decentralized network with less risk of corruption, human failure, or theft. These are just some of the many new applications that attracted people’s attention to this innovative idea.
The zeitgeist of public awareness had two big impacts on our lives. The first was that one of us—Michael Casey—got so excited about blockchain technology’s potential to change the world that he quit a twenty-three-year career in journalism to work on it full time. Less than six months after The Age of Cryptocurrency was published, Mike left The Wall Street Journal for MIT’s Media Lab. The lab’s frenetic director, Joichi Ito, who is commonly known as Joi, had recognized parallels between Bitcoin’s emergence and the software development he’d witnessed during the early days of the Internet. Sensing a similar enthusiasm for a new, decentralizing architecture, Ito hatched a plan to bring powerful academic and financial resources to the vital task of developing this nascent technology. The result was MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, a center where leading academics and students in the fields of cryptography, engineering, and finance could collaborate with Fortune 500 strategists, innovative startups, philanthropists, and government officials to design the digital architecture of a new “Internet of Value.” When Mike received an offer to join this initiative, he saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an economic revolution.
The second impact is the book you are reading. In The Age of Cryptocurrency, we focused primarily on a single application of Bitcoin’s core technology, on its potential to upend currency and payments. Since the book’s publication, though, we have learned there’s a risk in writing about technology: it changes, while the words on the page do not. So much has changed in three years, in fact, that we were compelled to write another book. The Truth Machine expands the conversation we began in 2015 and takes it to a level higher. It explores how Bitcoin’s technology and its various offshoots point to a general redesign of social organizations, fostering many more alternative applications.
In the modern economy, to control information is to control the world. This is seen in the ever-growing influence of tech behemoths like Google and Facebook, constantly accumulating data that’s pertinent to who we are and how we interact with each other. In this twenty-first-century economy, power is defined by whoever has authority to collect, store, and share data. Currently, that authority is centralized. It is concentrated among a narrow number of giant tech companies. If you’re wondering why that’s problematic, just think of the influence that Facebook’s hidden algorithm, which prioritizes the company’s business model above all other objectives, has had on our politics. In incentivizing the creation and sharing of often-dubious information to trigger dopamine releases among social networks of like-minded people, its algorithm played an instrumental role in the bombshell U.S. elections of 2016.
The ideas behind the blockchain have now unleashed a struggle to turn that structure of concentrated power on its head, to figure out how the capacity to control and manage information might shift to a decentralized system that no one controls. It lets us imagine a world that’s not dominated by Google, Facebook, or, for that matter, the NSA, one where we, the people, the core components of global society, get to say how our data is managed.
We felt it was important to get that message across. The Truth Machine is our attempt to convey it.
Sixty miles east of Amman, in a 5.6-square-mile block of dry, stony ground carved out of the Jordanian desert, lies the UN High Commission for Refugees’ Azraq camp. Teeming with 32,000 desperate Syrians living in pre-fabricated shelters—rows and rows of white, corrugated steel cabins arranged in a military-like grid—Azraq poses the logistical challenges of a small city. Yet UNHCR and the other aid agencies that give the refugees food, shelter, and a modicum of hope can’t count on the kinds of institutions and infrastructure that normal cities use to ensure order, security, and functionality for their residents.
All refugee camps are, by definition, short on what political scientists call “social capital,” the networks of long-established relationships and bonds of trust that allow communities to function, to engage in social interaction and exchange. But Azraq can seem especially devoid of it. There are police in Azraq, but they are Jordanian. They are not of the people, not of the community. And while the crime rates in Azraq are lower than those in nearby Zaatari camp, where 130,000 Syrians live in conditions that a UN review once described as “lawless,” this hot, dry, stony place is hardly welcoming. When Azraq was set up in 2014 as an alternative to Zaatari’s chaos, refugees complained that it lacked life. Electricity was sparse, which meant they couldn’t charge their cellphones, cutting them off from family and friends. The lack of a functioning, trustful community also heightened the refugees’ fears of being abducted by the extremist organization Islamic State. Many initially refused to move to Azraq camp, and although the numbers have increased more recently, Azraq is still far below the 130,000 capacity for which it was built.
It’s fitting then that this pop-up city, in real need of some functioning social capital, is now the scene of a radical experiment in new models of community governance, institution-building, and the management of resources. At the heart of that effort is blockchain technology, the decentralized ledger-keeping system that underpins the digital currency bitcoin and promises a more reliable, immediate way to trace transactions. The World Food Program (WFP), a UN agency that feeds 80 million people worldwide, is putting 10,000 Azraq refugees through a pilot that uses this system to better coordinate food distribution. In doing so, the WFP is tackling a giant administrative challenge: how to ensure, in an environment where theft is rampant and few people carry personal identifying documents, that everyone gets their fair share of food.
Among those participating in this project was forty-three-year-old Najah Saleh Al-Mheimed, one of the more than 5 million Syrians forced to flee their homes as the brutal, ongoing civil war has all but destroyed their country. In early June 2015, with mounting food shortages and reports of girls being kidnapped by militias in nearby villages, Najah and her husband made the drastic decision to leave her hometown of Hasaka, where their families had lived for generations. “It was an ordeal that I pray to God no human will ever witness,” she said in an interview conducted on our behalf by WFP staffers working in the Azraq camp.
In leaving behind her home, her assets, her circle of neighbors and family, and her ties to what was once a more coherent Syrian nation, Najah was also losing something extremely powerful that the rest of us take for granted: a societal system of trust, identity, and record-keeping that ties our past to our present, anchors us as human beings, and lets us participate in society. The amalgamation of information that goes into proving that we can be trusted as a member of society has historically depended upon institutions that record and affirm our life events and credentials—bank accounts, birth certificates, changes of address, educational records, driver’s licenses, etc.—and keep track of our financial transactions. To lose all of that, as refugees often do when thrust into “statelessness,” is to be put in a highly vulnerable position, one that’s inherently easy for the worst of the world’s criminals and terrorist organizations to exploit. If you are unable to prove who you are, you are at the mercy of strangers. Among all the work that agencies such as the UNHCR and the WFP do, this core function—the creation of stand-in societal institutions—is just as important as the food they provide. In dusty tent cities filled with dislocated people around the world, these humanitarian agencies must undertake the challenging task of recreating systems of social trust. They are reconstructing societies, building them all over again. And it turns out that blockchain technology provides a tool for doing just that.
It’s in this realm, where human beings must depend on reliable institutions to keep track of their social interactions and provide proof that their claims are valid, that blockchain technology comes into its own. With this system we would no longer have to trust institutions to maintain transaction records and vouch for us, since blockchain-based programs comprise an intricate set of features that result in something that’s never existed before: a transaction record