E-mail is widely used, and everyone knows what it is. Bitcoin is a hot new techno-bauble, and Bitcoin technologies like block chain are getting lots of attention and money. It turns out that e-mail has a great deal to teach us about Bitcoin and its technologies. Here’s the punch line: in spite of its ubiquity, practically no one understands how e-mail works, and this causes huge errors with practical consequences! By comparison, Bitcoin and its spawn are incredibly complicated; most of the people who do understand e-mail have little chance of understanding Bitcoin. Think about the consequences of this, please.
Do You Know How E-mail works?
E-mail is simple, right? You login to your e-mail account, fill out the To and Subject fields, maybe add a couple people in the CC field, write your e-mail, and press send. Then some magic happens, and the e-mail shows up in the in-boxes of the people to whom you sent it. You can read your own e-mail by looking at the items in your in-box, and even go to your sent-mail folder and look at what you sent. It’s simple, wonderful and true! For the vast majority of the time, it’s fine to leave “then some magic happens” alone.
The trouble comes when trouble comes, i.e., when there’s some special circumstance that requires knowing something about how that “magic” in the middle works. That’s when it comes out that almost no one has a clue about what’s going on, even in something as simple and ubiquitous as e-mail.
The IRS e-mail case
There are lots of examples, but the issues involving e-mail at the IRS which have been in the news off and on for the last couple of years are a good case in point. Here’s the lead paragraph from Wikipedia on the subject:
Now, remember – I’m not talking about the merits of the issue on one side or the other. I’m solely talking about the knowledge exhibited of how e-mail works, and the practical consequences of that knowledge. Read this juicy lead from an AP story on the subject:
Here are the key points:
- In June 2011, Lois Lerner’s computer crashed.
- This resulted “in the loss of records”
- It was determined that the records on the hard drive, i.e., Lois Lerner's emails, were gone forever
I am aghast. Agog. At a loss for words. I’d like to be shocked at the “depth” of misunderstanding, but I think it’s more appropriate to be shocked at the “shallowness” of misunderstanding exhibited in this quote, and in the heads of all the IRS employees, FBI, Congressional staffers, the archivists, and all the journalists with their fancy degrees from fancy schools.
Here is the core concept that everyone involved on every side seems to agree on:
The e-mails Lois Lerner wrote are uniquely stored on the hard drive of her personal computer. If it is true that the hard drive is severely damaged, then the e-mails are “gone forever.”
The simple thing
Even from the simplistic view of how e-mail works, every e-mail is either a draft or is sent to someone. If it's been given an accurate address, it arrives. It's in the receiver's in-box, and perhaps eventually in their deleted mail folder. Since the issue involved e-mails not only received by Ms. Lerner, but ones sent by her, presumably to other IRS employees, there is an obvious strategy: do a search on the e-mail of every IRS employee to whom Ms. Lerner could have sent an e-mail, and see if she did send one. It's the magic of e-mail: the sender has a copy of what was sent, and the recipient has a copy of what was received. There are at least two copies: both sender and receiver have one!
Have you ever read that simple thought anywhere else? Neither have I.
The "deep" thing, requiring understanding of how it works
Now we get to the real point. An e-mail address has two main parts: the name, and the domain. The name is the part before the @ and the domain is the part after the @, for example [email protected] Similarly, all e-mail systems have two main pieces of software involved: a client and a server. Software by Microsoft is widely used in governments and corporations. Outlook is the client software, which runs on the computer on which you read and write e-mails. Exchange is the server software, which runs in a data center somewhere. Exchange is a program with a database holding the e-mails, address books and calendars for a whole bunch of users. A domain like IRS.gov is implemented with many Exchange servers, each with the e-mails of a particular collection of IRS workers, typically a couple for each physical location.
When Ms. Lerner wrote an e-mail, she used her computer running an e-mail client such an Outlook. When she hit the Send button, the e-mail immediately went to her Exchange server, which filed it away. It then found the Exchange server(s) of the recipient(s) and passed the e-mail to it (them), which it turn sent it to the user's Outlook clients. Shortly after Ms. Lerner sent an e-mail to her colleague Mr. Lowe, it was stored in no less than four places, including a couple servers. In addition, assuming the government had at least moderately responsible Exchange administration, the e-mails were further copied to replicas, on and off-site, and in addition periodically backed up to yet another medium and location.
There are other e-mail clients and other e-mail servers. I have no information about what the IRS actually used. But this is how e-mail works! There are clients. There are servers, which serve a number of users/clients. When a human writes an e-mail, it goes from her client to her server to the recipient's server to the recipient's client. As as result, it should have made no difference whatsoever that Ms. Lerner's computer "crashed." It wouldn't matter if it suddenly grew wings and flew off to Tahiti to frolic in the waves. Any e-mails that Ms. Lerner wrote were securely stored on her e-mail server shared with other users and in a data center, and on multiple replicas, backups and disaster recovery sites.
The fact that Ms. Lerner's computer crashed and people supposedly spent time attempting to recover e-mails from it, and when they failed, declared them "lost forever," and the fact that everyone else involved, including journalists and commentators and experts of all sorts, accepted that as the state of affairs ("well, if her hard disk crashed, what can you do, ya know?"), demonstrates that none of them has a clue about how e-mail works. It's like not knowing that cars have engines. It's that bad.
What e-mails have to do with Bitcoin and Block Chain
Compared to many other computer technologies, e-mail is simple. Compared to many other computer technologies, Bitcoin is complex. Even worse, what's interesting about Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin the crypto-currency -- it's the block chain technology on which it's implemented. Block chain is getting all sorts of attention from financial technology people and investors. I won't review it here, but a brief look at the action will convince you it's frothy.
What if investors, financial industry executives and Bitcoin technology company leaders are as informed about block chain as everyone involved was/is about e-mail? What if they're making important decisions based on critical observations as sound as "well, the hard drive is kaput, so the e-mail is gone, and that's that?" If the understanding of important actors in the e-mail drama exhibit paper-thin understanding and wrong-headed conclusions, are we to understand that all the folks involved in Bitcoin and block chain are geniuses by comparison?
Place your bets, people. I know what I'm betting on.
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