A “birdie” hole!

I have been enjoying the summer tremendously as you can tell from my tan if you happen to see me (otherwise, believe me!) 🙂 During my week off, I played golf for 6 of the 7 days, mostly with one of my kids. Such an enjoyable experience, especially because we had a couple of excellent rounds. I have also been taking some time to catch up on emerging technologies, especially one that I simply could not get my head around – bitcoin or generally, the idea of blockchains.

Whether it is technologies such as bitcoin or the gene editing story that is in the news recently, once again, the creativity and good intentions that are driving new innovations,  are being rushed without proper thinking of their implications. When I was younger I ignored that thinking part and was all excited about the advances and pooh-poohed the need for policies and governance for new and emerging technologies. But as I get older, I am beginning to shift my thinking on this a lot.

I found an excellent set of articles by Tess Rinearson under “Making Money – Bitcoin Explained (with Emoji), Part 1” and “Making Money Trustworthy – Bitcoin Explained (with Emoji), Part 2“. They are by far the best and easy to understand articles on bitcoins and how they work. As I read them, a couple of things that I have never thought of crossed my mind. For example, I work hard(I sure hope so) at Wellesley, for which I get paid. The after tax salary gets directly deposited to my bank. As the article points out, the bank is a “fallible” central authority. Banks as “fallible”? Never thought about them that way…

Bank shows me statements and I basically trust that my money is in the bank and I can access it any time I want. But this is pure trust. Once in a while, portions of our money is something tangible – cash that we withdraw, which increases the trustworthiness. Where exactly is my money? What happens when the bank merges with another bank? Will the new bank promise to give the money to me? What if everyone with an account wanted to draw a lot of their money at the same time?

Over the past few hundreds of years, the banking system has developed into a trustworthy system with controls, regulations (for however long the current government will let some of these remain!!!) and necessary checks and balances that we don’t even have to think about or worry about our money. I am sure that in the early stages, it was not this way.

With systems like bitcoin, there are major concerns that have not been thought through. I have a long list of questions, but here are a select few:

• bitcoins origins seem to be some selected bright minds who can mine them fast enough using clever computational techniques. This seems a little strange compared to the current model where the “currency” is under government control and the value of the currency in some sense is tied to the trust we place on different governments. In this case, I have no idea about who is “creating” these bitcoins.
• “The Bitcoin blockchain is an immutable, public, distributed ledger” and “synchronized copies of the blockchain are held by computers all over the world” both from here. Which computers all over the world are holding these transactions? Who is governing them? How hacker proof are they? Whereas if a hacker steals money from a bank, there is at least some recourse (it may be lengthy and frustrating, but at least there is a process). If bitcoins are stolen, just the very nature of them makes them untraceable and the lack of regulations or governance means, you are out of luck.
• If you make a mistake in paying using bitcoin, say you sent it to a wrong email, it is gone! Since transactions in this are immutable, “once a record has been in the blockchain for a couple hours, changing or erasing it becomes infeasible”. I should point out that with tools like Venmo, when you send money to a wrong cell phone number, you are out of luck, unless you have a nice person at the other end willing to send the money back.
• There are many institutions looking at this technology for credentials storage, again, something that is way ahead of the game with other serious concerns.

The concerns about gene editing are numerous and one can read about them all over the place. Whereas the scientists have good intentions, such as curing diseases, such technologies and a close relative, cloning, can all be used in highly unproductive ways. Whenever I think of cloning I think of Boys from Brazil! What if rogue scientists start using these techniques to do bad things? Unlike building a nuclear facility, which is easy to detect and some sanctions can be imposed, cellular level manipulations can be done without anyone noticing for a long time!

On a different topic, I also worry about born digital content and digital preservation. We are currently using technologies that may not exist 20 years from now. How do we make sure that the digitally preserved content will be accessible then? The Library of Congress has resources for sustainability of digital content and we have Hathi Trust, Google Books initiatives. But it is fair to say that we are in the very early stages of addressing them in a sustainable way while valuable content in several different formats that are being produced using technologies that seem to come and go. Printer materials have certain clear advantages from preservation perspective that digital content doesn’t. One example is alternations. New editions have to be printed for any changes whereas digital content can be changed easily on the fly without retaining any prior information through version controls.

Wait a minute! May be we use the immutable aspect of a blockchain methodology for digital preservation. Hmmm, but then, who knows whether blockchain technology itself will continue to live long? At my age, I have a lot of others things to worry about and pray that PDF, Google Apps and a few other things live for as long as I live (which is actually not that unreasonable expectation given my age!!!)