Everyone is talking about Blockchain, for some people  it’s  the nerdiest-hype-tech word trending nowadays, for bankers and accountants could be as scary as Mr. Sandman himself, and for some others (like me) it’s just as intriguing and huge as the invention of the internet but, ¿What is exactly? and ¿What is the Inception hack conspiracy?.

Lets start by saying some concepts I’ve heard around, Blockchain is basically a ledger, it records transactions between parties, the identity of both parties can (or not) be private, however the transaction not so much, lets put it this way, your home address for instance  is public (transactions) but whatever happens at home is private (parties), every block contains information about transactions that are linked (chained) to another block and so on. So blocks record transactions that can’t be erased nor modified in any way, like the Genesis,  only creation is viable.

Since it’s public, anyone can have access to it, that being said the key element about Blockchain is that it doesn’t only generates copies of itself in every party of interest in realtime every time a transaction is performed, but every block is created based on the prior block information (your transaction history), this means that if there’s no “logic” according to the last transaction the block is not created,  so if anyone try to hack it, it would be necessary to hack all the peers copies and edit all the non-editable blocks at the same time , making the task basically imposible…ish.

¿So how does Blockchain affect us all?

Since every transaction is publicly shared, and all this records are copied in realtime to peers, the waiting time for every transaction is  basically reduced to none since all the intermediaries who usually validates the authenticity of every party and transactions are there no more. So the mere existence of banks, credit bureaus, accountants and even some lawyers procedures (contracts) are jeopardized by this technology.

However for some others the reality is quite different, the fact that cost*/time per transaction is zero allows parties to low their cost per service or product, and lets see beyond that, since every transaction is public you will know why a Chilean Syrah wine is more expensive than a Californian Malbec, not from the brand positioning perspective but from the actual cost of the operational effort, so yes, Blockchain value is about transparency.

The “Blockchain inception hack conspiracy”

So, here’s my theory, I’m not a data-programmer mogul so just bear with me for a second here. Let’s think about the Blockchain origins, the creator is supposed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, no one knows if that is a He, a She or even a “Them”, what we do know is that Blockchain was written for Bitcoins, but the creation itself, the genesis was the typical ” I’m gonna leave this here and slowly walk away” scenario, that’s pretty scary  since we do know how it works, but we don’t know who did it. We also know about the fact that apparently it’s un-hackable… ¿right?, at least for third parties but, can we say the same about the creators?

Think about this, Blocks can’t be edited, Each block needs validation from the prior Blog in order to approve the upcoming transaction, that means that the information of the new transaction has a reference from the prior block, that way the new transaction can be linked to the one before and so forth, then it’s copied (the whole thing) again and again to other users (peers) over the web, that’s how it works, so far, is solid as steel but, I just can’t stop thinking about the Inception movie…

The movie was about a group of people who were hired to place thoughts in the target minds  in order to make them believe that something that never happened, actually happened. That’s basically the whole concept of the movie, if you really remember something happened the most probable thing is that you BELIEVE that happened,  even if it is a LIE you just can’t know the difference, this is what they called an INCEPTION, it’s a thought in the past that HIT the present, changing the Future…

Now let’s get back to those damn Blocks..

What if at the creation, the genesis, the Inception of the Blockchain, the creator(s) coded a pretty little lie on the first block, a little, almost imperceptible something that has been copied and chained over and over in the system, something no one sees, because it is part of Blockchain already, or even sleep until some trigger event put it in motion…

Think about this:

1. Blocks can’t be edited
2. Blocks are copied to all peers every time a transaction is performed
3. Blocks needs validation from the prior blocks to be created. 

So what if this “code” this “inception” is a command waiting to steal, change or even worst shut down the whole thing? ¿Is it crazy? I mean,  if the malware  is there from the beginning , none of the 3 rules above can save us.

Besides, ¿Who on earth wouldn’t take credit for such invention? . There’s much I don’t know about this life but I do know this is weird as h…

I’m Phillip Stolen, which is Felipe Hurtado in Spanish and I ask: What say you!?

*cost is zero based on current intermediaries , however the mining processing power do have some significative cost per  transaction. Thanks to Jairo for put this in consideration.