Disclaimer: Relative to my expertise in something like OpenStack, or relative to the expertise of folks who are working daily on driving advancements in the fundamentals of Blockchain and related technologies, I know next to nothing about Blockchain. However, relative to the average member of the public, I believe I have enough understanding as a technologist to help demystify the subject for other non-experts.
The context for this post is that I attended the recent Climate Innovation Summit in Dublin, which primarily focused on the challenge of financing solutions in the area of Climate Change mitigation and adaptation. To my surprise, the subject of Blockchain seemed to be the main pure technology topic that came up again and again.
Before this event, and without exploring the area too deeply, I had a suspicion that Blockchain is all too often "a solution in search of a problem". This all too common tendency of technologists makes me grumble at the best of times, but when the subject is a technology that is impenetrable to many people, and the problem space is what I believe to be an existential threat to our way of life ... I have grave reservations, to put it mildly.
Much credit goes to EIT Climate-KIC for publishing a report titled Distributed Ledger Technology for Climate Action Assessment which I will refer to heavily below. In large part, my goal here is to highlight the key points and conclusions I took away from that report.
What Problem Does Blockchain Solve?
Blockchain is designed to be an alternative to centralized systems. What does that mean? Well imagine:
- A database with no central administrator
- A currency with no central bank
- A contract that is enforceable without recourse to a judiciary
and you start to get a sense of this problem space. This is quite appealing, on the face of it. A decentralized system should be more fault tolerant and attack resistant because there is no single point of failure, and it should also be more trustworthy and resistant to abuses of power because of the transparency it offers.
And then there's the idea of "social scalability", as researcher Nick Szabo is quoted in the Climate-KIC report:
Scaling human traditional institutions in a reliable and secure manner requires increasing [the number of] accountants, lawyers, regulators, and police, along with the increase in bureaucracy, risk, and stress that such institutions entail."
Solving problems without needing any more lawyers? Hurrah!
Why is Decentralization a Hard Problem?
The Climate-KIC report does a nice job of explaining the 5 components of this solution to the decentralization challenge:
- Cryptography - public key encryption and hashing functions allows protecting the privacy, integrity, and even the anonymity of data in the system. This is familiar technology used in secure websites with HTTPS, for example.
- Hash tree - this is simply a list of records whose integrity is protected by a cryptographic hash on each record which combines the hash of the previous record, a timestamp, and the transaction data. This is a well-understood concept that is used to good effect in systems like the Git Version Control System (VCS).
- Peer-to-peer networks - this is allows you to build resilient storage by having peers in a network replicate data to other peers. Heard of Napster and Bittorrent?
- Consensus mechanism - how can you authenticate and validate a transaction in a peer-to-peer network without appealing to a central authority? Take a look at the Byzantine General's Problem. It's difficult.
- Sybil control mechanism - how do you protect against an actor in the system generating a large number of fake identities, known as a Sybil attack. This too is hard. Bitcoin's answer is to make it prohibitively expense to abuse the system this way, with its "Proof of Work" system known as mining.
The first three components - cryptography, hash trees, and peer-to-peer networks - are well established, and it would be possible to use them to build an effective, highly-distributed database with the aid of a central authority (to e.g. decide who can be trusted to write to the database).
However, to make that database fully decentralized - especially with anonymous actors writing to the database - some really difficult challenges are introduced, and that's where the consensus and Sybil control mechanisms come in. These are much more challenging problems, and Blockchain is one relatively recent foray into this area.
Note - in the report, the "Do you need a Blockchain?" flowchart highlights the idea of a "Permissioned Blockchain" suitable for a case where all actors are known but untrusted. That does eliminate some of the difficult problems in this space, but catering for untrusted writers is where much of the complexity remains.
Note also - the report also references an excellent article called The Truth About Smart Contracts by Jimmy Song which highlights the challenge with attempting to specify and enforce the rules of a contract using (potentially buggy) computer code without allowing for appeals to a central authority to interpret the "spirit" of the contract. And also the challenges of attempting to link such decentralized contracts with the physical world.
Blockchain Inefficiency
Given the challenges that full decentralization brings, it's not surprising that Blockchain has some drawbacks. To quote some of the points that jumped out at me in the Climate-KIC report:
DLT is a highly inefficient database technology that is up to 1 million times less efficient than a centralised database, which in turn leads to much higher energy consumption and GHG emissions.
Given that we're talking about Blockchain in the context of Climate Change mitigation, that seems important to consider!
the trade-off between low energy efficiency and higher levels of decentralisation is the key question in the DLT for climate action ecosystem and needs to be addressed for each potential DLT solution
Blockchain's inefficiency and higher emissions should be weighed up against a need for decentralization.
To determine whether DLT is the right tool to solve a given problem, it should be validated that DLT is the only solution to the given problem. If DLT is not the only solution, also a more efficient centralised database can solve the problem.
In other words, you should only consider Blockchain if you've already eliminated the possibility that a centralized system could be sufficient.
A more entertaining take on whether Blockchain is a good fit for your application, from James Mickens:
How Important is Decentralization To Addressing Climate Change?
This is the key point. As Kirsten Dunlop said in her keynote at the Climate Innovation Summit:
We have 12 years to set in place profound structural change in almost every system of cause and effect in our society
Some of "Climate Action" use cases and examples for Blockchain listed in the Climate-KIC report includes:
- Energy - peer-to-peer energy trading
- Supply chain management - reduce paperwork, fraud, and errors
- Carbon trading - a more transparent carbon marketplace
- Transportation - decentralized ride sharing
- Open government - increased transparency and accountability in government
- Measurement Reporting and Verification (MRV) - more transparency in carbon tracking
- Finance - new ways of financing climate projects
More or less implied here is that the problems associated with centralized systems are on the critical path to effectively addressing these use cases.
The Climate-KIC report says:
While climate change is a truly global problem, it is well recognised that it requires a decentralised, multi-stakeholder, bottom-up approach to be solved
And that's hard to argue with! I'm a big proponent of bottom-up innovation guided by a unifying mission, and certainly such a huge problem space can't be tackled top-down. Mariana Mazzucato's report on Mission-oriented research & innovation in the European Union looks like an excellent framework. And when it comes to Climate Change, we are all stakeholders.
But ... does that really imply that the technology platforms we use must be decentralized? For example, a crowd-funding platform hosted by a single legal entity can still be effective, without itself being decentralized. Can a sufficiently high level of trust and transparency be achieved without fully decentralizing the platform? I believe that is often the case.
To quote the Climate-KIC report again:
DLT’s main power lies in decentralisation. It currently is unclear how the physical centralised world can be decentralised. [...] As many climate action solutions are more valuable when synchronised with the physical world, this barrier is a key barrier to overcome.
Decentralization and anonymity brings up some pretty fundamental questions about how human society is organized. And undoubtedly, tackling Climate Change effectively is going to require fundamental changes in our society. As Naomi Klein put it, This Changes Everything.
But are the problems that Blockchain claims to solve really the key problems getting in the way of effective Climate Change mitigation and adaptation efforts? Even if they are, are there other "good enough" solutions without the drawbacks of Blockchain that can be deployed more rapidly?
What I really worry about here is the danger that Climate Change will be perceived by some as a smokescreen for people pushing pre-existing agendas that aren't strictly related to the challenges posed by Climate Change. To take a more extreme example, how likely are we to mobilize the sort of action needed if people sense they are also being asked to buy into Anarchism as a political philosophy?
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Blockchain is a super interesting technology, and it has opened the door to exciting advances in some truly difficult computer science problems.
If you are motivated to explore how technology can be used to move towards a more decentralized society, by all means you should go down the Blockchain rabbit hole!
However, if you are primarily motivated to rapidly implement Climate Change mitigation and adaptation solutions in the real world, I would suggest that you can safely focus your limited resources on technologies other than Blockchain.