J.R Willett, the Founder of Mastercoin/Omnilayer, wrote this in 2013:
For this thought experiment, we will imagine that your child has been kidnapped and put up for sale on “TorSlaver”. Their business plan is to kidnap children and sell them to the highest bidder, whether parent or pedophile. The winning bidder is sent the location of the child, probably bound and gagged and dumped somewhere. As long as they don’t get caught doing the kidnapping, the kidnappers can do this again and again with complete impunity. Once someone proves it can be done, copycats will come out of the woodwork, and it won’t matter if the first mover gets caught.
Sadly, I think this future is coming, fast :(
ZeroNet is the first production-grade, user-friendly, working decentralized internet without any central points of failure whatsoever. It’s an amazing leap forward in human connectivity, commerce, productivity. It’s literally going to change the entire way the internet works.
And sadly, I don’t think it will take a long time before ZeroSlaver app pops up.
Already in my first 48 hours of browsing ZeroNet, I found a “NSFW thread” on ZeroTalk (kind of a reddit actually). Curious, I entered it, and one of the very first results there was … horrible.
I’m no stranger to hardcore internet porn. But this was just too shocking. One of the first comments to the NSFW thread, was a series of photos of a dead woman. This woman was abused in various ways, skin cut off from various parts of her mutilated body, and her body was later dumped somewhere … all of this photographed and available. I literally was horrified to see it.
The horror isn’t that this exists, out there. The horror is that it’s accessible and monetizable. People tend to vote up shocking content, and as soon as masses of people start using ZeroNet, a no-moderation internet, such photos will pop up on popular ZN websites, where people would be exposed to snuff and worse on their local social network.
Furthermore, people will be able to charge for this shit. Someone can create a post with a photo of a woman, and say “Pay me 100 BTC to kill her, or 100 BTC to free her”. Whichever bounty gets filled, he does as his audience desires. This give a way for all the psychos and perverted minds of the world to collaborate, and it will enable and popularize new kinds of horrors.
We Bitcoiners have known for years that this future is coming. Why do we support Bitcoin? Because there is no choice.
This future is coming whether you support it or not. The only thing to do is try your very best to stop these horrors from within, because soon there will be no “without”. Bitcoin and crypto-currencies are not going anywhere, and the tech just gets more and more advanced and user friendly, as we see in ZeroNet.
I’d like to end this grim post with a bit of optimism: I think that the future is also Wonderful. I think that the human race is evolving towards the singularity at a very fast pace, and that this technology can do a lot of good. End poverty, sickness … death. I think our morality and awareness are evolving too. There is a lot to be gained by tools such as ZeroNet, which is why it, like Bitcoin, will take over the world.
At the end of the day, decentralization is about choice. Decentralized technologies make moderation and enforcement of centralized rules much harder or impossible. This allows each and every person to decide their path, for better or worse. Its each person’s personal journey in life to choose his own personal evolution, and our entire species is evolving together. I’m optimistic.
