Monday, March 8, 2021
What a lovely dream!
Me and Nick were formulating plans and designing the architecture of the first decentralised city on Mars, which is expected to be completed by 2033, while gulping some delicious kebabs on the streets of New Jersey. (Yes we have discussed it with Mr. Musk)
Alright - not a great way to start a newsletter but you will get a hang of my “punacious” side. Let’s dive into something interesting.
Just as Rome was not built in a day, one of the most significant challenges for any startup is its ability to achieve critical mass.
Social Media Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were launched in the year 2004 and 2006 respectively and since then have only multi-folded their business. They have connected nearly 3 billion people with their family, friends and have transformed how businesses advertise in the process. These Dotcom era social media platforms have their own data collection policies and collect users data to monetize it to the targeted advertisement companies. Dotcom era social media network is full of rage, malicious fake content and users. Block-com era focuses on a decentralized network where the digital giants (infact there should be a room for any kind of monopoly) should neither have the ownership nor the right to censor the content. User themselves should have the right to monetize their own data. One such Blockchain initiative is AKASHA which stands for ‘Advanced Knowledge Architecture for Social Human Advocacy’ and is yet to go for an ICO.
Problems with Social Media!
Although social media in itself is a huge problem, but there are some grave problems which we need to sort.
Malicious factors: Suppose an account associated with a person named X gets hacked today. He somehow manages to recover his account by some tenacious efforts . The problem doesn’t end here. Firstly, X starts unfollowing the 1000 accounts that the hacker followed from his behalf which were now spamming X’s feed. Secondly, the hacker may gain access to some private information of the person X. This illustrates the problem with social media, their vulnerability to malicious attacks. According to reports, nearly 2/3rd of US adults who have an account on social media have been hacked once.
According to survey, nearly 62% of the adults consider social media as their primary portal to news, which gives access to the portal some really filthy power.
In May 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matthew Caruana Galizia was locked out of his Facebook account for 24 hours after publishing content related to Maltese political figures affiliated with the Panama Papers.
In 2016, Facebook deleted Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s posting of a Pulitzer Prize-winning image from the Vietnam War,the poignant “Napalm Girl” photograph by Nick Ut, for violating Facebook’s nudity policies.
In 2020 Twitter, Facebook and some other social platforms debarred POTUS from putting up his views.
Amazon decides which books should be sold and which should be banned from selling on their platform.
Who gives them the power to decide what is to be taken down and what not is to be taken down?
Centralised ownership: Social media networks enjoy a monopolistic position in the market. A handful of companies gather huge amounts of data from users (sometimes in ways that cross ethical boundaries), and subsequently monetize that data through the sale of targeted advertising.
In the year 2020, numerous high profile accounts were compromised to promote the adoption of Bitcoin.(Luckily no nuclear codes were leaked)
Need of the hour is to embrace decentralization as soon as possible. One such initiative is AKASHA which is the brain child of Ethereum. When you upload something on Facebook, your browser uploads the data to Facebook’s servers. From there Facebook sends the data to your friends browser or maybe to a dozen other people for advertisements. Facebook acts as an intermediator here. And the foremost use of Blockchain is to eradicate the intermediaries. AKASHA on the other hand does not store any data on its server, the data is uploaded onto IPFS which returns a unique hash value of that upload, which in a way also solves copyright issues.
Have a look at the following two tables and decide yourselves as to how can a decentralised system ensure your data privacy and save you from frequent data breaches -
As Andrew Lewis said - “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold.” With numerous discussions on the application of Blockchain, government using blockchain to develop smart cities, wide adoption of cryptocurrencies, people, not just the people working in the blockchain industry, do have realised the numerous potential threats!
Fun Fact: A trillion computers doing a trillion computations every trillionth of a second for a trillion years is still less than the number of private keys in Bitcoin.
A smart creator (not a teacher/professor/Boss) never forgets to give his/her audience a homework… Hence here’s yours - Read about Blockchain Revolution
Don’t be querulous and make sure you complete this before the next issue of my newsletter, else you know the punishment - Write “I WILL COMPLETE MY ASSIGNMENT FROM THE NEXT TIME” 100 times in your notebook!
Until next time :)
Fond adieu❤️
Cheers!