DARPA wants to know if he can do anything with blockchain

DARPA is known for seeing futures first and then making them real. The Pentagon's blue-sky agency has laid the groundwork for everything from the Internet to driverless cars, and continues to explore the boundaries of technologies such as the autonomy of battlefields and the launching of paradigms in the economic space. All this makes a recent DARPA request for information on blockchain almost an accusation of the technology itself. If DARPA fails to understand a responsible and generative use for blockchain, who can?

People or organizations with ideas on how the national security community can use blockchain (or, as DARPA says, "distributed consent protocols without authorization") are invited to respond to the request until December 20, and if selected, may submit their ideas at a workshop in February.

So, what exactly is DARPA looking for? The most common use case for a blockchain is in cryptocurrency, like bitcoin. The cryptographic protocol creates a ledger that keeps track of the complete transaction record and makes it extremely difficult to falsify the incorrectly generated inputs. (I find this illustrator in the form of a comic book useful). In the iteration of the currency, these units are then exchanged as a kind of currency, although the variability of the price at a time makes it something more like an unstable commodity than a reliable deposit of value.

But DARPA is freeing itself from currency-like uses. Currency has been a natural consequence of blockchain technologies because it provides the clearest incentive for many people to keep a distributed register: keep computers running to track cryptocurrency exchanges and the exchange will periodically reward a master maintainer with new units of currency. (Commonly, this is what "mining for bitcoin" means, and it uses enough computing power to have its own traceable environmental impact).

Rather than wading the world of cyrptocoins, DARPA takes a side step, which means that one of the biggest challenges for any blockchain application in which they can find value is to encourage people to use it. The request specifies that "all means of rewarding participants (for example, giving them access to IT resources) are also a transfer of value, and such transfers fall within the scope of this subject provided the premiums are not made up of money." So a possible way to distribute the ledger could literally be the distribution of the ledger, giving the computers the people to use and keep as long as they keep the general ledger program running.

The second topic of the DARPA blockchain workshop is not less ambitious than the first. DARPA is looking for methods that can combine economic notions of usefulness with the understanding by the computer world of protocol participants as "honest" or "harmful". If anyone has an idea how people trying to maximize their benefits from the use of an open ledger can be held maliciously in that space, DARPA is all ears.

Finally, DARPA is also looking for an analysis of how distributed protocols tend to centralize and the vulnerabilities this centralization can bring. In the case of existing blockchain cryptocurrencies, for example, these are third-party services that manage the cryptographies of others through systems with passwords that are often violated and stolen. Ways to anticipate centralization and mitigate risks could help to keep a blockchain system as secure as the individual pieces it contains.

With so much uncertainty, vulnerability and oddities in the concept, it is hard to imagine the exact usefulness that DARPA wants to get from the blockchain. And this is partly the purpose of the workshop. Recognizing that this technology has undergone real refinement and development thanks to blockchains and cryptocurrency, the agency is keeping an open mind on what the military can derive from this work, if it exists.

"These technologies have dramatic implications for the security and resilience of critical data storage and computing, including for the Department of Defense," read the request. "At the same time, the concrete applications and security of these DoD technologies are not clear."