The Greatest Contest on Earth: The $72 Trillion Blockchain Hacker Sweepstakes

The idea of a crowdsourced contest to bring together the best minds in pursuit of a common goal is hardly new, and as such many of you have heard of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, which offered a $2 million award to the team that could best run an autonomous vehicle through an obstacle course in the Mojave Desert. Since then there have been many others, among them the Netflix Prize, and, more recently, SpaceX’s Hyperloop pod competition.

But those contests, and their prizes, pale in comparison to the biggest, baddest, and most lucrative of all crowdsourced contests. It’s a contest that has been running, quite fittingly, in stealth mode for a number of years, in part because the winner will have access to a prize of both unparalleled value and impact.

Indeed, whoever wins this contest will unlock the purported keys to the future of finance, business, technology, and even, heaven help us, voting. And in the process of making that alleged future a living nightmare the winner will have access to what is, at the time of this writing, a $72 trillion prize.

So, with no further ado, I’m proud to announce the greatest contest of all, the Blockchain Hacker Sweepstakes, a crowdsourced contest to be the first lucky hacker to crack open the supposedly unbreakable blockchain. The prize? The winning individual or team, for as long as they can keep their success a secret, will be among the richest and possibly most powerful people in the world.

Those are some stakes, no? I told you it was the greatest, didn’t I?

Here’s the essence of the contest: Bitcoin, blockchain, and all of its derivative technologies are currently the hottest, sexiest, and most important technologies to emerge in recent years, based on the notion that because of blockchain’s supposed hacker-proof architecture it can be used to secure any and all forms of transactions. Indeed, the hyperbole has gotten to point that there isn’t a day that passes where someone posits that yet another of our planet’s myriad social, political, economic, and technical problems can be handily solved with the application of blockchain technology. We’re seeing proposals to use blockchain to track the provenance of supplies in a supply chain, manage the complexities of carbon credit markets, improve electronic health records, enable even more music streaming, and, most insidiously, voting. (Yeh, voting. Leading the charge on blockchain voting is the municipality of Moscow, that bastion of free and open democratic values.)

While the above, despite the breathless hype, are mostly a collection of press releases and proofs of concept, about the only place that blockchain has really succeeded is in the cryptocurrency (what I call the cryptoponzi) world of bitcoin, which has exploded to a $72 trillion market, give or take a few trillion bucks. (And possibly more, if Facebook is allowed to proceed with its bonehead cryptoponzi scheme, I mean business plan, called Libra. It’s Facebook, so what could possibly go wrong?)

And therein lies the essence of the contest.

That $72 trillion, sitting in various cryptocurrencies, is protected by the myth that blockchain can’t be hacked. That myth has led thousands of miners to consume a few trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity to create the underlying blockchain infrastructure, which itself generates billions in profits as it consumes enough electricity to power an entire country or two. Suffice to say, there’s more than a boatload of money tied up in this blockchain stuff.

And in the grand tradition of Willy Sutton (“Why do you rob banks? ‘Because that’s where the money is.’”) that much money can only have one effect on those with larcenous tendencies: the itchy, twitchy need to steal. In this case, multiply that itch about 72 trillion times. And it’s going to be a piece of cake. All that’s needed is someone to do what we humans do all the time: beat the impossible odds, overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and, in this case, crack that blockchain myth wide open, take the money, and run.

Indeed, the size of the prize and the undeniable allure of pulling off the biggest caper in history is why I think this contest has been going on for a while, albeit in deep dark secret. (And so it has, in small doses that are just the very tip of the bitcoin iceberg.) That kind of money can’t help but attract the best and brightest among the worst of the worst to give it a shot – the only downside is the need to deploy a lot of time and energy and brain cells, but the winner’s return on that investment will be immeasurable no matter what.

Because we humans love a good hill to take and impossible dream to dream, we’d do it for God and glory anyway. But a pot of money that big works even better. And the beauty of the decentralized nature of blockchain is there’s no single authority that exists to defend a blockchain from such an attack. With no legal or sovereign entity behind the myriad bitcoin exchanges, the sweepstakes’ prize winner will just steal her little heart out clandestinely until her hack is detected. That could take days, weeks, or seconds. So, how much she’ll be able to steal is mostly a matter of how long it will take before the theft is detected. Regardless of how long, it’s a pretty sure bet she’ll be able to pocket the money without ever being found out or the victims recompensed. Anonymity: It’s a key feature of blockchain.

In a way I’m really hoping the contest will end as soon as possible. In part because this will be the only way to stop the current blockchain mania that has seen tech companies, financial institutions, shipping and logistics companies, and whatever else throw millions out the window chasing this Ponzi scheme. Only when there’s a winner blowing the lid off these hare-brained schemes will this nonsense stop, most likely the day the crypto-currency market collapses.

So, odds are this contest has been running for a while and I’m confident the number of players working to win the prize is far more than you can guess – or want to know about. Especially those of you counting on this technology to do something important like make you money or at least get some budget for your blockchain “proof of concept” project.

Even without my clandestine contest, taking down blockchain is really just a matter of time anyway. While the pundits and know-it-alls pretend that blockchain is hacker-proof, there’s a lot of smart money willing to bet that a quantum computer would be able be able to tackle the problem without breaking a sweat. Of course, that can’t happen right? Just because billions are being invested in this quantum technology pie-in-the-sky is no guarantee it will succeed, right?

The problem from an epistemological sense is that the best argument for the safety of blockchain is that it’s impossible to crack because it’s impossible to crack, and, luckily, the one technology that can crack it will never happen. Ergo blockchain remains impossible to crack. (Unless it’s this one, which is apparently designed to be cracked – sort of the anti-sweepstakes, if you will.)

Can these two suppositions coexist for long? No. Quantum is just starting its own hype cycle, but the basic supposition of what today would be the unimaginable power of quantum computing is not in dispute. And bear in mind that quantum is only the threat we know about. With that much moolah at stake, it’s easy to imagine teams of hackers, the descendants of the ad hoc teams of academics and private sector experts who came together to win the Netflix prize so many tech-years ago, are basically working 24/7 with whatever tools they can come up with to claim the prize.

Let’s presume, in the best possible case, that the quantum blockchain hack is 20 years in the future. Is this supposed to be reassuring? Salesforce.com pioneered the disruption we now know as Software as a Service (SaaS) a mere 20 years ago. Imagine what it would mean if the technological basis of everything Salesforce.com and its competitors and peers started doing at the dawn of the SaaS era had a prospective 20-year lifespan? There were many skeptics at the birth of the cloud economy, but no one every postulated that one reason to short this new fangled way of doing business is that it will hacked into oblivion in 20 years. Even if quantum takes a little longer, is this a bet anyone should really be taking?

One of the more egregious examples of the current blockchain cures the world’s problems disease can be found in the attempts to use it as the basis of a “secure,” smartphone-based voting system. If the proponents of this option were only approaching this in an open and honest manner, it might at least be an interesting academic exercise worth exploring (before we regain our senses and revert to the only auditable voting tech possible, paper ballots.) Instead, in addition to that aforementioned bastion of democratic process, Moscow, leading the charge, a venture-funded startup in the US, Voatz, is trying to disrupt its way into the voting tech world. In addition to its habit of obfuscation and opacity regarding its blockchain technology and methods, the company is backed by Bradley Tusk, who has rebranded himself as a philanthropist concerned with democracy, but who was actually the main henchman in charge of Uber’s business model of riding roughshod over local regulations in the service of making Uber investors such as Tusk rich while impoverishing its drivers. Anyone wonder whether  he’s doing this out of the good of his heart?

It’s hard not to worry that the same “damn the regulations, full steam ahead” method will bring blockchain into the already vulnerable world of voting – just in time to usher in another electoral cycle marred by illegal interference and suppressed votes. That’s going to hurt a lot more than the prospect of millions of corporate R&D and marketing dollars flushed down the tech hype toilet.

What helps me sleep at night is the assurance that soon enough greed will win the day, and we’ll be reading about the hack of the millennium and hear the sob stories of how the blockchain bros have lost their billions. So, pop the popcorn, pull up an armchair, and let the Great Blockchain Hacker Sweepstakes begin.