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So I was watching the 1985 cult classic “Back to the Future” with my niece and between the break towards the end, I started explaining
to her about how Time travel may work and why it is impossible to go back in
time and Cosmic strings. Somehow and for some mysterious reasons, the
conversation drifted towards blockchain and I realised how much time travel has
relevance with blockchain.
One of the key fundamentals of Blockchain is that you can’t hack the
previous blocks transactions without consequences. Hold your thought and let me
wander into time travel narration.
Imagine you are a Marty
McFly (played by brilliant Micheal J
Fox) and you come in contact with Dr.
Emmett Brown, who builds you a car capable of
time travel and you go back in time to save the
world. How, lets say you land up in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914 to stop
assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria by Gavrilo Princip and hence avert Great war (also known as World War -1).
For the sake of the story, lets say you are able to convince the would be
assassin to convert to Gandhian way of Non-Violence and not kill the Archduke.
Hurray! You are the hero who has saved the world. Noble peace prize to
you. We all are so proud of you. But are we ?
Now comes the scientific pin to burst your bubble. If you could actually achieve
something like this or change any event of the past as much as moving a pebble,
you will never be able to go back to the world that you came from. Science says
that universe at that instance will create another alternate Universe which
will follow the timeline in which Archduke never got assassinated and new
timelines would get created because of that while the other universe from where
you came would continue as if nothing happened except for you mysteriously
disappearing forever.
And you, the time traveler would be stuck in this world and the two
universes would never come in contact nor you would be able to jump from one to
another.
So how is this relevant to blockchain. Assuming you get access to a block
chain node and can alter transactions in a block created few days (instead of
you paying 100 bitcoins to someone, you hack it and change it to only 10
bitcoins thus saving yourself cool USD 600K).
Problem is that this will skew the hash address of the current block and
all the subsequent block in your node (same as you changing the past event
during time travel) due to capturing of hash address of the previous block,
which will make this node completely out of synch with other nodes and hence
can’t participate in transactions till this anomaly is corrected.
So both in Block chain and time travel, any change in the past will make it
incapable of participating further in the current state of existence till it is
fixed. The self-consistency
in timelines would kick in, which would interfere
with your jumping the times lines or existing as a valid node.
Back at the ranch, Niece got completely bored and asked, ’but well, God
can fix it” ?
‘Yeah right’, I thought for a second but if you look at it, God can. How
you ask?
God can erase the existing world leaving the altered world as the only
existing world, so there are no two different stories of what-if archduke had
been killed or had survived.
God on blockchain would be someone who has ownership of 50%+
participating nodes and since blockchain works on consensus, if you happen to
hack transactions on one of the blocks and propagate the same chain to all your
other 50%+ nodes, Presto, this becomes the valid transaction and other nodes
will have to accept this transaction erasing the original transaction as if it
never happened. All the nodes will operate with this new chain with hacked
transactions.
My niece who was completely bored by now asked, ”So if we coalesce AI
with Blockchain, would it make a stronger and more powerful God ? “
Calling for ‘Who wants Ice cream” was my exit strategy before She could
throw some more inconvenient questions at me.
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