For Blockchain Skeptics

Many people have a negative perception of the blockchain industry. It's true there have been many scams, false promises, and and misleading narratives put forth by the industry.

But I ask that you temporarily suspend judgement. I want to show you how, despite all of the dirt—the blockchain industry as struck gold. And if you care about any of the following values, you might want to consider giving it another look.

1. Verifiability - we should not have to trust tech companies to provide us with accurate data. Instead we should be able to verify what they are saying is true. The blockchain industry has made many breakthroughs in zero knowledge proofs, allowing us to mathematically prove that a given result was computed correctly. For example, if you have a hash of all the content in a database, I could prove that the result I sent your client from my server accurately reflects a given query.
2. Inclusivity - big tech companies are currently siloing data and exploiting network effects. By keeping all of their data on their proprietary servers, competitors cannot come into the market to build a better product because network effects lock-in incumbents. Smart developers and product designers must first get hired by imperfect and biased recruitment processes before making contributions. Blockchains provide a mechanism for building apps with open backends and databases*, taking open source to the next level.
3. Freedom of Speech - blockchains are focused on liveness and censorship-resistance, so that people cannot have their rights to speech and access to information violated. However, this also gives people optionality to avoid speech that they find offensive or distasteful.

Blockchains are built in the spirit of older technology, like BitTorrent and Tor. However, the developers blockchain recognized that in the real-world, participants of a network need to be properly incentivized for it to scale. While it is very difficult to get cryptoeconomics right, if done properly it make make highly effective next generation decentralized networks.

Celestia: A Better BitTorrent

BitTorrent works really well for sharing popular movies, songs, and TV shows. Many people seek out this content, and then some portion of them stay connected to the network in order to share it with the next person for free.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work well for long-tail data. Large, infrequently accessed datasets might initially be shared on the network. But most likely the hosts of that information will drop off and it will no longer become available. If you are able to download an obscure torrent without a lot of seeds, I recommend you do so now because you may not be able to do so in the future.

Another issue is that, since torrents are not ordered, BitTorrent doesn't work well with real-time streams of data. If you chunk data between two torrents, you cannot know which chunk comes first unless (1) you know all of the data upfront and include that information alongside the chunks, or (2) you trust a third-party to tell you what order the data is in. But if you are dealing with real-time data, you cannot know what the chunks will be before they are generated, therefore you must rely on a trusted third-party that can mislabel the data and mislead you at will. As an extension of this, you cannot detect when this third-party is skipping over a chunk altogether. In other words, you don't know if you have a complete or accurate set.

Celestia addresses both of these problems. It does this by requiring participants in the network to download a random sample of all data, instead of just the data they need. Then it is able to reconstruct all of the data, even from a subset of that total data through something called erasure coding.

The implication of this is huge. It means that not that you can download any data on the network, it also means you might not have to. As mentioned earlier, zero knowledge proofs can be used to prove the result of any computation. So if you want to download a movie from Celestia to watch it, then fine—you will have to download the full thing. But if you want to query an open source dataset on Celestia, you can just receive the result and a proof that it is correct. And since Celestia uses blockchain consensus to order data, you also can be sure the the query was run on the correct dataset that was fully constructed in the right order.

Now let's see how this applies to web apps.

To be continued...