benefits. Of course, there are a lot of challenges – both to making it happen and to making sense of the resulting birds-nest of information that will arrive in our laps – but in the long run, and given we solve the other problems, internet equals good.

That overwhelming sense of goodness however, applies only for the cases in which the question of availability is not an issue. What about those people who have no internet access? How about locations where internet access is not possible, or where the quality of service is too poor to make it usable? These are not just geographical issues, they’re socio-economic too. They’re environmental and situational. You know there’s no internet at the bottom of the ocean, right? Or down a coal mine, or in the back of the supermarket when you’re trying to look up the ingredients for chicken curry? Or when your battery is dead.

As the internet has become primarily (let’s face it) a channel to market/revenue stream, the size (and comparative wealth) of the connected community and the laws of diminishing returns do mean that penetrating those difficult to reach portions of the population is likely to take a long time. In fact, until 6G, 7G, 8G – who knows - and until our brains are somehow wired in at birth, there will always be people and places where the internet’s availability is questionable, and hence its ubiquity and goodness are denied.

Maybe the Internet of Things should be called the Internet of Nearly All The Things…

But this Internet of Nearly All The Things is good enough to enable the establishment of Blockchain.

Just to make sure that we’re all on the same page here, I’m talking about Blockchain based applications in general rather than just internet-wide cryptocurrency based Blockchain applications, although those are included by default. A number of Blockchain participant nodes connected in a service overlay network share a ledger of information and use a consensus algorithm to ensure that the information in everyone’s ledger is accurate. Include enough nodes and spread them around a little and it becomes really difficult for anyone to tamper with the information – particularly when you throw in some really tough to crack cryptography – and by removing the single broker from transactions you not only take out the single point of failure issue, you also break the monopoly of power some of these brokers used to have. Democracy (sort of).

These Blockchains might be spread all over the internet or just all over your corporate network, it doesn’t really matter for the purpose of the functionality - as long as the independence of each node can be assured - but the idea remains the same and it works just fine as long as the connecting infrastructure continues to work, whatever that happens to be.

So what about the unconnected community? Ok, people with no phones and no internet possibly aren’t all that interested in mining Bitcoin anyway, but if everything else (as the internet gurus are suggesting) goes Blockchain-aholic? Those without access could be severely disadvantaged. Where’s the democracy now?

Okay, this is not a socialist, “digital divide” rant. Far from it. I already stated up at the top that the internet is good. We do need to strive to connect the remainder of the population one way or another in order that everyone gets access to the same quality of service that it brings in many ways, no matter their geographic location or socio-economic background. That’s a given.

I am more concerned about the blamelessly disconnected. The places where the internet can not reach. A solid, high availability network of data centres may well host the majority of nodes in a Blockchain, but if the node where the transaction is happening just doesn’t happen to have a connection then it cannot take part. As we push out to the edge of the IoT with smaller, less power-hungry, less processor-intensive sensors and devices and a predominance of wireless connectivity the levels of guaranteed availability begin to decrease. Perhaps in many cases it is not going to be possible to host the Blockchain node applications inside the node itself, and instead some sort of intermediary broker will be needed, handling requests from remotely connected edge devices over significantly less available communications media. This is where the vulnerabilities lie…the weakest link in the chain? And not because we’re going to have the chain “hacked” and the valuable contents of the ledger stolen, but instead because of the effective denial of service that could be instigated by preventing elements of the chain from participating.

The internet or even just the network has become like air. It’s just there.

Very rarely are we seeing anyone ask the question – how does it get here? While we’re placing ever more dependence upon generic network connectivity provided by the internet and its various modes of delivery for potentially critical applications – some of which are life critical – we need to take a look at how disruption of those modes of delivery could affect our critical applications. We’re so intent on staring at the gold inside the vault that somebody could come along and demolish the bank.

At RSO we have numerous technologies for securing your wired and wireless networks, reducing the vulnerability of the critical applications your organisation relies on, and providing backup solutions that keep your business running even when the infrastructure it depends on might not be as reliable as you need it to be. Get in touch.