We don’t hear as much about “blockchain immutability” as we used to. Although the entire point of a cryptographically signed Merkle list is to prevent tampering with the record of events that it represents - to produce an immutable and unalterable data structure - the current state of the world that is represented by a blockchain is different from how it was in the past. Coins have been sent, transactions have been executed, and queries will return values different from what they would have previously. Blockchains are immutable. But they can be extended.
Blockchains can only be extended by blocks that follow the rules enforced by the computers that assemble each new block. In computer science terms, this is a state transition machine. Any invalid transition between states, such as trying to send yourself 21,000,000,000 bitcoins in a transaction that doesn’t explain where they come from, will be rejected and not included in the next block. Any valid transaction should eventually be included and will then form part of the permanent record. Unless, as Satoshi proposed, it is rendered irrelevant by a later transaction and can be discarded to save storage space.
Much like nature producing crabs, tech bros keep proposing systems that use the immutability of the blockchain to record the existence of sexual consent. This misunderstands every concept that it touches on, not least that sexual consent is an ongoing process rather than a one-time contractual agreement that obligates an attractive young woman to provide sexual services without complaint or invoice to said tech bros. These misunderstandings illustrate the anxieties of late startup culture and the mispriced fears and entitlements of the young men it exploits. They are reflected in the proliferation of Non-Disparagement, Non-Disclosure, and Non-Compete clauses with perpetual and cascading extents within tech industry employment contracts. Love, honour, and obey. These fears find their symbolic resolution in blockchain consent but have real effects in fiat society.
Commitments, in the Cold War game-theoretic sense of “threats”, must be credible to be effective. You must be able to trust the entity that is making the commitment to make good on them and carry out their threats. Immutability builds credibility and thereby affords the possibility of trust in this sense. We see this fulfilled in the credibility of blockchain value, and we see it shitting itself in the fuckery of blockchain consent. Committing to something, whether nuking your opponent or “the bit” in the sense of a joke, creates a ray through its light cone that affects decisions made within it. This is trivial, any decision will affect what comes after it, but a commitment is the promise of a decision. It is a trustworthy decision offer or option in the market of reason.
Knowing who one is making commitments to - whom one is threatening - is a matter of identifying them. Identity has many meanings, from mathematics to those used in political commentary. Blockchain identity is a combination of the computer security sense and the financial sense - it is an account. We irresistibly attach the social and psychological concepts of identity to this. Bitcoin’s pseudonymity allows us to exploit the former without entailing the latter to protect the private individual from state surveillance and censorship. However, that isn’t good for building the counterparty trust that economic exchange requires. Protean identity is not trustworthy in this sense.
Which leads us to the carcinerization of immutable identity. If unstable identity doesn’t build trust effectively, surely stable identity will build trust. Singular, irrepudiable identifiers onchain strongly tied to our offchain personhood that we commit to so that we can render ourselves transparent to our counterparties. That this is the logic of financial and social credit scores is not the least of its problems. Danah Boyd identifies the problem with demanding that people reduce their multiplicity to a singular presence in her early work. Even Curtis Yarvin knows that you will need more than one identity if you are a queer kid in an intolerant community.
I have encountered the problem of blockchain immutability quite directly since transitioning. The philosophical question of to what degree I am the same person as before - and people change all the time in many other ways - is tied to the computer science question of updating records for accuracy (hello GDPR). My legal name has changed, but I placed my old name in an image that I sent the hash of in a transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain. I’ve updated the image, but it now no longer matches the hash. Likewise for the first NFT project I created after starting my transition. The certificates in “Certificate of Inauthenticity” originally bore my deadname for an added degree of inauthenticity. Which seemed like a good idea until it started haunting me too much. Fortunately I had made the NFT metadata in the CoI contract mutable, so I could update the image to remove the now (legally!) false signature.
Committing to an identity is a powerful act in social and economic terms. But identities in these senses are not singular in the way that state databases need them to be and that tech bros lack the life experience to understand that they are not. They will also change meaningfully over time. Attempting to capture more of the value of a person’s multiplicity under a singular identifier to exploit them economically or control them socially is an antipattern. The problem is that identity, immutability, and trust are in neccessary tension. If we commit to immutable blockchain identities as the anchors of social and economic trustworthiness, then they are rendered untrustworthy by our doing so. The human beings under them will pay the price that this externalizes onto them, in direct proportion to the degree that they are not singularly knowable.