This afternoon, I decided to enjoy the Autumn sunshine and go for a jog around a nearby park. I like to take these opportunities to listen to podcasts and catch up on what has been happening in the general cryptocurrency / Bitcoin space - I find that [Let's Talk Bitcoin](https://letstalkbitcoin.com/) is a great source of informative podcasts.
[reference commons.wikimedia.org][1]
The podcast that I listened to today was [Epicenter's podcast on Smart Contracts and Law](https://epicenter.tv/episode/149/); in which [Lukas Abegg](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-abegg-72716827) covers quite a few thought provoking topics:
> * The copyright questions around 3d printing
> * How legal issues around 3d printing are like issues around smart contracts
> * How information theory can help us conceptualize smart contracts
> * The thesis of Lessig’s book ‘Code is Law’
> * The case for law regulating code
> * Why Alternative Dispute Resolution has big potential for blockchain applications
[quote from Epicenter][2]
The first part of this podcast covers some of the grey areas around 3D printing and patent law - an aspect of Intellectual Property law that Lukas Abegg was first introduced to in a lecture, instantly seemed to have taken an interest in and has been passionate about ever since - really got me thinking about what the future has in store for designers, producers and consumers; as 3D printing becomes more mainstream.
Whilst Lukas was talking about 3D printing and the aspects of this technology that really interest him, he said that 3D printing is "an intersection of the digital world and the physical world" and briefly touched upon how this meant that there were similarities between 3D printing and Bitcoin.
**In this article, I would like to explore the general similarities between 3D printing and Bitcoin and how this might lead us to reason about the future of 3D printing.**
[reference commons.wikimedia.org][1]
# Similarities between 3D printing and Bitcoin
As I continued to jog on this crisp Autumn afternoon, I thought about the similarities between Bitcoin and 3D printing and I came to the conclusion that there really was conceptually some overlap between the two technologies. I also decided that it was worth exploring this concept more; to rationalise about just how similar the problems that Bitcoin solve are to problems in the 3D printing world - and what this might, therefore, mean for the future of 3D printing, as this technology continue to grow and evolve over time.
## Value creation
Firstly, a problem which all designers of, successful, products battle with is how do you register the creation of a design? How do you prove that you were the first person who came up with the idea or design? How do you prove that you created this intellectual (and often digital) item of value - and therefore deserve to be able to monetise your hard work and prevent others from doing so without your permission and/or paying you for the right to do so?
*We have [design patents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent) for just this reason I hear you say.*
This is true. Design patents are, however, a high barrier to entry: they are complicated documents to create; which require specialist knowledge and there is a cost not only in terms of time, but also money required to have a design patent registered with a centralised authority. The registration of which is essentially a record in a ledger.
I believe that the future of 3D printing is going to be, potentially millions of, people wanting to share (and monitise) their designs for solving everyday problems - in a range of different materials; whether it's the design of a pretty ornament or a design for birthday cake.
In the same way that our current banking systems are not available to all globally, there are horrible bureaucratic inefficiencies and high costs to transfer money globally - to maintain what essentially are more ledgers - the current design patent system isn't designed to scale to the necessary capacity: to operate on a global scale and be available to all.
Therefore, the future of digital design patent registration (or its equivalent) that will be able to cope when 3D printing becomes truly mainstream, and the use of the technology becomes an everyday normality, is going to require a revolution that is equivalent to what Bitcoin is to Fiat currency and the current banking systems.
## Preventing double-spend
It's trivial to copy digital items. The last thing that a designer wants is to sell a digital version of their design once and only once because the person that they sold the design to allowed others to copy the digital design from them for free. Just like peer-to-peer file sharing software had an impact on the entertainment industries, it has had and will have a pronounced effect on the design and manufacturing industry when 3D printers are in every home.
Bitcoin is digital money, but you can't just copy the amount of Bitcoin you have to double it. If you were able to, you could spend the original amount in one transaction and the copy in another transaction *ad infinitum*.
Product designs for 3D printing will also require some sort of mechanism to prevent them from being used (spend) twice - even if the file containing the design is copied, once that file has been used to 3D printed the object another copy of the design will have to be purchased before another copy of the object can be 3D printed.
## Immutability and trust
You can purchase digital music, videos or computer games from any number of online stores, but how can you be certain that what you download is what you thought that you were buying? If you download a digital copy of a song via peer-to-peer software, how can you be sure that even though the name of the file is what you expected, the length of the song is correct and the [ID3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3) tag is correct,
that you are not about to fall prey to some elaborate [Rickrolling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling) prank or worse?
The same applies with downloading a design for your 3D printer - when the designs that you sent to the 3D printer for a new salad bowl to use at the dinner party, that you are hosting that evening, turns out to be a statue of Rick Astley or worse!
Bitcoin's Blockchain by its very nature is immutable - due to the amount of electricity and time it would take to rewrite the history that was stored in one of the blocks in its ledger.
Immutability when applied to designs for 3D printing will mean that once a design has been registered that no one can *re-write history* and say that their version of the design came first.
Immutability when applied to designs for 3D printing will mean that it will not be possible to modify a design after it has been registered.
Trust when applied to designs for 3D printing will mean that you can be cryptographically certain that what you have downloaded is **exactly** what you intended to download.
# Conceivable solutions to these problems
It's hard to predict the future, but by looking at the past we can get a good understanding of what the future may hold.
## DRM
The entertainment industries reacted to the digital age by using [digital rights management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management) to try and prevent copied and illegally distribution digital content from being able to be accessed / watched / listened to / played (whether it was music, computer games, movies or books).
It is possible that the software running on 3D printers of the future will be DRM-aware and that some sort of access control management will be carried out this way to prevent a design being printed more times than was paid for or distributed via unauthorised channels.
## Smart Contracts
Embedding of DRM in digital objects works up to a point, but it has many failings. Essentially, what it is trying to represent is a contract between the vendor of the digital product and the end user - one which the host software is programmed to not work with, without it being present.
This falls apart when the software enforces everyone to embed DRM into their product in order for it to be used - it creates a technical barrier to entry as well as philosophical ones. This also falls apart if people either remove the DRM in order to use other software or just use software which does not care about DRM one way or another.
[Smart contracts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract) are still in their infancy, but they could well have a big part to play in the future of access control management of digital content. Smart contracts could act as the glue between the (online) interfaces for purchasing designs and the consumer's 3D printer.
By using a Smart contract as the glue between these two systems you can actually solve a couple of the problems which I mentioned before: preventing double spend and trust.
By enforcing the use of a crytocurrency such as Bitcoin (or a digital token) in order to interact with the Smart contract (which will in turn tell the 3D printer to print a design) then we can be certain that the means to purchase the design has not been duplicated. The Smart contract in turn then directs the 3D printer to print the design only many times as have been paid for.
It is possible to be certain that a given Smart contract (and the version of the code contained within) is exactly the one you expect it to be; from this, a strong level of trust between two parties can be built e.g you can be certain that when a third party says that if you pay X Bitcoin into Smary contract Y that you will get N items printed out.
One downside to this whole idea is that the 3D printer has to be connected to the Internet in order to operate.
Another downside is that the 3D printer will probably need to be shipped with a list of trusted Smart contracts in order to maintain the level of trust; or a trusted third party, certification authority for Smart contracts may need to exist for this all to work.
This may also lead to all designs having to be registered with something equivalent to a trusted App Store before they can be printed - which introduces the possibility of censorship and increases the amount to time required to iterate over a design.
## 3D printing as a service
We are increasingly moving towards a more service-oriented and virtualised approach to hardware for the majority of small to medium businesses and users. The upfront cost of specialised hardware can be very expensive and then there are the added running and maintenance costs as well; this has led to lots of cloud-based solutions for storage and application hosting.
Some 3D printers by their very nature need to be quite large in order to be physically big enough to print the items required. There is also the purchasing and storage of a range of different materials which you might want to print with.
I think due to the economies of scale and logistical aspects of 3D printing that just like we have gigantic warehouses of servers or Bitcoin miners in locations where it is most economically sensible for them to be located for them to be able to operate at scale that there will also be large factories of 3D printers in the future. These factories will benefit from being able to purchase the materials cheaper because of buying in bulk, be able to get their energy cheaper because they can be located close to cheap energy sources and even provide a better service because they will be aware of current consumer trends and be able to print out stock to match the perceived demand ahead of time (and can therefore potentially be able to ship an item to you quicker than you could have 3D printed it yourself - especially when we have flying drones shipping small items).
I am sure that there will be some people that can either afford or justify the necessity of their own dedicated 3D printer, but I suspect that this won't be on the scale of car ownership.
# Conclusion
It has been many years since my ex-colleague [Trandi](https://trandi.wordpress.com/category/3dprint/) got me really excited about 3D printing based on his tales about his personal projects and experience from owning a 3D printer. I'm still very optimistic about the future of 3D printing and the possibilities that are in store for us all - although, I'm a lot less certain that every home will have a 3D printer. Despite almost every home having some sort of personal computer, I think that the sheer size necessary for a 3D printer to be, in order to be able to fabricate lots of useful items is going to mean that it doesn't see the same sort of reach / adoption as the PC.
I think that where we are really going to see the biggest change is in the decentralisation of the manufacturing process - that lots of small businesses that provide the service of 3D printing and delivering on demand will appear and that it may even be viable for a more local economy of people that own a 3D printer being able to monitise the use of it as a service for the local community.
As a result of these things, the registering of designs, provision of directories of designs and access control around purchasing and using designs is going to look radically different to what it does today. I believe that some sort of global ledger of designs which can be 3D printed; which is cheap to register your designs on, tamper resistant and transparent will play a big part in the future of 3D printing - whether it is the Bitcoin Blockchain or something very similar.
[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
[2]: https://epicenter.tv/episode/149/