Blockchain is a new and exciting technology currently working to deprecate the existing world of middlemen and centralized authorities. The value-add is simple, create a highly redundant append-only database where those who host the database are rewarded with “cryptocurrency”. As the network grows, the harder it is to compromise and the more value it holds — people will often reference Metcalfe’s law here (value of a network is proportional to the square of its users).

Imagine a few years down the line when blockchain, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts are the standard. The businesses living off the scurf of inefficiencies baked into our former system have ceased to operate and people have more control over their data, information, money equivalent, etc… At this point in time, the network has become incredibly valuable — what is to stop some greater power from attacking the network and overtaking it?

There’s been a recent discussion about ASICs making their way onto the Ethereum network and a proposal to modify block mining to be ASIC resistant. This alarm is caused by one company creating ASICs that can mine on the Ethereum network — what hope would we have if one country were to throw billions of dollars in resources to secure a 51%+ stake in the nodes on the Ethereum network? What is to say that this isn’t already the case and there’s a zero-day waiting to be launched as soon as the network is valuable enough to exploit?

I haven’t had anyone give me any real deep thoughts on this or how to prevent such a thing from occurring. If this was to occur, say China attacks the Ethereum blockchain and ends up controlling it in such a way that they can choose which transactions to ignore, jack up gas prices, etc… and ultimately make the network pretty useless. This would likely lead to some counteraction by other nation-states, like the U.S. saying “Ethereum is no longer safe, we have our own implementation which is safe — use this instead”. And this idea of nationstate blockchains would be promulgated throughout the world.

So now every country has its own blockchain and people can move between other blockchains at their own risk (maybe if they try to use another country’s blockchain without being a citizen, their transactions are ignored). So we now have a complete police state where every transaction you make is completely surveilled and the public “world blockchains” have all been compromised.

I don’t see why this scenario couldn’t play out, and I don’t believe it’s the future we want. If anyone has any comments on this matter or counterpoints, I would greatly appreciate them.