#“Is Blockchain a Shield for the Weak or Armor for the Powerful? Insights from a Conversation between 🧙‍♂️ (Professor) and 🐣 (Student)

I once felt that I almost understood blockchain while also missing the crucial parts, so I tried a round of Q&A with ChatGPT and turned it into this reworked dialogue. Yep, this works. It is surprisingly educational.

Dialogue: 🧙‍♂️ (Professor) and 🐣 (Student) on Why Blockchain Exists

🐣 (Student) “🧙‍♂️ (Professor), everyone keeps mentioning blockchain lately, but what is it really? Some people talk about it like a spell for striking it rich with crypto.”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “It is no spell. Think of it as a neighborhood noticeboard that has been copied all over the world. Once something is written, no one can erase or rewrite it.”

🐣 (Student) “But 🧙‍♂️ (Professor), if someone doodles on a noticeboard, it is ruined.”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “That is where blockchain differs. Even the doodles become part of the official record. In a way, it is the most suffocating noticeboard imaginable.”

Does It Protect the Vulnerable?

🐣 (Student) “Do ordinary people even need such a noticeboard?”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “In countries where banks freeze accounts at will or elections are riddled with fraud, it becomes a weapon. A tamper-proof ledger can protect people in weaker positions.”

🐣 (Student) “But if a government declares, ‘This ledger is the official one,’ won’t everyone be forced to obey it anyway?”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “You are striking where it hurts. Evidence is still just evidence. How it is treated depends on power in the real world. Blockchain can be both a shield for the weak and armor for the powerful.”

🐣 (Student) “It feels like those ‘contracts to protect common folks’ that ended up being unreadable papers used to trick people who could not read.”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “Indeed, history seems eager to repeat itself here.”

📌 Note: Immutability Versus Protecting the Vulnerable Blockchain is praised because people in power cannot alter records after the fact. Yet in the real world, the powerful decide which chain counts as ‘authentic,’ so the very same technology can reinforce existing power structures.

The Problem of Data You Cannot Delete

🐣 (Student) “What if someone publishes revenge porn on-chain? You cannot delete it, right?”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “Exactly. If it is written directly to the chain, deletion is nearly impossible. That is why projects actually store the data in systems such as IPFS or Arweave and only keep references on-chain.”

🐣 (Student) “But the data still exists, doesn’t it? It is like shoving a jar of pickles to the back of the fridge—you might not see it, yet the smell still lingers. In Japan, almost everyone has experienced that lingering scent in a shared fridge, so the comparison hits hard.”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “A humble analogy, but an accurate one. Immutability is a weapon and a curse at the same time.”

📌 Note: The Difficulty of Removing Blockchain Data

  • If you store data directly on a blockchain, you cannot delete it later.
  • Most systems save the actual data in external storage such as IPFS and keep only hashes or links on-chain.
  • The data still exists, so you can only make it less visible, not erase it.

When the Ledger Gets Bloated

🐣 (Student) “Even if heavy assets are kept off-chain, won’t transaction history alone cause the ledger to bloat, like a noticeboard too thick to carry?”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “That is correct. Hence the push for techniques like layer 2 solutions and sharding to distribute the load, though none of them are a perfect fix.”

🐣 (Student) “It sounds sketchy. If you split data across the network, what happens when node counts fall and pieces are missing? The guarantees would crumble.”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “That is why economic incentives and cryptography are designed to guarantee that the data exists.”

📌 Note: Scalability Concerns

  • Because transaction histories grow endlessly, running a full node becomes heavy.
  • Researchers are exploring layer 2 (off-chain processing) and sharding (splitting the chain) to cope.
  • None of these approaches has fully solved the problem.

What Purpose Does Blockchain Serve?

🐣 (Student) “All I hear are problems. What is blockchain actually good for?”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “In practice, it is useful for international remittances, preventing tampering in supply chains, and automating finance through DeFi. The deeper experiment, however, is whether we can reach consensus when no one trusts anyone else.”

🐣 (Student) “But real-world power can still enforce decisions, making consensus irrelevant. If authorities adopt blockchain, wouldn’t they just reinforce their forced agreements with an immutable ledger?”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “I cannot deny that. This is why I called blockchain both a shield and armor.”

📌 Note: Connecting to the Real World Consensus on-chain is technically solid, but whether it has legal force depends on social and institutional agreements. If the powerful embrace it, blockchain becomes their reinforcement; if they ignore it, it becomes powerless.

Is Blockchain a Tool to Fight Power?

🐣 (Student) “Power exists because people comply. If everyone ignored it, power would vanish, even without blockchain.”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “In theory, yes. Power comes from collective consent. Blockchain suggests shifting that consent from people to code. But humans do not thrive in absolute freedom. In DAOs, large token holders still end up running the show.”

🐣 (Student) “So our games of power never truly end.”

🧙‍♂️ (Professor) “Precisely. That is why I keep pondering whether we can use blockchain to make power radically transparent and controllable.”

Conclusion

Blockchain can be a shield for the vulnerable and armor for the powerful. Immutability can prove justice or lock people into discomfort.

In the end, blockchain may simply mirror how people, power, and freedom interact.

Technical Appendix: How Blockchain Stays Afloat

  • Consensus algorithms

    • Bitcoin’s Proof of Work relies on computation-heavy “voting” to block tampering.
    • Ethereum’s Proof of Stake creates consensus backed by staked assets.
    • The goal is to reach agreement when no single party can be trusted.

  • Hash functions and tamper detection

    • Each block carries the previous block’s hash, so altering a transaction triggers cascading inconsistencies.
    • The “chain” structure is what makes data irreversible.

  • Keys and signatures

    • Transactions are signed with public-key cryptography to prove who sent them.
    • Lose your private key and you lose access to your assets. The responsibility is entirely yours.

  • Scalability and layer 2

    • Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and Ethereum’s Optimistic and zk-Rollups move most processing off-chain and settle the minimum on-chain.
    • These approaches aim for hundreds or thousands of transactions per second.

  • Distributed storage

    • Systems like IPFS and Arweave integrate with blockchains to keep data undeletable.
    • Hash links make tampering at the storage layer detectable.