Love is Like Cocaine

Love Is Like Cocaine

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The View From Age 38

A few weeks ago, to prepare myself for my solo book club, I read a biography of Marcel Proust — though not the Jean-Yves Tadiédoorstopper that I mentioned in my first entry. Instead I read Benjamin Taylor’s Proust: The Search, a tightly focused biography concerned mainly with one question: how did Marcel Proust, of all writers, manage to author what many consider to be the greatest novel of all time? According to Taylor, it was not by any means preordained. No one in his circle, especially those who knew him in his youth, would have predicted it. His first published efforts were mediocre and forgettable. He lacked discipline, socialized too much, and couldn’t be bothered to show up for his part-time librarian job. He was also very sickly, an asthmatic who was easily exhausted by travel and parties — both of which he could not resist. Yet somehow, Taylor argues, “all this light-minded flitting around would turn out to be essential preparation.”

It took Proust about 13 years to write In Search of Lost Time, an extraordinary pace when you consider that he wrote seven volumes, none of them less than 400 pages and some close to 900. And it’s extraordinary considering the quality of his prose, and how interconnected the books are, with certain themes repeating and developing over the course of the novel, and a cast of characters changing over time, aging and evolving (or not evolving), just as real people do. Proust had the end of the novel in mind when he began, and a vague sense that he had found the structure — or, maybe, the moral sensibility — that could finally contain all the different modes of writing he wished to employ: description, analysis, dialogue, gossip, satire, and of course, his essays and insights about memory and consciousness. He was 38 years old and in poor health when he started writing. He knew he did not have any time left to waste. He believed — as it turned out, accurately — that he was writing on deadline. He died in 1922, shortly after completing his novel.

Reading Taylor’s biography, I kept thinking about the fact that I’m turning 38 this spring. This felt, at first, like a very egotistical thing to dwell upon, a secret hope that I might be on the cusp of writing a novel as grand as Proust’s. But, delusions aside, I think what really interests me about this parallel is that as a reader, I am the same distance from my childhood as Proust was from his when he began his book. Given Proust’s theme of memory lost and found, that similarity in perception has made the early pages of the novel feel very close to my current experience of memory and time.

Even those who have only a passing knowledge of Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, will probably know that it begins with a long recollection of the narrator’s childhood trips to the country. This recollection is famously spurred by a happenstance bite of a madeleine cookie dipped in tea. The narrator, Marcel, describes the memories as “involuntary”, and all the more beautiful because he did not even realize he had them; they were bidden by sensory experience, not intellectual recall.

When I first read Proust in college, I certainly knew what it was like to suddenly and surprisingly remember something after encountering a particular smell or taste. But at 21, my memories of childhood were so close that nothing really seemed forgotten. If the smell of someone’s shampoo unexpectedly brought back the pretty smile of a long-lost babysitter, I didn’t believe, as Proust did, that it was a stroke of luck to have remembered that girl, and that I might have forgotten her, entirely, if not for that whiff of Herbal Essences. Now, at 37, I understand how distant memories can become. Lately, I feel like I’m looking at my childhood from a slightly higher vantage point, so that I can finally see the topography. Certain events and people seem to have risen in importance while others have blended together. I was talking to a friend my age about this and she knew what I was talking about, reporting that just recently she seems to have forgotten parts of her teens and 20s. Does this happen to everyone, we wondered — was it some kind of subtle marker of impending middle age? Did it happen to Proust? Was forgetting what allowed him to write his marvelous book of remembrance?

by Hannah Gerson, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: Marcel Proust

Tom Jobim & Elis Regina

Yumikrum, Lady of the Lake, collage, 2015
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Carrier, Pigeon

It’s natural to wonder how long the subsidies Amazon has so generously provided to our perpetually broke national postal system to deliver approximately forty percent of its packages will last, given that Amazon can’t help but to absorb the things that its partners do for it, whether it’s publishing books, producing TV shows, cranking out wipes, spinning HDMI cables, or transporting the items that its forty-six million (or more!) Prime members can’t stop ordering.

While Amazon’s interest in claiming the last mile of delivery is no secret—with the swarm of delivery drones that it constantly tells us is looming just over a slight technical and regulatory horizon, and the fleet of AmazonFresh delivery trucks and same-day couriers patrolling city streets—Bloomberg reports that Amazon is moving forward with project “Dragon Boat” (what a delightfully problematic codename!), a “global delivery network that controls the flow of goods from factories in China and India to customer doorsteps in Atlanta, New York and London”:

Amazon’s plan would culminate with the launch of a new venture called “Global Supply Chain by Amazon,” as soon as this year, the documents said. The new business will locate Amazon at the center of a logistics industry that involves not just shippers like FedEx and UPS but also legions of middlemen who handle cargo and paperwork associated with transnational trade. Amazon wants to bypass these brokers, amassing inventory from thousands of merchants around the world and then buying space on trucks, planes and ships at reduced rates. Merchants will be able to book cargo space online or via mobile devices, creating what Amazon described as a “one click-ship for seamless international trade and shipping.” … Amazon will partner with third-party carriers to build the global enterprise and then gradually squeeze them out once the business reaches sufficient volume and Amazon learns enough to run it on its own, the documents said.

Amazon potentially one day turning off the spigot of money that helps keep the USPS solvent is, in some sense, one of the more minor eventual outcomes of it building and controlling a complete, end-to-end, factory-to-doorstep global logistics and supply chain—FedEx and UPS have far more to worry about—but it is one of the more clear examples of the plausible negative consequences of funding-starved public infrastructure being underwritten and then slowly captured by a private company. (I mean, if you think that a USPS potentially diminished by the eventual loss of Amazon’s business is a negative thing. Maybe you don’t! One man’s public infrastructure is another man’s waste of tax dollars that could be better put to use unlocking latent value through the machinery of the startup economy, and besides, if we even have mail after decade or so, carriers would just be replaced by drones anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter that much after all.)

by Matt Buchanan, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: Elvert Barnes

What It Feels Like to Freeze on National Television

I am reflecting here on the worst public embarrassment of my career. Two days ago I appeared live on television on ABC News Breakfast to provide comment on North Korea’s recent rocket launch, a topic on which I have written and spoken about extensively. The interview was a disaster from the get-go as I melted down under the weight of anxiety. The experience was mortifying, the feeling afterward devastating and the humiliation very very public.

Reliving the interview in my mind continues to be excruciating. However, I am writing about it now in an effort to “own” the experience, to thank the people who offered me support in the hours following the interview, and to make a broader point about anxiety and mental health.

Experiencing “the freeze”

I’m not the first person to freeze up on the big stage and I won’t be the last. But what does this experience actually feel like? I don’t need your sympathy, but I would like to share this story in solidarity with the large number of people who struggle with social anxieties on a daily basis.

I was contacted by the ABC studio in the afternoon on Sunday with an invitation to appear on News Breakfast the following morning, an invitation which I gladly accepted. It’s not the first time I’ve appeared on TV and I was confident in offering comment on my area of expertise. North Korea’s nuclear aspirations is a topic I have written on extensively and spoken about in the media and other public forums.

In doing the News Breakfast interview I inadvertently thrust my life-long battle with severe anxiety into the public domain. The moment I accepted the interview invitation on Sunday afternoon I started experiencing a steadily growing anxiousness that peaked as Michael Rowland threw to me in the ABC studio. I watched an NBA basketball game on TV on Sunday night but I couldn’t tell you a single detail about the game. Rather than go to sleep as PM ticked over to AM, I became increasingly wired as I ruminated endlessly on what I would say in the interview, what I would wear and how I would get to the ABC studio in Southbank in the early morning, among other things. As an introverted personality type I have a richer inner world but with an early start and an appearance on national TV looming my brain slipped into a state of hyper-arousal. I did not sleep a single minute before I jumped on the train to the city on Monday morning.

I arrived at the ABC’s Southbank studio in plenty of time before the schedule interview. I checked in at the security desk and waited about ten minutes before a member of the News Breakfast team escorted me upstairs. Next I was taken into the make-up suite to get daubed with foundation. In hindsight, my inability to say anything cogent about my interview topic in small talk with the friendly make-up person may have been a sign of things to come. From there I was brought into the TV studio office, where the presenters research their stories of the day off-air and support staff arrange interviewees and content feeds from around the world. I waited there for about twenty-five minutes, absent-mindedly scanning old newspapers while watching the goings-on about the office and repeating what I wanted to say about the North Korean rocket launch over and over in my head.

About two minutes before my interview I was taken into the studio editing room, which looked something akin to the situation room at the Oval Office, with numerous TV screens, computer monitors and other equipment sequestered in an otherwise dark, small room. Both the office and the editing room were an intense hive of fast-paced, urgent activity.

During the on-air story prior to my interview I was then led into the studio itself, where I was miked up and sat down next to Virginia Trioli and Michael Rowland, who both introduced themselves and shook my hand. Filled with cameras, auto-prompter screens, TVs and computer screens under the desk, I experienced the studio as a claustrophobic environment and felt instant discomfort.

The lead-in story to my interview was a piece on Whitehouse spokesperson Sam Powers’ official statement on the American reaction to the North Korean rocket launch. I remember thinking that I’d cite Powers’ remarks in my comments. As the Sam Powers story ended and the tech guys were counting in the live camera feed to the studio desk, I began to experience what could generally be described as a panic attack. I could feel my body over-load with adrenaline as my entire physique heated up, my muscles deadened and my skin began to vibrate as if being shocked with a mild electric current.

Michael Rowland introduced me and then threw to me with his first question. I have no memory of his actual question, my mind all of the sudden swimming in a haze. As I realised that seconds were ticking away without me forming a coherent answer, the physical anxiety reactions intensified. I babbled and stumbled, my carefully prepared comments slipping away from my conscious awareness. Michael and Virginia, seeing that I was struggling, asked prompting questions in an effort to change tack and help me out of the hole. I very much appreciated their efforts to shepherd me through the interview, but it was to no avail. With every question they asked I struggled even more as my anxiety symptoms took complete command of my body and mind. Finally I gave in and said “I can’t do this,” and Michael and the editors quickly threw to the next story.

by Dr Benjamin Habib | Read more:
Image: ABC News Breakfast

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.

The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

When Drago saw the signal, he was stunned. “It was difficult to understand what to do,” he told me. He informed a colleague, who had the presence of mind to call the LIGO operations room, in Livingston, Louisiana. Word began to circulate among the thousand or so scientists involved in the project. In California, David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, saw his daughter off to school and went to his office, at Caltech, where he was greeted by a barrage of messages. “I don’t remember exactly what I said,” he told me. “It was along these lines: ‘Holy shit, what is this?’ ” Vicky Kalogera, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, was in meetings all day, and didn’t hear the news until dinnertime. “My husband asked me to set the table,” she said. “I was completely ignoring him, skimming through all these weird e-mails and thinking, What is going on?” Rainer Weiss, the eighty-three-year-old physicist who first suggested building LIGO, in 1972, was on vacation in Maine. He logged on, saw the signal, and yelled “My God!” loudly enough that his wife and adult son came running.

The collaborators began the arduous process of double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking their data. “We’re saying that we made a measurement that is about a thousandth the diameter of a proton, that tells us about two black holes that merged over a billion years ago,” Reitze said. “That is a pretty extraordinary claim and it needs extraordinary evidence.” In the meantime, the LIGO scientists were sworn to absolute secrecy. As rumors of the finding spread, from late September through this week, media excitement spiked; there were rumblings about a Nobel Prize. But the collaborators gave anyone who asked about it an abbreviated version of the truth—that they were still analyzing data and had nothing to announce. Kalogera hadn’t even told her husband. (...)

LIGO is part of a larger effort to explore one of the more elusive implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The theory, put simply, states that space and time curve in the presence of mass, and that this curvature produces the effect known as gravity. When two black holes orbit each other, they stretch and squeeze space-time like children running in circles on a trampoline, creating vibrations that travel to the very edge; these vibrations are gravitational waves. They pass through us all the time, from sources across the universe, but because gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces of nature—electromagnetism, for instance, or the interactions that bind an atom together—we never sense them. Einstein thought it highly unlikely that they would ever be detected. He twice declared them nonexistent, reversing and then re-reversing his own prediction. A skeptical contemporary noted that the waves seemed to “propagate at the speed of thought.”

by Nicola Twilley, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Aleks Sennwald

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The Reality of Missing Out

When it comes to ad-supported services, pundits everywhere are fond of the adage “If you’re not the customer you’re the product”. It’s interesting, though, how quickly that adage is forgotten when it comes to evaluating the viability of said services.

Twitter is a perfect example. In response to my piece How Facebook Squashed Twitter I got a whole host of responses along the lines of this from John Gruber:

I have argued for years that the fundamental problem is that Twitter is compared to Facebook, and it shouldn’t be. Facebook appeals to billions of people. “Most people”, it’s fair to say. Twitter appeals to hundreds of millions of people. That’s amazing, and there’s tremendous value in that — but it’s no Facebook. Cramming extra features into Twitter will never make it as popular as Facebook — it will only dilute what it is that makes Twitter as popular and useful as it is.

From a user’s perspective, I completely agree. But remember the adage: it’s the customers that matter, and from an advertiser’s perspective Facebook and Twitter are absolutely comparable, which is the root of the problem for the latter. Digital advertising is becoming a rather simple proposition: Facebook, Google, or don’t bother.

CONSUMER SERVICE CARNAGE

Last Friday LinkedIn suffered one of the worst days the stock market has ever seen, plummeting 40% despite the fact the company beat expectations for both revenue and adjusted earnings; the slide was prompted by significantly lower guidance than investors expected.

The issue for LinkedIn is that a company’s stock price is not a scorecard; rather it is the market’s estimate of a company’s future earnings, and the ratio to which the stock price varies from current earnings is the degree to which investors expect said earnings to grow. In the case of LinkedIn, the company’s relatively mature core business serving recruiters continues to do well; that’s why the company beat estimates. That market, though, has a natural limit, which means growth must be found elsewhere, and LinkedIn hoped that elsewhere would be in advertising. The lower-than-expected estimates and shuttering of Lead Accelerator, LinkedIn’s off-site advertising program (which follows on the heels of LinkedIn’s previous decision to end display advertising), suggested that said growth may not materialize.

Yelp, meanwhile, was only down 11% yesterday after releasing earnings (and issuing guidance) that weren’t that terrible.

The company’s big hit came last summer when the stock plummeted 28% in a single day on, you guessed it, a lower-than-expected forecast, based in part on Yelp’s decision to end its brand advertising program.

Yahoo’s core business, meanwhile, is practically worthless as revenues and earnings continue to decline, and the aforementioned Twitter has seen its valuation slump below $10 billion; both are in stark contrast to the companies each has traditionally been associated with: Google is worth $460 billion (and was briefly the most valuable company in the world) and Facebook is worth $267 billion.

The reason for such a stark bifurcation is, ultimately, all about the “customer”: the advertiser actually buying the ads that underly all of these “free” consumer services.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

What Depression Is Really Like

In a piercing letter to his brother, Vincent van Gogh captured the mental anguish of depression in a devastatingly perfect visceral metaphor: “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.” Anyone who has suffered from this debilitating disease knows that the water in that well is qualitatively, biochemically different from the water in the puddle of mere sadness. And yet, even as scientists are exploring the evolutionary origins of depression and the role REM sleep may play in it, understanding and articulating the experience of the disease remains a point of continual frustration for those afflicted and a point of continual perplexity for those fortunate never to have plummeted to the bottom of the well.

No one has captured this perennial plague of the human spirit with greater vividness and acuity than William Styron (June 11, 1925–November 1, 2006) in Darkness Visible (public library) — his trenchant 1990 memoir of depression.

Styron, who first descended into clinical depression at the age of sixty and describes himself as “one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale,” considers the cultural baggage of this “veritable howling tempest in the brain,” propelled by “the intermingled factors of abnormal chemistry, behavior and genetics”:

When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word “depression.” Depression, most people know, used to be termed “melancholia,” a word which appears in English as early as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. “Melancholia” would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated — the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer — had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering “depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

One of the most striking paradoxes of the disease is that despite its devastating prevalence — depression is the most common form of disability in the world today — its symptoms are so imperceptible from the outside that it is extremely difficult to tell who is suffering and who is not. And yet what goes on inside is acute and unmistakable.

by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings |  Read more:
Image: William Styron

Inside the Surreal, Self-Invented World of Pamela Anderson

I first meet Pamela Anderson on a Tuesday. She's posing on the deck of a mid-century house in Beachwood Canyon, in the low hills of Hollywood, as afternoon fades gently into evening. It's hard to say what's more striking, when I first walk into the house: Pamela Anderson, or the light on the deck, golden as only LA light can be at the end of a clear afternoon. Beneath the sky, a band of grey smog hangs on the horizon—under that, the creeping 101, the spindly marquees of hotels.

Pamela is wearing black lingerie and a trench coat, and her hair is groomed into a neat bob. All day, she's been a fantasy out of Hitchcock or Fellini: She's posed in tears with a pistol, in silk pajamas, taking drags from ultra-thin Capris while clasping an oversized cordless phone in a convincing semblance of panic. When the camera is doing its work, the small army of assistants, stylists, hair people, and hangers-on all fall silent. All I can hear is the beep-click of the shutter and Lana Del Rey on the stereo, for mood.

It's not right to say she is unrecognizable in the photos being taken; she is Pamela Anderson. But she looks small for someone so much larger than life, and somehow modest, miles away from the beach-bronzed rock 'n' roll goddess I was expecting. It's a strange effect. The Pamela Anderson that comes up when I google her name, all smudged eyeliner and wild chemical blonde, feels like another woman. It feels like an invention. In my time with Pamela—beginning here and ending ten hours later, dazed, in an Uber winding back down the hills—I will learn that the line between invention and reality is porous.

As I'm waiting to speak with her, night falls. An assistant pulls the photographer aside. "I'm going to get wine," she whispers, "what should I get?" Rosé, chardonnay, champagne; the consultation spreads to Pamela. "Goldschläger?" she jokes. That's how she met her first husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee—she sent him a shot of Goldschläger from across a Las Vegas bar. He licked her face and they were married not long afterward, a modern-day fairytale, on the beach in Cancun, the bride in a white bikini. Their union was catnip to paparazzi, and the Anderson-Lees were rarely out of tabloids throughout the mid-1990s, inadvertently creating the celebrity sex tape genre before bearing two children and divorcing. Much of what I know about Pamela Anderson before meeting her is colored by the vivid imagery of this era, which I absorbed at an impressionable age. The assistant goes for rosé.

The segue from shot to matrimony sounds improbable, but that's the way Pamela tells stories: as impressionistic collages of names, moments, and places, sometimes daisy-chained into breathless sequences. Each is like a little flower arrangement. David LaChapelle, Las Vegas, bathrobes, glitter on her skin, "visiting Elton in his room." That's how she lives, too. She doesn't have a manager, or an agent; she never really has—"they just give up on me," she says. Instead, she meets people, follows her instincts, gets into pickles, unpickles herself, picks up, moves on. She claims to be both unmanageable and suggestible, demonstrating a combination of freewheeling courage and guilelessness that has led her to who she is today: a newly-single sex symbol pushing 50 with a rolodex full of artist friends and two adult sons, entering what she calls "Chapter Two" of her career. (,,,)

Pamela became a celebrity in a different age. Although hounded by paparazzi during her rocky and very public marriages to Tommy Lee and briefly, Kid Rock, she retained some measure of inaccessibility. Her heirs to the throne of tabloid notoriety have no such luxury, nor do they desire it. The celebs created by Instagram and YouTube became famous to be seen; what's the point of privacy? Now that every would-be Kardashian can send out a constant, direct-to-consumer stream of staged intimacy and selfies, access—the longtime currency of fame—has been upended. Pamela, whose image was ubiquitous before ubiquity could be juiced with retweets, is left in the strange position of having to renegotiate the nature of her own public image.

by Claire Evans, Vice | Read more:
Image: Tucker Tripp

Los Punks

[ed. See also: LIVINGOFFTHEWALL]

The Knife Room (West Anaheim Medical Center)
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Nenad Bacanovic

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Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

[ed. Sorry, technical difficulties. Regular programming will resume shortly.]
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Bad Decision

Aaron Rodgers sits with San Francisco 49ers head coach Mike Nolan as Dr. Harry Edwards takes notes during an NFL Scouting Combine interview held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Feb. 27, 2005 in Indianapolis. Two months later at the NFL Draft, Nolan and the Niners selected Alex Smith with the No. 1 pick. Rodgers was the next QB taken at No. 24 by Green Bay. A four-time Pro Bowl quarterback and Super Bowl XLV MVP, Rodgers turned 32 years old on Dec. 2, 2015. (Todd Rosenberg for SI)
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What Is Blockchain?

Known by many as the technology underpinning the bitcoin digital currency, blockchain has acquired a new identity in the enterprise. At a time when companies face new challenges in data management and security, it’s emerging as a way to let companies make and verify transactions on a network instantaneously without a central authority. Today, more than 40 top financial institutions and a growing number of firms across industries are experimenting with distributed ledger technology as a secure and transparent way to digitally track the ownership of assets, a move that could speed up transactions and cut costs while lowering the risk of fraud. Some companies see an opportunity to use blockchain to track the movement of assets throughout their supply chains or electronically initiate and enforce contracts.

Blockchain remains in the experimental phase inside many large firms and there are few tested use cases, experts and analysts caution. Here’s a look at how this emerging technology works:

What is blockchain?

A blockchain is a data structure that makes it possible to create a digital ledger of transactions and share it among a distributed network of computers. It uses cryptography to allow each participant on the network to manipulate the ledger in a secure way without the need for a central authority.

Once a block of data is recorded on the blockchain ledger, it’s extremely difficult to change or remove. When someone wants to add to it, participants in the network — all of which have copies of the existing blockchain — run algorithms to evaluate and verify the proposed transaction. If a majority of nodes agree that the transaction looks valid — that is, identifying information matches the blockchain’s history — then the new transaction will be approved and a new block added to the chain.

The term blockchain today usually describes a version of this distributed ledger structure and distributed consensus process. There are different blockchain configurations that use different consensus mechanisms, depending on the type and size of the network and the use case of a particular company. The bitcoin blockchain, for example, is public and “permissionless”, meaning anyone can participate and contribute to the ledger. Many firms also are exploring private or “permissioned” blockchains whose network is made up only of known participants. Each of these blockchain implementations operate in different ways.

Guardtime, a company that sells blockchain-based products and services to enterprises and governments including Ericsson AB and the country of Estonia, explained its approach like this:

Assume an organization has 10 transactions per second. Each of those transactions receives its own digital signature. Using a tree structure, those signatures are combined and given a single digital fingerprint — a unique representation of those transactions at a specific time. That fingerprint is sent up the tree to the next layer of infrastructure, such as a service provider or telecom company. This process happens for every organization in the network until there is a single digital fingerprint that encompasses all the transactions as they existed during that particular second. Once validated, that fingerprint is stored in a blockchain that all the participants can see. A copy of that ledger is also sent back to each organization to store locally. Those signatures can be continuously verified against what is in the blockchain, giving companies a way to monitor the state and integrity of a particular asset or transaction.

Anytime a change to data or an asset is proposed, a new, unique digital fingerprint is created, Guardtime said. That fingerprint is sent to each client node for validation. If the fingerprints don’t match, or if the change to the data doesn’t fit with the network’s agreed-upon rules, the transaction may not be validated. This setup means the entire network, rather than a central authority, is responsible for ensuring the validity of each transaction.

by Arvind Krishna, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Oliver Wyman