Below is an excerpt from Kyt Dotson’s novel City of Paradigm, a science fiction tale about a fictional 21st century city situated somewhere in California. Each City of Paradigm column is two parts: an excerpt from the novel and an editorial describing the real-world context of the technologies described in the story. Readers may find more City of Paradigm here on SiliconANGLE.

In a city like the City of Paradigm malls could take on an entirely different role: they kept their old manner of providing a giant building to hold retail and food merchants as well as broad open spaces for movement of people, but the two largest complexes in Paradigm (situated within opposite sides of the city) also doubled as nexuses for the underground mass transit network of the city.

The city architects built the East Paradigm Mall like a pentagon with four major retail department store outlets built up along the outside in their own multi-story buildings, with the fifth plot belonging to a virtual reality cinema. The ground floor (and all the floors above) belonged to the retail and social areas of the mall; to reach the mass transit, numerous escalators, elevators, and corridors connected to the second basement. The first underground level contained maintenance equipment and technology offices for supporting the entire space.

Bell stood just inside one of the lobbies with her back to a large set of glass doors, which rattled as wind whistled through the city carrying with it clouds of dust. For a weekday afternoon, the parking lot appeared almost empty—although the lunch crowds inside the mall moved with loud purpose, burbling with conversation.

Isabelle “Bell” Elune Wolfe and her friend, Kathleen Gamble, had arrived at the mall only an hour before the gusty windstorm blew in from the west. If it weren’t for the barometer app, hanging out just on the edge of her vision with a clock near it, Bell might not have noticed that she’d almost missed lunch chatting with her friend in the lobby and hadn’t even gone into the mall itself.

“We should really get to the stores!” Bell blurted when she noticed the time. “I’ve got a meeting at five and I don’t want to make my dad angry with me again like last week…” She let the words trail out of her mouth.

Kathleen nodded and gestured for Bell to lead the way.

The pair drifted into the mall proper, dodging small clots of people as they began to filter out of the food court or funneled towards the mass transit access ways. Bell led Kathleen across a broad, ivory paved floor towards a small recessed area with a kiosk and a wide table in front of an information board. The board—a giant LED screen featuring an animated map of the mall’s retail outlets—displayed user icons connected to shifting sets of numbers and included a leaderboard on the side with more names and numbers.

Bell paused next to the leaderboard, reached into her trench coat pocket, and withdrew a small grey device. The device, shaped like a brick and emblazoned with a stylized wolf, had her name written under it “Elune.” After she set it down, another icon appeared on the leaderboard (somewhat near the bottom).

“You use these?” Kathleen asked, looking over the various blocks sitting on the table—her hand paused next to Bell’s device.

Bell sniffed at that and shrugged. “Yeah,” she said trying to sound nonchallant. “As with all things, my dad got it for me. He set the privacy settings so that it only displays my personal avatar on the leaderboard but we don’t show up on the map—“ She gestured at the leaderboard. Some of the icons and names floated around the animated map of the mall representing people who had placed similar devices next to the leaderboard.

“The mall authority uses the World Wide Ledger to track a lot of its metrics and the different stores here will even accept dozens of virtual currencies connected to that,” Bell said. “So, my dad got me a mining-brick. I synchronized it last weekend and see—“ Bell pointed to her name on the leaderboard. “—I already have fifty five Paradigm Points.”

“I get those on my card for buying things here,” Kathleen said. “And you just get them for putting this here?”

“That and I get free access to the Paradigm Mall cloud,” Bell added. She pulled up her phone and showed Kathleen the app running.

“It says there’s a sale right now at Abel and Böhme!” Kathleen exclaimed and grabbed Bell’s wrist. “Let’s get going, it’s got a timer, and there’s a new wearable management CPU that I want to get. It could be on sale. Let’s go.”

— Excerpt from The City of Paradigm, novel by Kyt Dotson, © 2015

Digital currencies and ledgers for consumer benefit

Readers of past City of Paradigm excerpts will probably recognize Bell and know she’s not just an avid gamer, but a lover of technology and gadgets. Of course, in this fictional Californian city, she’s steeped in technology at every turn. Even the malls have gotten hip to tech trends that give them better insights into customer interests and even have come on board with the blockchain, a database technology that underpins the digital currency Bitcoin and provides a way to securely and openly acknowledge transactions.

photo credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)

In the story, Bell mentions the “World Wide Ledger.” This is a term that has been floated about as a way to describe the current infrastructure that makes Bitcoin work, which is the blockchain mentioned above (more information on Bitcoin.) The Bitcoin blockchain is in fact well-described as a world-wide distributed ledger of every transaction ever made on the network. The moniker “World Wide Ledger” also resonates with “World Wide Web”, yet another innovation of the Internet that many people reading this right now are utilizing.

In the excerpt above Bell produces a device she calls a “mining-brick,” which for the purposes of storytelling is not well described to the audience. So we can cover that here.

To keep the blockchain secure, Bitcoin miners run numerous calculations (measured by hashpower or calculations-per-second, since Bitcoin is secured by calculating cryptographic hashes) on hefty computers (often in giant datacenters) and their reward is a little bit of Bitcoin every time they prove that the work was done to secure a block. This reward comes from the protocol itself currently, but it also comes from fees paid by anyone who wants to transfer bitcoins on the network.

Blockchain mining for a mall?

What Bell is doing with a mining device is adding to the total hashpower the mall has at the time by using her own personal resources—although presumably a mobile device, the kiosk keeps her miner charged, saving her electricity. Because her device adds calculations-per-second to the mall’s infrastructure, it increases the security of the mall’s blockchain. This blockchain in the story could even be part of the Bitcoin blockchain as made possible by sidechains.

Already a Bitcoin mining company called 21, Inc. has proposed a way to allow low-powered devices to join in on adding to the Bitcoin hashpower; and even mining outfit BitFury Group has developed a Bitcoin mining lightbulb. Bell could presumably give the mall access to some of her smartphone’s CPU power; but a device with a dedicated chip that could sit and charge would actually be more efficient for her.

In the story, the mall uses an incentive of giving access to infrastructure services and apps as a means to get visitors to offer hashpower. The story includes the “Paradigm Points,” concept also as another form of currency that that be traded for services, coupons, and other amenities in the Paradigm City Mall that are presumably rewarded for offering that hashpower.

The blockchain, consumers and retail stores

As mentioned above the currency aspect of the blockchain, Bitcoin, is only one useful manifestation of the underlying technology. As a World Wide Ledger, the blockchain provides a method by which data can be written once and become indelible. Once something is stored in the blockchain, it can never be changed without every person who can see the blockchain on the Earth also needing to change it as well (which would be quite an undertaking).

photo credit: Bert Kaufmann via photopin cc

This means that companies right now are looking into how the blockchain can be used as a source for proof of existence or to provide provenance for a document or a signature. To do this, a database of the information that needs to be stored is pegged to the blockchain by encrypted signatures that can be validated against a transaction.

One of the best examples of this practice is from Factom, who are seeking partnership with the government of Honduras to use the Bitcoin blockchain to provide proof that a land deed document exists and that it is unaltered. Other examples include cryptographically and blockchain secured identity from Onename, ShoCard, or World Citizenship.

The idea that the Paradigm Mall could release its own currency (Paradigm Points) is already handled by sidehcains—and so could every retail store in the mall as well, perhaps with an exchange rate for Paradigm Points or Bitcoin.

The retail shops themselves could benefit from the blockchain by using it as a tracking system for inventory or by using it to audit information on customer transactions. The ownership and transfer of various blockchain currencies connected to any particular outlet could be used a metric for the health of that store. Furthermore by using a blockchain currency the “virtual money” produced would gain the security benefits of bitcoins as well in that they would be impossible to counterfeit.

Feature image by SiliconANGLE