Chain of Thought: Exploring Blockchain Through the Lens of Philosophy

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In recent years, several philosophical movements have emerged that seek to challenge traditional ways of thinking about the world and our place within it. These movements include transhumanism, accelerationism, critical theory, solarpunk, and crypto-anarchism among others.

Blockchain is a decentralized, digital ledger that allows for the secure and transparent storage and transfer of information. Its potential applications are vast, ranging from financial transactions to supply chain management, governance systems (e.g. through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, DAOs), and even digital identity and intellectual property and benefits for artists and scientists through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and soulbound tokens (SBTs).

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”– Galileo Galilei

According to Tapscott and Tapscott (2016), “the blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value”. The technology uses cryptography to ensure the integrity of the data and prevent unauthorized access or modification.

As Swan (2015) notes, “The fundamental innovation of Bitcoin was the creation of a decentralized consensus mechanism through the proof-of-work algorithm, which enables network participants to agree on a single version of the transaction history”.