Exclusive Interview: A Briefing with Scott Stornetta, Founding Father of Blockchain
Bitcoin, the archetypal blockchain, has for ten years waged technological warfare against corporate and state-run finance. Yet for all the heads that have been turned in the tackling of such a gauntlet, it was, in fact, a far more elemental problem that spawned the search for blockchain.
Since sketching out the fabled blockchain blueprints in 1991, two scientists have watched their contraption clear the runway and soar to loftier heights by the minute. Nearly three decades on, at the Malta Blockchain Summit, CryptoSlate talked to visionary scientist and blockchain co-creator W. Scott Stornetta in a reflection of his creation and its present trajectory.
The Genesis
As Stornetta wound up his doctorate at Stanford in the late 80s, the physicist looked beyond the unfurling, infantile IT infrastructure of the time and envisaged a world where documentation and data existed purely in electronic form.
In that advanced, inevitable, yet not-so-distant digital world, he also saw something that would eventually become its plightâan âenormous problemâ that would take decades to be called by its true name. In 1989, he epiphanized:
“If we canât tell an old document from a new document, or a tampered one from an original, weâre going to be in real trouble as a society. And so, I realized there was going to be a need to create tamper-proof, immutable records in the digits themselves.”
And when Stornetta fingered cryptography as part of the answer, the physicist swiftly sought out help from those in the knowânamely, mathematician and to-be long-time collaborator Stuart Haberâand his collection of cryptographers at Bell Communications Research.
Blockchain: A Global Conspiracy
But as the group of scholars âtook off to the racesâ and in a few months devised a workable solution, much to the dissatisfaction of Stornetta, their newfangled system was trust-based.
The physicist already thirsted for the trust-less architecture now held up as one of blockchainâs core tenets, yet Haber, with true academic rigor, suggested they first prove why trust was an essential component of any solution.
What followed would make history.
The pair realized that as each intermediary was drawn into the system to prevent collusion between existing parties, another would have to be added, and added, and added.
The superior answer, for Stornetta, was a global affair where all participants in existence validated trust:
“The only way to solve it would be to have a conspiracy that involved everyone in the world, and then I realized that was in fact the solution. That these widely distributed records, where everyone becomes a witness, essentially, solved the problem by turning it on its head.”
Having gone on to spawn the prototypical blockchain, co-author the time-honored, academic journal cited in Bitcoinâs whitepaper: How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document, and found the now-defunct Suretyâwidely considered the worldâs first commercial blockchain service providerâStornetta has cultivated something of a god-like status amongst blockchain proponents, to whom he would impart a few words of wisdom.
Reaching Consensus
Nakamoto was evidently enamored by Stornetta and Haberâs approach to time-stamping, and yet the brain behind Bitcoin tweaked their approach to forming a consensusâsubstituting âone man, one voteâ for the now-quintessential algorithm, Proof of Work (PoW)âor as Stornetta explained it, âone CPU, one voteâ.
And while Stornetta would tip his hat in âhonest admirationâ to the pseudonymous creator, he seemed far from hailing Bitcoin as the ultimate blockchain.
The philosophically decentralized nature of Satoshiâs mining consensus, he explained, had been jeopardized by industrial-grade mining pools capturing vast quantities of block rewards, all as the networkâs resource consumption skyrocketed. To that end, he noted:
“I donât think we need to view what [Satoshi is] doing as the final word so much as the opening act. We can have so much of the benefit of the blockchain without todayâs onerous consensus mechanisms as we currently see in play.”
To step towards his ideal consensusâone where cost becomes negligible to the systemâStornetta posed three questions to progressive blockchain architects; questions that, when answered, he believed would open up an âenormously large design space for innovationâ.
“Where should the computation be done?
Who should have the governance?
Who should be incentivized and for what?”
Steemit, for example, took a âfar more human-friendlyâ approach to consensus than PoW in Stornettaâs books; offering an alternative, more âorthogonalâ solution by having users vote on the value added by other participants.
The Future of Decentralized Economies
With 2,100 listed cryptocurrencies and counting, many blockchain proponents would be all-too-familiar with the widely predicted crypto-culling akin to the dot-com bubble-burst.
Stornetta, however, sees their eruptive creation in a decidedly more optimistic light.
He explained that âthe verdict is outâ on the winners, and that current or emerging cryptocurrencies will become âincreasingly viableâ as they, quite literally, begin to give central banks a run for their money. He continued:
“[Cryptocurrencies are] like a do-it-yourself federal reserve kit; thatâs now shipping to all sorts of developers around the world. Someoneâs going to get it right.”
Stornetta, ever the impartial academic, didn’t seem partial to picking any potential champions, but he did give the thumbs-up to security tokens as the “successor, next-generation” version of present-day cryptocurrency.
The veteran scientist wouldnât be welcoming everyone aboard the blockchain bandwagon, however.
To anyone attempting to use the technology to reinvent the wheel, or perhaps more spuriously copy and paste centralized solutions onto the blockchain, Stornetta counseled that value creation and a “little humility” were surefire ingredients for success. He surmised:
“The real issue is: how do I create value? Not: how do I get a billion people to do something. Because, if you can find a small or modest-sized problem where you can really bring value creation by decentralizing, then people are going to be interested.”
The top blockchains of today didn’t get a free pass from Stornetta either; the founding father discouraging anyone from declaring status as “the incumbent” and resting on their laurels.
“There’s a need to continue to innovate”, he suggested, giving the nod of approval to efforts such as Bitcoin’s Lightning network and the seemingly interminable development of Ethereumâboth of which would extend their rule over the more spritely, lean competitors of tomorrow.