Religions, Forks and the Digital Past

Part 4 of 12 — Blockchain: Decentralization of Money, Power and the State Originally written as a History BA thesis, academic year 2021–2022. Published online August 2026. Series index → · References & bibliography →

Religions and forks

A major problem in history has been religious rifts, which often led to political divisions. Worshipping another God meant not only building a relationship with one such deity rather than another, but submitting to one hierarchy rather than another. The history of Christianity well exemplifies this mechanism, in which hierarchies of every denomination attempted to annihilate what was heretical and dangerous to them. Human hierarchies are not something real, concrete, yet they move minds and people. One of the theories that would explain the reasons why homo sapien sapiens survived other species, even though they were physically stronger, is because of the ability to imagine. It is because of imagination that human beings were able to gather in herds of more than a hundred individuals.¹ They imagined religions, nations and finally hierarchies. These, by their very nature, feed on those below: every religious hierarchy needs believers, otherwise it would cease to exist; every political hierarchy needs the people to support it, no matter whether it is a monarchy, supported by subjects, or a representative democracy, supported by citizens. There are many kinds of hierarchies in our society: starting with the school system, we are accustomed to an imbalance between forces, which prevent the full democratic realization of society.

There is a hierarchy in the socio-economic system, there is a hierarchy in information: the invention of printing in the middle of the last millennium led to a decentralization of the information system. Works that otherwise would not have been disseminated at all, for economic or political reasons, have been allowed to be printed, read and studied. If culture has the power to influence thoughts, those who hold information have the power to direct them.

The early press was fought by the powers-that-be precisely because of the abolition of the information monopoly it carried, alienating itself from existing hierarchies, it was soon adopted as an instrument of indoctrination. In Europe, censorship was very active, although with varying intensities depending on the ruler and, in the case of England or the Netherlands, surprising liberality. It then went from preventive censorship, in which every piece of writing had to be approved before going to press, to repressive censorship, in which there were forbidden works and those who possessed them could be punished. Today's censorship works differently: the state still carries out censorship actions, but what is innovative is the concept of shadow banning, or censorship applied to distribution, which restricts the dissemination of censored content. As the Twitter files² confirmed, the well-known social platform used to restrict the dissemination of certain news by receiving orders from the government.

The Internet has undoubtedly contributed a great deal to the circulation of information, having been designed and structured from the very beginning for this very reason. Even on the Internet we know that there are monopolies, in that netizens navigate the usual waters, that is, they always use the same social networks and always rely on the same search engines. These systems have repeatedly censored certain views regarding certain scientific or political issues, often revealing it after the fact, once it was no longer possible to go back.

The Internet we know is the Internet of Information and has probably been the greatest revolution in information since the invention and spread of printing. We are now heading toward an Internet of Value³ , where information will be tracked and a value will be associated with each of it. This is the value of utilitarianism: data are written as transactions on blockchains, and there, as information, they acquire value. Blockchains guarantee a store of value, that is, a store of value, just like the coins that humanity has used throughout history.

In the very interesting whitepaper on blockchain from the World Economic Forum (WEF)17 it is pointed out that the hierarchical paradigm will be abandoned in favor of a peer-to-peer paradigm. Concerns are expressed about decentralization, the necessary new forms of governance that will need to be adopted, and, most importantly, possible divisions in decision-making and the resulting forks. Bitcoin's development is, in theory, completely decentralized and based on the decisions of the community behind it: unlike Linux and Wikipedia, excellent examples of horizontal collaboration, Bitcoin has no leader. Linux and Wikipedia have two 'benevolent dictators'18 who hold the reins of the two projects. This is the case for virtually every open source project, which may have a development team, and thus governance, that is more or less structured. It should be kept in mind that although there is horizontal collaboration, the Bitcoin code repository is managed by a few people, namely Bitcoin Core. The repository is that virtual place where the code of a specific software is saved, i.e., a kind of virtual biblIoTeca.

One characteristic of what is free, as the text of a book or code may be, is that it is copyable, and, eventually, modifiable (this is referred to as a fork).

Clarification on forks.

Forks currently differ from a traditional schism in that they can remain on both branches of a blockchain. However, this peculiarity, which is currently peculiar to digital, can be undone by making it impossible to use one of the branches through an update of the consensus rules. Example: a blockchain undergoes a fork, and branches A and B are created. The nodes of the individual branches can decide whether to allow users to continue to exist on both branches or to prevent this possibility. This can be done by creating a blacklist, i.e., based on user behavior. Branch A could decide to be exclusive, that is, blacklist all users (wallets) using branch B. In this case, users would have to be certain which branch to be on, because as a result of using either branch A or branch B, membership in either branch A or B also follows. This kind of exclusive fork would make digital forks much more like traditional forks, preventing the possible splitting of what is immaterial.

Another concern of some influential people in the field of distributed systems is to adopt a single language, a single platform and a single ecosystem: this is for reasons of efficiency. Similar reasons have led in the past to wars, genocides or whatnot.

Every language spoken by human beings carries with it different modes of reasoning depending on how it was formed or adapted to inhabitants and place. It was often imposed by force, as in cases of territorial conquest, and then inevitably blunted through contamination with local languages. Even programming languages, although acquired later, are formed on the basis of logical and cultural processes. The first stirrings of censorship of code and ideas in the West led to the 19 arrest of a developer of Tornado Cash, i.e., an Ethereum smart contract that allows coins to be 'washed' by mixing them in a way that makes tracking more difficult. The developer in question only wrote the smart contract, but does not directly launder the money, as everything is done in a peer 2 peer manner.

The betrayal of digital

The transition to digital is leading to a kind of disinterest in everything analog: this process of transformation, unfortunately, is succumbing to an over-reliance on digital media. A striking example is the one reported by Robert Darnton, who denounced in one of his essays, how in America in the middle of the last century a kind of pre-digitization was going on, using slides to save old books for fear that paper would not survive the next hundred years. Paper books were copied onto film at great economic and human cost and then destroyed. The films are currently in a state of degradation, while the few paper copies are still intact and searchable.⁴ One wonders if this technological push was not yet another own goal of the human being, who, in the grip of an industrial fever, unconsciously applies the rules of every industrial system: first he destroys to make a profit and later rebuilds with the same intent.

The question we will start with is: what if primary sources on paper or parchment no longer exist a hundred years from now? Indeed, the vicious circle of supply and demand intervenes in this field as well, and it remains the most difficult part of science to find out what is cause and what is effect. Will it be because of general disinterest? Will it be because confidence in technology will reach unprecedented levels? Will it be because of economic interests pushing for digitization? In any case, such a situation and all the issues it may entail cannot be ruled out.

He who controls the past controls the present.

If all the primary sources in our possession were digitized, we could save historical knowledge as if it were a kind of Ark in which everything important is saved. To some extent this is already the case and, fortunately, the digitization of sources, and to some extent also the bringing of the historical method closer to non-specialists, is happening rather expeditiously. If, however, an analog primary source were to be tampered with, here are teams of experts who would easily notice, having a physical object that has the marks of time and the hands that have touched it on it. On the other hand, there is no way to determine whether or not a digital file has been edited unless one has a yardstick: a recent historical event such as the fall of the Berlin Wall will be taken as an example. Until before the digital age, to edit all sources and hide such a fact would have required an immense amount of work and would have been difficult to do. With information technology, however, it is possible to edit millions of documents through specially written programs and with the help of artificial intelligence systems. Just as in a digital document it is possible to use the 'search and replace' function, a similar thing could be done for historical sources, where the word 'Berlin' is replaced with the word 'Milan'. Here it is that, for the historian of the future, History would immediately acquire a sense quite different from what we know, and the 'Berlin Wall' would become everywhere, and on any kind of 'primary' source, the 'Milan Wall'. The possible consequences of such actions do not need to be explained.

The reader may have already imagined how the hash function can allow a kind of snapshot of the file in question to be saved, but a major problem always remains: who will guard this hash? Who ensures that the digitized primary source has not been modified and subsequently the hash file updated? These issues, although they may seem like distant and abstract dilemmas in the present, should be considered by those who recognize the inestimable value of studying the past and have a love of truth as their aspiration.

The Internet Archive itself, which does an egregious and indispensable job, is actually a completely centralized solution and has not, at present, attempted to shelter itself from these issues. What would happen if, a hundred years from now, the sitting president ordered the Internet Archive to delete any Internet page that contained the word 'tomato'? The fruit in question, conceptually you mean, would cease to exist. One solution to this problem is offered by blockchains, which allow not only for saving a snapshot of the files of primary sources, but also for linking them to each other so that as one changes in the middle, so do all the others, thus revealing tampering. Decentralization of blockchains, implemented through a replication system, would allow for redundancy against any environmental catastrophes or coups.

Already today it would be possible, for example, to take a picture of a primary source, calculate the hash of the file, and save that code in a Bitcoin transaction. Having saved that code, at a given moment in time, would provide the ability, for those who do not trust it, to verify whether or not a file or primary source has been tampered with over time.

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