I was chatting with a friend here on steemit @thatgermandude and I found myself referring to the blockchain as like a new form of printing press, a new form of hard drive, a new distributed operating system, etc. This lead me to thinking of the future.
He mentioned that people should be able to splinter and quit the blockchain in the future and start up a new one. I told him the blockchain is not really about rules other than ideally the data is immutable. Once the block is in the chain it cannot be edited, it cannot be deleted, etc. The blockchain should allow anyone to explore these blocks. That means there truly is no secret when it is on the blockchain. It is an open audit trail. It is a hard drive that once the information is on the blockchain it is forever on the blockchain.
What does this say of history? Would we have the problem of "History is written by the victor" any longer. Would it also solve my personal variant of that quote "History is edited by the victor?"
I think it might. My prediction would be that though they could no longer censor or get rid of it the tactic would be to put so many pieces of information out there that paint their desired narrative that it would kind of BURY the history. Instead of sands of time burying ancient cities and knowledge, we would have the sands of misinformation burying the truth.
There is an advantage here though. They cannot erase or edit the truth. So it would still be there if we wished to look for it.
In the future will we have a new form of archaeology such as digital archaeology? I'd argue with the way the internet is exponentially growing there is already a reason for digital archaeologists and digital anthropologists. How much have we already buried in the internet?
The difference between the blockchain and the internet is the internet typically is built on servers that must be paid to maintain and they are centralized. So when that server or company running the server goes out of business whatever information was stored there is lost. So yes, while the internet is information expanding at an exponential rate, information is also being lost.
The blockchain can theoretically stop this loss. I truly find imagining the future with regards to history, secrets, governance, archaeology, anthropology, etc to be very interesting.
I thought some considerations on the phrase "History is written by the victor" were worth exploring in relation to the potential way that blockchain tech could forever change that.
