Why Does Rick Sanchez Know Blockchain
There is a strange similarity between blockchain (and in general, distributed systems) and Rick Sanchez, from the famous show, Rick and Morty.
Being a fan both of blockchain and this creative show, I was perplexed with the first episode of the fourth season.
Beware, spoiler alert.
On the fourth season premiere, we get to visualize yet another substantial evidence that Rick is excellently clever. Effectively clever could be a euphemism, if we take into account the brilliant survival strategies that are developed and implemented (supposedly) by Rick himself.
Rick combines technology, social engineering, and great boldness to come up with a brilliant replication strategy, showing his capability of thinking ahead. Thinking ahead is helpful when you have Morty distracted:
We can see that although Rick is in a life-threatening situation, he focus his energy on trying to understand why would have Morty steal a death crystal as if he was not afraid of death. Sometimes when we orient our focus to something secondary, bad things happen:
Yeah. Ups. Nonetheless, we see this blue, reasonably well-disposed hologram, that swiftly tries to connect to the one in his surroundings — Morty — and tries to persuade him into cloning Rick. Rick has implemented an emergency system on Morty’s body, the crisis detection, and correction hologram. Crisis detection corresponds to the failure identification, that is present in the design of distributed systems. Right after the failure identification — Rick is dead — the recovery process starts (failure correction).
The hologram then makes an increased effort to persuade the only one that can save Rick at that time, to operate and do precisely that. By having a fairly charismatic Hologram Rick, Rick tries to minimize the recovery time.
When the first failure recovery fails, which is also the fastest, the backup protocol is activated.
What the hell? Rick uses cloning to achieve the same strategy as modern blockchains: replication. Replication helps to achieve dependability (through availability and integrity, thanks to consensus mechanisms). We can then conclude that Rick is like a blockchain, in particular, because each new Rick is probably not quite the one who died.
We know that stemming from studies with twins (natural clones), the environmental input significantly shapes our development and decisions. Furthermore, in a study, the author argues “that an individual created by human cloning techniques or any other type of genetic manipulation will not show the donor’s characteristics to the extent of compromising uniqueness” [Morales, 2009].
Thus, Rick is one in a set of Ricks (blockchain nodes) that share the same basis (smart contracts), with the same goal: dependability, trust execution, but are different in its essence (as in blockchain nodes controlled by different parties). Nonetheless, there are Ricks that deviate from the default, correct behaviour (as in Byzantine faults, or as in malicious nodes). Hologram Rick tries to subvert his mission, by attacking the “real Rick”, as soon as he is able. That is maybe why Ricks formed a citadel: to defend the interests of the majority.
If we consider the citadel of Ricks, we can perceive it as a public blockchain. Nodes are Ricks from other dimensions, with possibly a wide number of malicious nodes (we could also see the citadel’s council as the technical committee of some public blockchains 😂).
Here, we see a blockchain of blockchains: the own Rick C-132 is a lonely node, with his own private blockchain, that does not take part in the citadel — a true public blockchain.
All the geekiness apart, it was a fairly good episode.
