Are blockchains immutable?
A dive into the collective belief that ‘yes, assets CAN be digital, and you CAN own them!’
Hi, I’m Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter about our sociotechnical world, and how to change it. I hope you’re having a very happy holidays. I just got back from Seattle, where I enjoyed lots of family time, and my partner and I dressed up the pugs. Here’s Banana, looking absolutely thrilled about it 🤣
Today, I’m sharing an essay from the Untangled Archives interrogating the concept of ‘immutability’ and ‘digital ownership’ in crypto. It might be from April 2022, but it’s implications are even more relevant today, as crypto enjoys its moment in the sun. If you’re a curious skeptic when it comes to crypto, and want to dive in deeper, pick up my latest book and enjoy it over the last few days of 2024. Its short, sweet, and packs a lot of key concept and research into 80 pages.
On to the show!
Originally Published: April 3, 2022
There’s a big idea making the rounds in crypto these days — that “blockchains are immutable” and “enable ownership” of digital artifacts such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Let’s start with NFTs and work backward, shall we?
I mean, what is an NFT, really? Most people imagine a picture of a bored ape when they think of one.
But the NFT isn’t the image itself, it’s a digital receipt that includes metadata about the image, audio, or (and this is a big ‘or’) any digital thing. In his stellar essay, “The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now,” Ian Bogost writes,
“So NFTs aren’t strange or novel because they make appeals to value, provenance, and ownership via collective fantasies of paperwork. That’s old news. They feel strange and novel because normal people don’t usually construe monetary value in mere references to everyday things, like a cash-register receipt, or computer data. Belief in such value is, however, completely normal in the financial sector. In that context, an instrument that confers ownership, which can be bought or sold and which holds monetary value, is called a ‘security.’”
In other words, we’ve long agreed that certain things — certificates, titles, etc. — can symbolically represent the ownership of something, like a house. So what’s jarring about NFTs is not that we’re using one thing to represent the value of another thing — it’s that crypto enthusiasts now want to value any digital thing. The question becomes, will we collectively agree that these things are valuable? I mean, how much is this essay worth? I obviously think my words are priceless — how about you?
More seriously, what’s at stake here is the possibility of slipping into a society where every single digital thing becomes subject to the logic of money. So what does it mean to ‘own’ an NFT? Is it different from owning a physical thing? To answer these questions, we need to interrogate the idea that blockchains are immutable, which starts with some data in a box:
Okay, next apply a hashing algorithm to the data. Ta-da, the data becomes a unique identifier.
But hashing algorithms also show whether the data has been altered in any way. As Quinn DuPont explains, “this is possible because [...] any change of input for a hash algorithm produces a radically different output.” To see if anyone altered the data, just run the hash algorithm and compare it to the original.
Blocks are then chained together (hence the name!) such that each new block includes the hash from the previous block.
Alter one block, and you’ll invalidate the whole chain. The hashes and chains are what make blockchains technically immutable, and this immutability is what enables the ownership of any digital thing.
Or does it?
⛔️ Old assumption: how technologies shape human agency is ‘baked-in’ to the technology itself.
It seems we’ve arrived at a place where we assume that the tech itself is what shapes our experience of it; that because blockchains use hashes to link blocks of data together, they are therefore ‘immutable’ and we, in turn, get to own all the things! Not quite.
This makes the assumption that it is the materiality of the technology itself that shapes and constrains human agency. For example, STS scholar danah boyd identified four ‘affordances’ of “network technologies”. Think of an ‘affordance’ as a way in which technologies alter our experience of it. So, according to boyd, the four affordances of networked technologies are: “persistence,” (i.e. online data is recorded and archived) “replicability,” (i.e. content can be replicated) “scalability,” and “searchability.”
These qualities help describe the internet today. But remember the 1990s when the internet wasn’t about visibility and persistence but anonymity and ephemerality? What happened? According to sociologist Janet Vertesi, what technology enables and constrains isn’t “baked-in” to the object itself but is emergent and socially constructed, made visible over time. The internet is what it is today because we made it so. These affordances aren’t naturally occurring in the tech, but rather are — to use Vertesi’s term — “accomplishments” of people, organizations, and in this case, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
💡 New assumption: how technologies shape human agency isn’t pre-determined, unchanging, or a natural quality of the technology itself — but an accomplishment of people, organizations, and companies.
If we treat ‘immutability’ as an accomplishment rather than an affordance, we have to broaden our aperture beyond the blockchain. Blockchains are entirely ensconced in a much wider ecosystem that contains legacy tech, laws, consensus mechanisms, and governance systems. For example:
People can vote to change the chain (remember when the Ethereum blockchain did a hard reset?)
People can exploit or hack consensus mechanisms for their own gain — I touched on this in my first piece on decentralization.
Blockchains also interact with legal rules that don’t currently back up claims of ownership
So, whether immutability emerges or not hinges on the systems that blockchains interact with. In fact, the broader technological ecosystem that blockchains live inside of is, well, totally mutable, isn’t it?
This brings us back to NFTs and the concept of ‘ownership.’ Sometimes the digital receipt lives on the blockchain (or “on-chain”) but sometimes it is stored “off-chain” on a server hosted by a company like OpenSea, a link away from the blockchain. This sort of means that OpenSea is a centralized aggregator of NFTs — a Web2 company masquerading as a Web3 company (revealing that these categories don’t have as firm a boundary as some crypto enthusiasts want to believe). But anyway, if the receipt lives “off-chain,” the NFT merely contains a URL that points to the data. In Moxie Marlinspike’s recent interrogation of crypto, he writes:
“What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token).”
In other words, even if the governance or consensus systems don’t alter the “immutability” of the blockchain, you can only really go as far as uniquely identifying something, and not outright owning it. Making these distinctions takes back some of the power we weirdly (and willingly) hand over to the technology itself. But the technology is only part of the story.
⚠️ While this essay interrogates the intersection of ‘immutability’ and ‘ownership’, blockchains will be used for storing more things than NFTs. Terrible things. For example, blockchains will undoubtedly be used to store revenge porn and images of child sexual abuse. In other words, if blockchains become ‘immutable,’ that’s not something to cheer about. There is nothing inherently good about ‘immutability.’
The other part is the story itself — and right now, the ‘ownership’ narrative is taking off. Just Google ‘the ownership economy,’ and you’ll see what I mean. This is kind of ironic, of course. Bitcoin began in response to the 2008 financial crisis, as a supposed antidote to the corruption of our financial system. As researcher Ines Faria puts it, there was a “mysticism surrounding the hyped Bitcoin and blockchain software — which people wanted to understand and bet on, depositing faith in its power to bypass financial intermediaries and make them obsolete.” It may have started that way, but it has transformed into a system optimized for the financialization and ownership of every digital thing.
We imbue technology with a kind of magic. We tell stories about it, and then sometimes, we start to collectively believe those stories in ways that transcend the capabilities of the technology itself. If crypto transforms society in the way its supporters believe, it won’t be because blockchains are “immutable.” It will be because we overlook the limitations of the technology, change the surrounding technical and legal ecosystem, and decide to collectively believe in the story of ‘ownership’.