You have been asked yourself at least once.
Questions of the kind:
"How long will we still hear about blockchains and DLTs?"
And answers of the kind:
"It's just a bite, or a hype, that has exploded since last year and it's certainly doomed to fail."
Before assessing whether an answer is correct, you should assess whether the question is correct.
[Immanuel Kant]
This quote from Kant always resonates in my head when I deal with questions because it always pushes you to evaluate the situation not on the side of the answer (the solution), but on the side of the problem (the question).
In my opinion, to understand if in our future the blockchain will have established itself, we must take a look at history, to understand not only what the blockchain was born from, but the time it took for the adoption of all the technologies that are part of it.
A bit of history
First of all, we must take a step back to the 1970s.
Those were the years in which Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976 gave life to the notion of digital signature, thanks to the use of a pair of keys "public-private" was able to solve the fundamental problem of the dissemination of cryptographic keys and, at the same time, broke the U.S. government monopoly in the cryptographic field.
This solution quickly led to the birth of the RSA algorithm (1978) and a whole series of digital signature algorithms including the Merkle tree (or hash tree) invented in 1979 by Ralph Merkle, from which also takes its name the function of Merkle-Damgård hash described in 1979.
The Merkle tree will be placed in the center of Bitcoin and other Blockchain protocols.
After a few years, the first software marketed in the world was born to offer the digital signature RSA: Lotus Notes 1.0. It was 1989.
If we compare these dates, we see that it has taken 11 years, from the creation of a new method of authenticated signature of digital documents to its worldwide marketing.
11 years of ideas, debates, and improvements.
Another 12 years passed when the SHA-2 algorithm, based on Merkle's 1979 work, was published in 2001.
This cryptographic algorithm will then be used together with the Merkle tree in Bitcoin, the first public Blockchain in the world, born on January 3, 2009, with the creation of the genesis block.
We have seen that the evolution of the IT world in preparation for the birth of Bitcoin has covered 3 decades.
From a historical point of view, we cannot know whether a hype of today will still be present (albeit in another form) in 30 years.
If a mathematical invention of today will still be used.
If a new way of structuring data will not be outclassed by other processes with fewer limitations.
So, in my opinion, the correct question to ask to imagine the future is the following.
Why was the concept of blockchain born?
Bitcoin is just an expression of using what is a blockchain.
A blockchain is a distributed registry, where you can certify the author of a "message" (thanks to the public encryption key) and the time of creation of that message (timestamp) without the need for a third-party certification entity.
The content of the message, or transaction, is unchanged in the past, that is, the transaction is not editable.
Every single transaction, therefore, involves a change in the final state of the blockchain, which continuously accumulates these mutations over time.
That is why it is said that it is immutable in the past because the whole history of transactions will remain visible and not modifiable forever.
Therefore, a method using a distributed ledger, whether called "blockchain" or not, aims to eliminate intermediaries as the certifying institution of the author and time of a transaction, as well as giving a certain security of not altering the data.
Will this reason remain in the future?
While it is true that nobody has the crystal ball, the growing disclosure of digital assets (documents, contracts, objects, rights, etc...) is undeniable.
Assets of any nature certainly need to be certified both for the author (or the signatories) and for the time stamp.
With a certain amount of confidence, I believe that we can say that this need will remain in the future and that it will increase over time.
If it is the registers distributed that are the definitive solution to this problem, only time will tell us, history has taught us that until now man has been able to constantly improve in the field of information technology.
The blockchain doesn't live from the hype, it has only spread thanks to them
Ultimately, the blockchain is not experiencing a golden moment by chance.
It is living it because thanks to the enthusiasm of the last few years it has been able to show the potential of the LTDs in everyday use. The presentation of new potentials feeds enthusiasm in turn, in a virtuous circle.
The ultimate consequence is that the people in charge of the work will be "forced" to confront different ideas, thanks also to investments by large institutions, and this will certainly bring improvements in the FTT.
It is no coincidence that Ethereum was created in 2015 to create decentralized apps. Ethereum was the birthplace of the concept of smart-contract, which probably opened the door to exponential growth in the study and use of LTDs.
We are probably living in a moment of general euphoria where the word "blockchain" is often abused but this does not mean that the future of the DLTs should be given for passed away.
Luca Venturella
https://www.linkedin.com/in/luca-venturella/
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