The Economist succinctly nails the issue I have with “federated trust” distributed ledgers such as Blockchain / Ethereum:
The idea of making trust a matter of coding, rather than of democratic politics, legitimacy and accountability, is not necessarily an appealing or empowering one.
To be clear, append-only, immutable, verifiable ledgers (distributed or otherwise) are properly exciting as a new form of digital civic infrastructure .
There are some good posts on the GDS blog exploring their potential.
It’s the ‘federated trust’ bit of Blockchain that worries me, more for reasons of democratic accountability than wasted electricity.
Democracy has evolved as the least bad way we know of managing the tensions between collective and individual needs. You mess with it glibly at your peril. Or rather, at our peril. Careful democratic thought required, as well as careful code.
As Richard Pope says, “Software is politics now“.
Update 14 Nov 2015 : Jeni Tennison, Deputy Director of the Open Data Institute, has written a very fine blog post explaining far better than I can why using blockchain to store personal data is fraught with issues.
Tom Loosemore 