The above image is a beautiful image of a butterfly meshed in vibrant colors with musical notes all across it. With so much going on in it, what one person sees in it (at least at first) can be very different from another person.
A little while ago, I was working on a neural style transfer project. This is one of the images that I used as the style image. However, the resultant image didn’t display as much difference from the original base image as I’d thought. Even so, I gaily showed it to a couple of friends of mine. I asked what they thought of it, and they said that the base image and the butterfly image both had a significant chunk of white in them which was why the color transfer wasn’t obvious.
I honestly stared at the image for a couple of minutes before I realized that what they had referred to as the ‘butterfly image’ was in fact my style image. See, the thing that had initially attracted me to the picture was the color explosion in combination with the musical notes and the writings. It was all so electric.
But this wasn’t what my friends saw at first glance, and like I said, I didn’t see the butterfly until they pointed it to me even though, from a logical perspective it really should have been.
The point of this entire rambling is that people have different perspectives, and when multiple people are working on a project, in order to make it a success, each individual’s perspective and way of thinking should be clear to the rest of the team. This is the definition of coordination in a functional system.
Achieving this level of coordination is hard enough face-to-face, but it doubles down on the internet. That, to me, seems to be one of the issues plaguing the decentralization community.
What Is a Blockchain Network?
I will give a brief overview of what decentralization and blockchain networks are so that everyone can understand my point more clearly.
The blockchain is like a ledger that everyone can read - at least if it’s public. If it’s private or semi-public, then you have to be one of the authorized people to be able to view and change anything in the ledger. But even for public blockchains, a transaction performed on it needs to be verified. The more times it is verified, the more its authenticity is assured.
The trouble is these verifications require solving complex mathematical problems which, in turn, require vast amounts of computational resources. Moreover, people working on these are individuals who do not, in real life, know each other. They are only connected through their mutual interest in decentralization.
Therefore, in order to ascertain cohesive coordination among these individuals to assure the formation of a well-coordinated decentralized system, protocols are established by the network administrators to clarify the vision and mission of the network.
Now understandably, most of these networks’ missions and protocols revolve around data privacy and security because from what I’ve been able to understand--courtesy of Google’s Gemini--is that it is completely possible for a group of hackers or cybercriminals to create a private blockchain network of their own where they freely store and share all kinds of hacked data.
So clearly, the blockchain still needs some work to rid it of criminal activity. Now, I understand that my example may be a little extreme and that law-enforcement agencies probably have similar sophisticated technologies to counteract these crimes, and things like digital fingerprints exist, as judiciously explained by Gemini. Nevertheless, these are problems that the blockchain community is rightfully interested in resolving.
But that leads to another problem: tunnel vision.
The Big Picture
The blockchain community is a very exclusive community, composed mostly of young, enthusiastic, tech-savvy individuals. However, the idea of data privacy and security is for everyone, not just the techies. So, it is important that this technology is used and understood as much by regular individuals as it is by its developers.
Imagine this scenario.
A bank manager or administrator of a small, local bank decides that he wants to convert his banking system to a decentralized one to better the security for the bank customers. He hires a young developer to help and guide him through this change. The developer talks to him about authentication codes, verification, mining data, and other resources needed to form an effective blockchain network.
The manager--even if he is relatively young--will probably understand that the system access should be limited to a few trusted individuals, and maybe a little bit more. However, unless he himself is a computer scientist--unlikely in the case of a bank manager--it’s doubtful that he will understand the whole concept of decentralization.
But the tipping point would be the computational costs required. Remember, the bank is a small, local bank with a limited budget and resources. When you add this to the fact that the manager may or may not have completely understood how the system works, the odds that the bank will end up installing an effective decentralized system are slim.
The Gaps
One of the main issues stopping decentralization from becoming a global phenomenon is the lack of suitable hardware, closely followed by inadequate education for the masses.
My neural style transfer project was actually not the project I’d originally meant to do. Instead, I had intended to create a Generative AI project using transfer learning to make a GAN algorithm create some new images. My dataset--which was composed of the works of lesser-known artists--wasn’t a very big one, so I knew that it was possible that the end result may not be as novel as it would have been with a bigger dataset.
But what I hadn’t realized was that even with that small dataset the time, space, and computation required would be so enormous that, for my purposes, it would be better if I switched to a slightly different type of algorithm.
That’s kind of my point.
I use a regular laptop for most of my work, and for the most part, even for other A.I. projects, it’s usually enough. But it seems that for projects that require any kind of ‘generation’--even to a small extent--this can be a very big problem.
In my case, it wasn’t that big of a deal since it was more of a personal project than anything else, but for the task of providing privacy and security to the clients of a bank, this may be a bigger issue because while their computational resources may be better than my tiny, lonely laptop, it’s still unlikely to have the computational power even remotely resembling that which is necessary for maintaining blockchain networks.
Furthermore, the blockchain community really needs to understand that most people in positions responsible for the privacy and security of organizations are at the very least in their forties. Even if they are younger, they’re probably not very aware of how decentralization systems work which is understandable given its complexity.
One of the reasons that social media platforms are so universally popular across all demographics is that aside from knowing what a few essential buttons do, people don’t need to know very much about it. This is especially so in cases of individuals over the age of 60, and while your average bank manager may not be 60, he/she isn’t going to be 20 or even 30 either.
Conclusion
There is a lot of money being spent on making decentralized systems more reliable and eco-friendly, but maybe what is necessary is some of that money to also be spent on creating hardware that is not so costly and on educating individuals, i.e., marketing according to their demographic and positions in life. I mean, I can use my social media account from any phone and the phone needn’t be a good quality one, or even a new one. As long as the wifi and my app work, I don’t need anything else.
All in all, ensuring online coordination requires in and of itself an extensive system. If you’re only looking at the shape of the butterfly then you’re missing the colors and beauty associated with it, and if you only look at the colors, you might end up missing the main thing.
So, maybe what the blockchain and decentralization community needs right now for optimal coordination and cooperation are not just networks that focus on increasing privacy and security but instead a system of network of networks, where one network may be responsible for ensuring privacy and security, the other for hardware, and still other which works on marketing and educating plans for the masses all connected towards one unified goal.
In this way, privacy and security will no longer be just a catchphrase for the tech-savvy but an asset utilized by everyone.
