Blockchain: The True Potential Behind the Theatre

The more we talk about the technology, the harder it sometimes becomes to understand what it is actually useful for.

For years, we have heard about cryptocurrencies, NFTs, metaverses, tokens, DeFi, asset tokenisation, Web3, decentralised economies, autonomous organisations, and an endless stream of projects promising to transform virtually every area of our lives.

And, in the middle of it all, an entire industry has been built around these words.

There are legitimate companies.

There is serious research.

There are people building infrastructure that may become extremely important.

But there is also speculation, marketing, projects using blockchain simply because it is fashionable, tokens with no real utility, exaggerated promises and, in some cases, what can only be described as decentralisation theatre.

A project can have a blockchain.

It can have a token.

It can have smart contracts.

It can even use the word "decentralised" on every page of its website.

And yet still depend on a company controlling the application, a team capable of changing the rules, a small group controlling the network, or a central entity providing the data essential to the system's operation.

In that case, the question we should ask is simple:

What was actually decentralised?

It is an important question because, perhaps as a result of all this noise, there is now a widespread perception that blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.

And, in many cases, that perception is correct.

But there is a problem with that conclusion.

We are often looking at the wrong examples.

Not Everything Needs a Blockchain

A blockchain is not a better database.

In most situations, it is probably a worse one.

A company that needs to manage customers, inventory, documents or internal operations does not need a distributed network of computers to do so.

A centralised database is simpler, faster, cheaper and easier to administer.

There is no advantage in using blockchain simply because we can.

The real interest begins when the question stops being:

"How can we store this information?"

and becomes:

"Who has the power to alter this information, prevent an operation, or unilaterally decide what happens?"

This is where blockchain starts to become interesting.

Not because it performs magic.

Not because it automatically makes a system secure.

And not because it eliminates the need to trust human beings.

But because, in certain circumstances, it allows us to replace part of the trust placed in an entity with distributed verification and execution of defined rules.

And there are cases where that can have very concrete consequences.

I - Crowdfunding Without Depending on Whoever Holds the Money

Imagine a crowdfunding campaign.

One thousand people contribute one hundred euros each.

The target is one hundred thousand euros.

The campaign ends on 30 June.

The rule is simple:

If the one hundred thousand euros are reached, the money is released.

If they are not, every participant automatically gets their money back.

A centralised platform can certainly do this.

There is no question about it.

But there is still an entity at the centre of the system.

That entity receives the money, controls the platform, maintains the servers and executes the rules.

We can trust it.

We may even have excellent legal mechanisms to hold it accountable.

But we still have to trust it.

A smart contract allows the rule itself to be placed in the code controlling the funds.

The contract can know how much money it has received and when the deadline expires. If the condition is met, it executes one action. If it is not, it executes another.

This type of mechanism, known as an assurance contract, has already been implemented in blockchain-based crowdfunding systems.

The fundamental difference is not technological.

It is institutional.

The rule also becomes the mechanism of execution.

Instead of asking:

"Will the platform actually do what it promised?"

we can build a system where, within the limits defined by the contract, the platform does not get to decide.

That is a small difference when viewed as software.

It is a much larger difference when viewed as a distribution of power.

II - Censorship, Information and Voting

It is in the question of censorship that the importance of decentralisation perhaps becomes most obvious.

Imagine an electronic voting system.

We have citizens, a platform, servers and a communications infrastructure.

We can protect everything with cryptography.

We can create backups.

We can have audits.

We can make the system extremely secure.

But one question remains:

Who controls the infrastructure?

If there is a single server, a single organisation or a single access point, there is also a point that can be pressured, seized, blocked or switched off.

Decentralisation does not automatically make voting secure.

Nor does it, by itself, solve the political problems surrounding an election.

But it can change something fundamental:

the number of points that need to be controlled in order to prevent the system from functioning.

A particularly interesting example occurred in Catalonia in 2017.

During the referendum on Catalan independence, Spanish authorities sought to prevent the vote from taking place. Electoral materials were seized, polling locations were closed and websites associated with the process were blocked.

Catalonia did not conduct its referendum on a blockchain. But the case demonstrated something very concrete:

when infrastructure depends on a central point, controlling that point can be enough to interfere with the entire system.

In response, activists and technologists turned to distributed technologies, including peer-to-peer networks and IPFS, to keep information and services accessible despite the blocking of centralised points. A distributed architecture can make that task significantly harder.

And there is another, even simpler example.

In 2017, Turkey blocked access to Wikipedia. You can learn more about it here.

For almost three years, Turkish users were unable to access the world's largest open encyclopaedia.

The articles did not need to be deleted.

The information did not need to be altered.

It was enough to control access to the infrastructure through which that information was delivered.

This distinction is fundamental.

Censoring information does not necessarily mean deleting information. It can mean preventing people from accessing it.

This is where decentralisation acquires a political dimension.

A distributed network does not make censorship impossible.

But it can remove from a single entity the ability to switch off an entire source of information with a single decision.

The same logic can be applied to voting.

The question is no longer simply:

"Who controls the server?"

It becomes:

"Who can control the network?"

It is a technological difference, but above all, it is a difference in power.

III - Proving That a Work Existed Before Someone Claimed It Was Theirs

There is another problem much closer to the everyday reality of creators.

An artist produces a work.

A photograph.

An illustration.

A piece of music.

A text.

A drawing.

A project.

And, some time later, someone appears with a copy.

Or claims that they were the person who created it first.

How do you prove who had the work first?

This is where blockchain can function as a kind of distributed digital notary.

There is no need to put the entire work on a blockchain.

A unique cryptographic representation of the work — its hash — can be recorded together with a timestamp and an identifier associated with the author or the wallet that made the registration.

If someone later presents a file and its hash matches the one that was recorded, it is possible to demonstrate that that content already existed in that form at a particular point in time.

WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) identifies precisely this possibility: blockchain can create a verifiable time-stamped record of a work's existence and provide relevant evidence concerning authorship and unregistered intellectual property rights.

There is a significant difference between having no independent evidence of when a work existed and being able to present a public, chronological and tamper-resistant record demonstrating that a particular version of that work was associated with a particular identity at a particular time.

For an artist, that can be extremely important.

Again, the advantage is not making the work impossible to copy.

A digital work can still be copied.

Blockchain does not prevent that.

The advantage is creating a layer of provenance, temporality and verifiability.

It does not prevent someone from copying a work.

It can help establish who got there first.

And that distinction is precisely the kind of thing that gets lost when we reduce the entire blockchain conversation to speculative NFTs.

The Problem Is That These Are Precisely the Cases We Hear Least About

And perhaps this is the real paradox.

The cases where blockchain can offer a structural advantage are often the least spectacular ones to sell. They deal with much more mundane problems.

How to ensure that a funding rule is executed without depending on an intermediary.

How to make it harder to switch off voting or communications infrastructure.

How to preserve verifiable evidence of the existence and provenance of a work.

It is less spectacular but perhaps that is precisely why it matters more.

So Why Is There So Much Theatre?

It is a legitimate question.

If these are some of the cases where decentralisation can genuinely add something, why is there so much activity around applications that are, in practice, barely decentralised?

Because there is speculation.

Because there is money.

Because there is an entire industry that needs to sell products.

Because "blockchain" was, for a long time, associated with innovation and investment.

And because it is much easier to sell the idea that blockchain will revolutionise an entire industry than to explain exactly whose power is being taken away — and where it is going.

That is also why we should be sceptical of decentralisation theatre.

When someone presents us with a blockchain-based solution, perhaps we should ask a few simple questions:

Who controls the money?

Who controls the data?

Who controls the validators?

Who can change the rules?

Who can shut the system down?

Who provides the information coming from outside the blockchain?

Who can censor?

Who can reverse a decision?

And, above all:

If we remove the blockchain, what do we lose?

If the answer is "almost nothing", perhaps we never needed it.

But if we lose precisely the ability to remove power from a central entity, then perhaps we are looking at a genuine use case.

The True Potential

Perhaps the greatest promise of blockchain was never to replace databases.

Nor to replace banks.

Nor to create a new kind of money.

Nor to turn every object in the world into a token.

The most interesting promise is much simpler:

to change the architecture of trust.

For centuries, we have built institutions and systems around the same question:

Who do we trust?

We trust the bank.

We trust the state.

We trust a company.

We trust a platform.

We trust an intermediary.

In most situations, we will continue to do so.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

But there are situations where concentrating that trust creates a problem.

And in those cases, we can start asking a different question:

What can we build so that no one has to hold that power alone?

That is, for us, the truly interesting part of blockchain.

Not the promise of decentralising everything.

Not the idea that every intermediary is bad.

Not the illusion that code eliminates the need for trust.

But the possibility of choosing, in specific contexts, where we want to place trust — and where we want to remove it.

And perhaps that is why it is so strange to see so much theatre surrounding blockchain while relatively few people remain focused on these problems.

Because building infrastructure that distributes power is much harder than creating a token.

It is much less profitable, at least in the short term, than selling a narrative.

And it is much less spectacular than promising a revolution.

But perhaps that is precisely where the revolution worth building lies.

Not a blockchain for everything.

A blockchain where decentralisation actually matters.

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