Save us, Blockchain, from ourselves!

Continuation of the topic about confidentiality. Article by Nodeable Vice President of Business Development Matt Assaiah

Just as the etiquette in the current cryptocurrency market includes vocal criticism of Facebook for its crimes against privacy, even as billions of people continue to upload information about themselves there, so it has become fashionable to identify blockchain with a total solution to the problem that will give control over information to users, rather than social networks.

 This is complete nonsense.

The problem is not that it is impossible to build a network on the blockchain. After all, the original network was also decentralized, and also guaranteed the privacy that blockchain solutions now provide. 

The problem is people. 

User design designer Brennan Novak believes that while blockchain can solve many privacy problems, it can't offer anything as simple and secure as logging into Facebook or Google. “The problem exists somewhere between the barrier to entry (user interface design, technical challenges to set up, and the overall user experience of the data) and the perceived value of the tool,” Brennan said. 

Save us from ourselves, Blockchain!

The early network was chaotic. Decentralized, but chaotic. It was very difficult to find a new service or page, which led to the creation of directories and, ultimately, to the indexing of the Internet by Google. Thanks to this, we have a search tool for browsing the web. 

At the same time, according to information provided by Edward Snowden, Compuserve, which played an important role in popularizing the Internet, eventually gave way to Facebook, Twitter and Google - a small pool of companies that control much of what we see and do on the Internet. This corpus also makes it easier for the government to spy on all our online movements.

It is because of this shocking centralization, which ignores people's rights to privacy and limits choice, that web revolutionaries like Tim Berners-Lee are plotting to re-decentralize the web.

Blockchain in particular has been touted as the future of everything from farmers selling eggs to publishers selling news.. Instead of relying on servers, centrally managed blockchain relies on a “peer-to-peer network based on a community of users,” writes Adam Rowe. “In the new world, host devices will not be blocks of powerful servers, but devices connected to the Internet.” Such an architecture, in theory, provides better protection for the Internet from hacking or control, since web page data will be scattered across different devices.

All this means that responsibility for the system will lie with individual nodes. On us, as it were. Can you imagine?

And this is where the problems begin.

An article written by Stanford researchers expressed similar thoughts:

“An architecture without a single point of aggregation, management and control has several technical shortcomings. The first is functionality. There are many types of operations that are difficult or impossible to carry out without complete control over the information - fraud or spam detection, search, collaborative filtering, identification trending topics and all other types of analytics.Decentralized systems also suffer from low network reliability, which leads to forced trade-offs between data consistency and availability (CAP theorem) They can also be much slower from the user's point of view. There are also problems of the need for synchronized clocks and the risks of data duplication. 

According to Kai Stinchcombe, decentralized blockchain may become not just a “crap technology” but also a “bad vision for the future.” 

“It is absolutely true that unauthorized use of data on a blockchain is almost impossible, but the idea that blockchain is a good way to create coherent data is an absolute lie. In fact, the problem is that blockchain systems do not eliminate the need to confirm transactions - it shifts this responsibility to the least qualified people - ourselves."

“For example, in this blockchain p2p utopia, where everyone sells and buys from each other things without intermediaries, they could simply send you malware that will siphon all your savings from your Ethereum wallet,” Stinchcombe said.. “You rely on the software (and your ability to protect yourself in a software-driven world) instead of relying on other people.”

This sounds great to developers. Sounds terrible to everyone else.

And it's not that useful for developers either. Why? 

Because it doesn't matter how good you are at coding if someone else does it better and doesn't have your morals. Remember the story of the decentralized Autonomus Organization, which raised $150 million in cryptocurrency? Stinchcombe says, "The most carefully designed smart contract in history had a small bug that no one noticed until someone took a closer look and used it to steal $50 million. If crypto enthusiasts who are organizing a $150 million investment fund can't properly vet the software, how can you be confident in your ability to protect yourself from similar schemes in a decentralized world?”.

The main problem is in ourselves

The main problem with all the hype around blockchain is that people are not solving the problems they should be. The decentralized web conference, for example, addressed questions like “if people began to widely use the distributed ledger system, musicians could potentially sell their recordings without going through Apple iTunes.”

News sites could also create a micropayment system for reading a single article, rather than relying on advertising money. Such transactions may be safer and more private with the help of blockchain, but this does not mean that they will become easier. iTunes, for example, makes searching for music much easier. Centralization in this case is a feature, not a bug.

People are the problem

Tim Berners-Lee understands this perfectly: "The web is already decentralized. The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one microblogging Twitter. We don't have technological problems, we have social problems."

More than ten years ago, Larry Dignan said: "We are all zombies tied to Google, who don’t think about the privacy of their lives at all”..

In other words, we value convenience (and yes, centralization) more than privacy and security. Even though we deny it, our actions speak for us.

As Andrew Orlowski noted: “Google has the ability to almost instantly determine the location of almost everyone ... such capabilities are the dreams of every totalitarian. The pertinent question here is whether anyone should have such power at all?”

Are we doomed to live our entire lives as digital sheep of Facebook, mindlessly uploading personal data to its centralized treasury? It is certain that such an option is possible. 

Until we ourselves disconnect from centralized services that use our personal information for their own purposes, no amount of innovative technological engineering will change our destiny. Ultimately, we need more social engineering rather than infrastructure engineering. The problem is not Facebook, and not the blockchain that will save the world from evildoers. The problem is ourselves. In our heads and in our own stupidity.

Read also: WENDY MCELROY: PRIVACY IS THE VIRTUE THAT BURNED THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

According to https://www.theregister.co.uk