A Blockhead On Blockchains

A crash course in the future

UPDATE 15 MAR 2025: Estimates say that by next year, there will be 221 zettabytes of data stored on the network(s). That’s a lot of juice to maintain it.

Keystone - In memory of my dear friend Duke Miller, who passed last night. Navy diver and submariner who helped with SIGINT that gave Reagan the edge over Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit in 1986, by tapping subsea communications cables. Sailor, rest your oars. Viking out.

That pesky annoying thing called The Future keeps creeping up on us and taking a bite out of our collective behinds. The digitization and financialization of literally everything is taking over the world. The problem is, no one is making any effort to educate us on what’s happening, which means we don’t have informed consent in the process.

We are clearly racing at brain-spattering speeds toward a nationless world in which we are all blips in the Internet of Things (IoT). Like Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, we will all forge our (block)chains in life, which will follow us around like a bad smell for all eternity, or until the alternative power sources crap out.

If you think you won’t comply with all this, and you are reading this article, then it’s too late. You are now part of the take-over. In a process that has been ongoing since at least 16 December 1947, a cyber version of the universe is being created byte by byte, line by line, and it is all being financialized. You will soon be able to buy stock in how much air I breathe.

A key component of the cyber universe is the blockchain. That’s a term nearly everyone has heard of, but I’ll wager almost no one understands what it is, or how it works. So, let’s take a little stroll down the crypto path to see what we can learn. I promise I won’t get into alien technology and reptilian overlords.

SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit) is a cryptographic function developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). It was released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as part of the SHA-2 family in 2001.

SHA-256 is a cryptographic hash function initially used to secure data through one-way encryption to submarines. It takes an input (any length) and produces a fixed 256-bit (64-character hexadecimal) output. The function is:

• Deterministic – The same input always gives the same output.

• Irreversible – It is computationally infeasible to derive the original input from the output (I can’t use the hash to reconstruct the data inside).

• Collision-resistant – It is highly unlikely that two different inputs will produce the same hash.

Note the conditional statements. The word “impossible” doesn’t figure into it, but the concept of “highly unlikely” is a key feature.

SHA-256 was integrated into the creation of Bitcoin, which was in all likelihood invented by the NSA and their cousins. There is no such figure as Satoshi Nakamoto. Each Bitcoin is immutable—it cannot be destroyed or hacked—and each “coin” carries with it its entire history. Each “coin” is also secure. It cannot be hacked or altered in any way.

Didn’t Trump say something about Bitcoin?

When you hear of Bitcoin hacks, that is someone breaking into the exchanges and stealing code, but the “coins” themselves are never altered, and their history is a matter of record in the open ledger. More on Bitcoin:

• Bitcoin Mining – Miners (not minors) use SHA-256 in the Proof-of-Work (PoW) process, hashing block data until they find a valid hash meeting the network’s difficulty requirement.

• Digital Signatures & Integrity – SHA-256 ensures data integrity, as even a minor (not miner) change in input alters the hash drastically (avalanche effect).

There is speculation about NSA's involvement in cryptographic standards, but no evidence suggests a backdoor in SHA-256. It remains widely trusted in Bitcoin, SSL/TLS encryption, and digital security. SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, is what is used to verify both sides on websites using “https” encryption, especially in financial transactions.

SHA-256 is fundamental to blockchain technology, particularly in Bitcoin and other PoW cryptocurrencies. Its cryptographic properties ensure security, integrity, and immutability within blockchain networks.

Each block in a blockchain contains a unique hash generated using SHA-256. The hash is based on:

• The previous block’s hash (ensuring chain continuity)

• The block’s transaction data

• A timestamp

• A cryptographic nonce (used in mining)

A cryptographic nonce (short for "number used once") is a random or semi-random number used in cryptographic operations to ensure security, prevent replay attacks, and add uniqueness to computations. In other words, it ensures there is only one block in the cyber universe with the given characteristics.

This chaining of blocks via SHA-256-generated hashes prevents tampering—if a single value in a block changes, the hash changes, breaking the chain. Each block is verified by the ones immediately before and after it.

Let’s say you want to create a block with the entire Library of Congress. You put everything in a folder, then use a formula that includes all the contents, plus the timestamp you create it, plus the hash of the previous block, plus a random nonce. This generates a unique string of 64 letters and numbers. If you change any part of the contents, even removing a period at the end of a sentence in one book, the chain is broken and the block is invalidated. If you have all the precise data used to create the block, you can make an identical one, but the chances of that happening are slim to nil.

SHA-256 is crucial in Bitcoin’s mining process, where miners (not minors) compete to find a hash below a target difficulty by adjusting a nonce. The steps include:

1. Miners (not minors) take block data and apply SHA-256 hashing.

2. They modify the nonce repeatedly until the hash meets the required difficulty level.

3. The first miner (not minor) to find a valid hash broadcasts the new block, adding it to the blockchain.

This process secures the network by making block creation computationally expensive and resistant to attacks. In short, SHA-256 ensures:

• Data integrity – Any alteration in a block would require recalculating all subsequent hashes, making tampering practically impossible.

• Collision resistance – No two different inputs can produce the same hash, ensuring unique identification of blocks. Essentially, I would have to know the precise timestamp and nonce used to create a block, and the chances of that happening in any reasonable universe are beyond calculation.

SHA-256 is used in Bitcoin address generation and public-key cryptography. Private keys are hashed using SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 to generate Bitcoin wallet addresses, ensuring secure ownership verification.

Now, if your sanity is still intact after all that, the upshot of all this is that when the world has been converted to full digitization, your entire life history—every life event, every purchase, every sale, every asset, every liability, every creation, every spoken or written word, every grade in school, every relationship, every medical intervention—will be immutably recorded in your personal blockchain, and it will follow you beyond physical death. There will be zero identity thefts, but the price is zero privacy.

From an historian’s perspective, this is a gold mine. She could zero in on a certain time and place, say a war zone, and create a precise model of movements, participants and outcomes for historical events and records. No more stolen valor, but the price is your every meal and trip to the toilet becomes part of the record.

You will go to the doctor for chest pains, and he will download every function your body has performed for any given time horizon, and be able to tell precisely what the problem is and have access to the global physicians’ database, with AI to interpret the signs, diagnose the problem, and recommend the best treatment custom tailored for your personal situation. The price is he will know immediately if you are not following the treatment regimen, and you will lose social credits for being ornery.

This is the One World Government of myth and legend, but contrary to most expectations, there is no government per se. Instead, it is layer upon layer of algorithms, trustless contracts, and automatic transactions. Everything will be taxed to keep the machines running. Every resource will be allocated based on need. Productivity will be rewarded, and sloth will starve in the dark.

Sure, there’s some value in all this. No one can steal anything, because the location of the loot and who has it is always known. Punishment is instantaneous by limiting access to goods, services and locations.

If you keel over like Gene Hackman and his wife, emergency services will be dispatched immediately, rather than the gardener finding your carcass two weeks later. You can never get lost, because your precise location is always known, and the shortest route to anything is always available. You will never be stranded, because a driverless ride-share to anywhere from anywhere can be instantly dispatched.

All of this is happening right this very minute and it is unstoppable. Anyone who thinks they can opt out should be confident of their ability to survive in the wilderness like Euell Gibbons without any connection of any kind to any electronic devices or networks. Regardless, your cabin in the woods and your heat signature will eventually show up on a screen somewhere, and a “compliance team” will immediately be dispatched to your location.

On the one hand, there will be no individual or group with power over others. On the other hand, there will be no humans involved in the system at all.

Talk about a helluva choice.

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Our feature film du jour is Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). This is one of my favorite techo-dystopia films, and has no one you’ve likely heard of, unless you’re an Eric Braeden fan. The director, Joseph Sargent, did one of the most memorable episodes of Star Trek: TOS (The Corbomite Maneuver), and another film favorite, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

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