Zama’s Agnès Leroy talks about the untapped possibilities of blockchain and why her dad is right to be suspicious of new technologies.
I remember the first time I heard about bitcoin.
It was 2010, I was 21 years old and at that time I was living in Brazil for the end of my studies.
I was puzzled by this idea of creating a new monetary system that would not be controlled by any state, and I remember thinking that this could never work, because the states would resist something like this. What happened instead is that bitcoin slowly became part of the traditional financial system, turning into an option for investment among others, and gaining value and momentum with time.
Did it change the world?
15 years on, I look back and think – in a way, it did. It made the concept of a blockchain work on a large scale for the first time and opened the door to more widespread use of the technology.
Up until now though, blockchain has mostly been used for financial transactions, and a whole financial ecosystem has stemmed from it. But is this really the full potential of blockchain?
As humans coming from different backgrounds and living in different kinds of societies, we need to better come to agreements together, not only for financial transactions, but also for regulations, community decisions etc. Blockchain is a technology that has the potential to facilitate agreement between multiple parties, so why does it remain limited to the financial system? And even for now, to cryptocurrencies mostly?
In recent years we’ve even seen the rise of ‘network states’, digitally native communities relying on decentralised technologies to self-govern. Blockchain is often the preferred resource for these realities because of its decentralised nature: granting active access to multiple parties instead of relinquishing control to a single central authority enables a collaborative approach, introduces transparency and is therefore bound to inspire trust in participants at all levels.
What’s being experimented with in these communities echoes what’s happening at the traditional states’ level: every government provides essential services and operations to their citizens, and many of them are going towards a digitalisation of these services.
Take the examples of secure digital identities, confidential voting, streamlining tax collection but also streamlining processes such as business and vehicles registration, property management and public finances. All of these require a set of tools, a protocol allowing the integration of enhanced privacy solutions, to protect people’s privacy and guarantee transparency.
However, on its own, blockchain technology is still too immature, technically speaking, to fully take off. Just like AI took many years to become part of our daily lives, blockchain is yet to unlock major technical challenges to reach the next stage.
So, what’s missing?
We’re talking about a technology that aims at securing trust, with all the positive implications it could have for our communities. But people and institutions don’t trust it, and they’re quite right.
It makes me think of my mum and dad. My mum is quite the technology lover; she will easily adopt a new device or tech if it makes her life easier. On the other hand, my dad is concerned about his privacy. That’s why he always gets lost when coming to visit me in Paris, because he refuses to use the GPS on his smartphone.
Well, when you talk about a technology that could replace our current voting systems, my dad wins: we need privacy, we need confidentiality. We need to be sure no one can tamper with the results of an election.
Several cryptographic techniques are starting to address the confidentiality issue, for example zero knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption.
But confidentiality is not the only requirement for blockchain to reach its full potential.
Having large scale voting systems relying on blockchains would require extensive measures to secure people’s smartphones and laptops to avoid them be attacked on a large scale.
To address this, we would need to implement secure hardware, such as trusted execution environments or leverage techniques such as multi-party computation, which enables collaborative computation across multiple parties without revealing their individual inputs.
Using this kind of technology should become as natural to people as using their smartphones for online payments.
So, there’s still a long way to go, but as blockchain technology continues to evolve, it will reach everyone’s lives little by little, project after project. Let’s see where this goes!
By Agnès Leroy
Agnès Leroy is GPU director at Zama, tasked with pushing the performance of fully homomorphic encryption to the limits by leveraging the computational power of GPUs. She holds a mechanical engineering degree from École des Ponts ParisTech and a civil engineering degree from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil.
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