Merkle’s miscue and the future of blockchain

On September 23, 1908, in the ninth inning, budding young baseball star Fred Merkle singled to right against the Chicago Cubs, sending Harry “Moose” McCormick to third and putting the New York Giants in the lead in the National League pennant. ran against their rivals, the Chicago Cubs. The next batter, shortstop Al Bridwell, singled into center field, scoring McCormick and winning the game for the Giants. As was customary at the time, the jubilant Giants fans stormed onto the field and made their way to the exit, which was in center field.

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In the confusion that followed, 19-year-old Merkle happily ran to the grave to congratulate Bridwell. Cubs center fielder Soll Hofman threw the ball back into the infield, where it was intercepted by Giants first base coach Joe McGinnity and thrown back into the crowd. But Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers smartly ran to second base, either having found the original ball or—some say—secretly swapping it for another. He took advantage of what was then a little-known technicality in the rules, stepped on the base and called Fred Merkle out on a forced play, ending the inning, nullifying the run and giving the Cubs a one-game lead over the Giants that ultimately secured them a spot in the World Series, which they won. Reviewing at least half a dozen conflicting accounts of the play, the National League board ultimately upheld the ruling of home plate umpire Hank O’Day — who had to be escorted off the field, mobbed on all sides by a field full of furious Giants fans. Perhaps unfairly, the play became known across the country as “Merkle’s Boner”, a synonym for stupidity.

Seventy-four years later, Fred “Bonehead” Merkle’s grandson Ralph patented the so-called “Merkle Tree”, the technical basis for most modern cryptography. It synthesized many of the powerful cryptographic ideas developed by the United States in the aftermath of World War II, particularly Lamport-Diffie digital signatures, to form what he referred to as an “infinite tree of one-time signatures.” Where encryption systems previously required the production of a huge number of so-called keys to lock each piece of information individually, the Merkle method linked the messages together so that a single key could lock them all at once: forming either a tree or a chain, depending on how you looked at it on that.

Eight years after that, Scott Stornetta, a physicist and devout Mormon, was eating ice cream with his family in New Jersey at a Friendly’s, a chain ice cream stand, when it struck him that if the links in a Merkle tree lined up with chronological units— for example, a week – it could create a sort of permanent calendar that could be used to record inventions. Such an innovation can also help to restore temporal order in the media mudslide that had been triggered by the simple digitization of information. A year later, Stornetta and his friend Stuart Haber published “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, which opened with a quote from The Rape of Lucrece: “Time’s glory is to calm contending kings … to stamp the seal of time in the age of things .”

Sixteen years after Stornetta’s discovery at Friendly’s, an anonymous programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto found a way to build fees into the timestamping process and use them to pay the network of users to run the encryption themselves; a final step that took the time-stamped digital chain to the global market.

Today, it is difficult to get support for a cryptocurrency with a centralized time-stamping process; It is generally agreed that such a cryptocurrency hardly deserves the name. But it is easy to see that the idea presented in the Bitcoin Whitepaper goes more or less unmodified from Satoshi to Stornetta and Merkle and even back to Lamport and Diffie. Satoshi’s improvement to Stornetta’s blockchain was to allow it to run independently; Stornetta’s improvement on Merkle was to standardize the intervals at which the blocks were published; Merkle’s improvement on Lamport was to cut computational costs; even Lamport’s digital signature was a clever reformulation of Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman’s public and private “key pair,” an idea that can be put into practice as easily with numbers as with locked boxes or jars of paint.

What we have witnessed in recent years is the explosion of an old idea, namely public key cryptography, which has spent the last fifty years being streamlined, refined and economized into a product – Bitcoin – that even now looks more like it. as a speculative investment rather than a tool with real, practical uses. The sudden exposure of this technology to the public at this point in history, and its adoption as a political symbol by libertarian Republicans and transhumanists, is incidental to the development of the underlying cryptographic technique by obscure figures such as Ralph Merkle or Scott Stornetta: People who have a tend not to be motivated by bioscience or effective altruism, but by a genuine, even shy, interest in the science of information.

As their project takes new forms—as data storage, as copyright, as an anarchist weapon—it gains and loses supporters. As it falls in and out of alignment with the needs of different constituencies, the cultural aesthetics surrounding the technology can change radically. This latest iteration, born in the 2008 financial crisis and at a time of American political division, has proven particularly useful to a number of groups disaffected with the world order and have seized on cryptocurrency as a sort of cure. But the power of the cryptographic ideas, which since the 1940s have evolved alongside their better-known cousin, the computer, means that they belong to no one group, and continue with a leaping, fleeting momentum through the brains of a wide network of computer scientists. .

The invention of Bitcoin brought public key cryptography to the world’s attention for the first time since the early enthusiasm for personal computers. The next may drag it back to chat rooms, mailing lists, and journals, there to lie dormant for years or decades, until it resurfaces in marketable form.

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