Blockchaining Corporate Education

The Thing

There is certainly a perspective and flavor of modernity when some of our college fellows come up with brilliant ideas like blockchain. The disruptive innovation has at least one good reason for his author to remain under-cover, namely the inherent weaknesses of the trust-based model. The substitution of this model for an open and transparent peer-to-peer model over the globe seems an almost revolutionary attitude given the people the right to coin money.

Ten years after the original release of the Nakamoto’s article (2008), even before common sense can explain what Bitcoin is, the scholar world understood that, well, it is just another brick in the wall. However, this brick is mainly different from all the previous ones, because this time, it came out with a mathematical translation from the words. It was not only ideas on a written paper, but numbers and codes that are forging an algorithm that does something thast can be useful in the real world.

Bitcoin is the first public experiment that chains the ideas of language, math, wealth, and power. For the first time in history, there was no need for a French intellectual to write an explanation of what the social and political implications of a narrative are that built another limitation or benchmark for organizing society.

The free distributed software that propelled the original idea to the world financial market proved the concept that narratives are the building blocks of tools, no matter if we are thinking about a hammer or text editing software. The epistemological change is that since Renee Descartes, when there was the perception of the translation of an idea into math, but after Bitcoin, there is confidence that any idea translated into math is a tool that we can use in real life. It is Kant in its original thoughts and gives all software industry including games, and virtual reality, the assurance that before we can do things like terraforming in the future, we will be able to simulate it with a very accurate precision level.

According to Narayanan et al. (2016), blockchain is a chain of blocks connected by hash functions. The hash functions are mathematical functions that are easy to calculate from an input value. However, it is almost impossible to get back to the initial value after the calculation is done with the hash function. The hash function acts as a stamp over the results of a calculation, assuring that any change on the blockchain becomes evident. Any attempt to modify the stored data remains evident as it will change the final values of the hash function. Once the data is stored, it remains immutable. Multiples servers store the same blockchain, and that is why it is considered public information. Anyone may access a copy of all registers in a peer-to-peer network. The software chain a block to another block, and both synchronize information. They shared it with all the servers which store a copy of the original block. The new block is considered new information, and this new information requires the validation of the whole synchronized network by a validation device (Narayanan et al., 2016).

According to Nakamoto’s first idea (2008), this device is an algorithm. The algorithm requires a high computational effort to solve mathematical puzzles that are used to prove that the new information follows strict rules that allow the writing of this data in the blockchain. Today the logic behind a validation device allows stakeholders of a specific blockchain to control who is certifying the new data stored in the blockchain.

The education system is organized to assure that a student passes through many phases until he or she is considered to be able to manage some degree of knowledge. From kindergarten to the end of medicine or law school, students are evaluated in different ways and before becoming a worker competing in the market, we all collect many different documents to state that we know what we know.

The first use for blockchain in education is to enhance the information of all these bulletins we collect. In a typical school report, there is a grade stating that in a particular year, the student made great in English. However, we do not know if he or she were studying more grammar or more literature. With a blockchain system, we may build up a student’s portfolio throughout the entire schooling life until the person starts to work.