A Glimpse of Blockchain technology and Cryptocurrency through the Protests

Popularly, you’ve heard that the ongoing protests rummaging through Kenya are decentralized, organic, non-funded, and transparent. And that’s exactly what blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are all about too.

Decentralization means that it lacks a central location—no middleman or third party. Well, up to now, the government still thinks that an entity is definitely funding us. From the Russians, to the Illuminati, Ford-Kenya but maybe our true funding lies within the ruins that have been created by the corruption in this country. The uncovering of tweets by the late Jacob Juma from a decade ago, addressing still the same issues that we face in the present. The protests then began and have proven to not lie within a centralized society but a distributed network consisting of the citizens of Kenya.

Transparency comes in handy with blockchain technology through a distributed ledger that reveals to all custodians the transactions that have taken place. This has been vivid with the layout of the protests. We started with #OccupyCBD to #OccupyParliament to #OccupyUhuruPark and now to #OccupyJKIA. Clearly stating when and where the peaceful protests will take place.

The protests also have immutability in that they remain unchanged. They run with the same schedules religiously. Every Tuesday and Thursday, protesters have availed themselves in the streets, fighting for the cause, wanting a better country. In blockchain, the records equally remain unaltered. See when we talk about blockchain technology, we are literally talking about a buildup of blocks. Here, an individual block has to replicate the hash function of the previous block so as to avoid collision resistance.

Collision resistance has been seen in the protests, through the police fighting protesters. By launching teargas, to spraying water at high pressure from the water cannons, to the unnecessary arrests. The goons also paid to infiltrate the protests by looting and vandalizing businesses and causing unnecessary chaos. If it is hard to find two inputs that hash the same output then no good comes from what we’re trying to achieve in this country.

The deterministic nature of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency ensures that action is supposed to be executed in a certain way. And for us, it is going on X spaces to converse and to plan on the way forward. We do not just wake up and decide to occupy these places. We plan, we strategize. Equal to the Byzantine’s General Problem which states that system actors, in this case, we the people, must communicate with each other and agree on a viable truth.

Protesting and occupying also have various uses, so far, we’ve managed to #RejectTheFinanceBill2024, dissolving the Cabinet and forming another one, bringing to light how these gluttonous politicians have been spending the taxpayer’s money and of course grounding the president himself from leaving the country. The pilot and his crew must be having a lovely vacation I might say. And we continue to fight for many more causes, post and pay the interns and other civil servants, review some of these atrocious salaries, let these politicians account for taxpayers’ money and show evidence of development in their respective fields. Equally, blockchain seeks to improve food safety, simplify and deliver healthcare, introduce decentralized finance, and reduce fraud, and money laundering among many others.

We put our lives on the line in those streets. May all the lives lost continue resting in peace, it will not be in vain. At the end of the day as we raise the flag and are protected by the Constitution of Kenya, “All sovereign power belongs to the people of Kenya and shall be exercised in accordance with this Constitution.”