[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]: BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality
Automated attestation
With automated integrity, does it mean that a blockchain-based system will be able to automate the attestation of a signature by a human or machine?
The answer is: not entirely, but essentially.
The question touches upon one of the most important debates over the nature and usefulness of layer-2 solutions.
We can never, nor should we ever, completely automate human actions. That would be giving up the existential meaning of humanity.
For humanity to still have meaning in the digital age, two things cannot be automated:
(1) the true agency (including identity and intention); and
(2) the root truth (including facts and attestation).
They are the two aspects of human sovereignty (see Why AI Will Never Replace True Humanity).
With this foundation, however, the question is, where do efficiency and productivity come from? Does any of that come without sacrificing human sovereignty at all?
One should hope that the answer to the above question is “yes” because otherwise, the following conclusion would be inevitable: all technological progress is inherently evil (when measured against humanity).
I do believe that the answer to the above question is yes. That is, with a properly structured system, efficiency and productivity can come without sacrificing human sovereignty.
The answer is in the layeredness of the system.
The true base layer, let’s call it layer-0 (L0), has to be the physical reality of human existence, including individual activities and social connections and structures.
The question is, can we build a system that can automatically verify trillions of events and transactions (including attestations) based on the physical human layer-0 (L0) agency and truth? Here, “based on” is emphasized because it means not merely “on top of” L0 but actually, factually and truthfully based on it.
This requires a system that can automatically verify thousands, if not millions, of transactions based on each physically verified human agency or truth.
Considering the current earth population and the level of human activities at the physical L0, it most certainly means a blockchain layer-1 (L1) scaled to millions or more of transactions per second. (See The Necessary Scalability of Layer-1 on Blockchain)
But that’s also where the confusion comes from, along with many fake solutions.
The Lightning Network promoted as a layer-2 (L2) solution on the Bitcoin blockchain is a good example.
The LN promoters use a “court” metaphor. They say that LN uses the BTC blockchain as a last resort arbiter, like a ‘court’, which users do not resort to every time they make a transaction. It seems to make sense. Advocates of rollups and sidechains make a similar argument.
The analogy overlooks fundamental differences between a blockchain and real-world courts.
In the off-chain real world, the court is part of the human system that runs on human processes such as laws, lawyers, witnesses, and evidentiary rules. For that purpose, the entire physical world is a supplier of the information and attestation needed in court processes. That’s how the traditional world settles disputes. It has its own physical ‘ledger,’ so to speak. Backward it may be, but it has its own out-of-court ‘ledger’ to support the in-court proceedings.
However, on a blockchain, the chain itself is the ledger for settlement. When there is a problem in L2, say a fraud, the blockchain has no ability to obtain attestation from L2 outside of L1 unless the L2 is a genuine part of the same network following the same protocol, a condition that LN explicitly does not meet. As a result, the settlement is either accepted or rejected, but either way, it happens on-chain as is and will not solve any problem that arises from a separate network such as LN.
The blockchain itself is the ledger and cannot independently validate external data from separate non-blockchain L2 networks. Therefore, disputes arising from a breach of truth in LN result in unreliable or meaningless settlements on-chain.
In other words, due to the nature of LN being a separate non-blockchain network from the base blockchain, once the chain of truth is broken in LN, it is garbage in and garbage out. LN providing inputs to the base blockchain for settlement may function as the information channel but provides zero attestation value.
The level of attestation required for a global blockchain solution
The above fact squarely requires the blockchain itself to be scalable. Unless the blockchain itself is scalable and can reliably handle millions of verifications per second based on each attestation from the physical world, the blockchain system is not going to work.
For that reason, for a blockchain to be capable of global adoption, it must satisfy both the following conditions:
(1) it must be scalable to at least millions of transactions per second on layer 1.
(2) it must have an integrated solution to automate derivative attestations based on pseudonymity while not requiring total anonymity.
In the above, the scalability itself and the question about the derivative attestations versus base human attestations are both widely misunderstood concepts. Further, the matter of privacy and the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity is equally misunderstood. Concerning these concepts, confusion and fallacies rule supreme. It is part of the reason why cryptocurrency has gone astray from Satoshi’s vision while at the same time being able to falsely (often deceptively) appeal to people’s primal sense of privacy.
I’ve explored these concepts in my book BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality, especially Volume 2.
[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]: BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality
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