How Blockchain Could Immunize the Internet Against Distrust
Technology can be powerful, but it’s also fragile. In recent years, a series of events — from Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal to Equifax’s massive data breach — have eroded the public’s trust not only in large companies, but in the internet itself. The proliferation of fake news had us doubting every article we read. Deepfake photos and videos leave us wondering if we can trust our own eyes, or if what we see is just AI-generated.
When it comes to the veracity of what we read and see on the internet, we are truly at a turning point. Luckily, we’re also on the verge of a solution: widespread implementation of the semantic web, powered by blockchain. The semantic web is literally a new version of the Internet, and blockchain’s public ledgers are perfectly positioned to help keep data verifiable and unhackable. If implemented correctly, the blockchain-powered semantic web can help us learn to trust technology again.
A quiet evolution
The expert predicted in 2019 that between 50% and 60% of companies will use blockchain in the next few years. From preventing counterfeit products to improving food safety, blockchain is quietly enabling enterprises to rebuild consumer trust.
It hasn’t been an easy road. Only after the ‘first mile’ of the implementation have enterprises come to realize that solutions designed for cryptocurrency can’t support big-company use cases, which require data storage, traceable transactions, governance and other capabilities.
Blockchain wires together the M2M-driven semantic web by enabling trustworthy data. Data is a double-edged sword: powerful in the right hands and dangerous in the wrong ones. Through decentralization and complex cryptography, blockchain injects security and permissions at the data layer, as opposed to at the API level. Its public ledger offers a native audit trail of every data change ever, easily offering proof of integrity to customers and regulators alike. Those data layer security capabilities also allow developers to thin out bloated APIs in favor of a more data-first approach. Lastly but perhaps most importantly, users have clear visibility and ownership over their own data, instead of surrendering it to a faceless central authority.
Learning to trust again
As the 2020s pick up steam, many of us are putting that idea to the test as we lean into technology: our voice assistants are getting smarter, our cars are learning to steer on the freeway, and we can control our thermostats and our security systems from our phones. We’re agreeing to let our phones use all kinds of tracking information in exchange for the convenience of real-time directions, finding our friends, and getting more accurate search results.
If blockchain permeates the internet, it will make our online world more reliable. Audit trails will become normal, even expected; they’ll also be non-temperable. That means that we’ll be able to better understand the origins of photos, discover the original node of a fake news broadcast, and ultimately avoid the spread of untrustworthy information.
CyberVein is a public blockchain infrastructure based distributed database, utilizing DAG as the underlying storage solution, blockchain as the data management for big data, and federated learning as the AI application architecture. The technology provides a complete solution in compliance with GDPR and internationally growing concern on data privacy, granting businesses new opportunities in data exchange and machine learning modelling. CyberVein has centered its value on trust, data privacy, reliability and performance to bring the best solutions to the world. These values have very much resonated with the crowd and have attracted an audience.
CyberVein had already done some work with the combination of blockchain, big data and AI. The work include a communications, management and analysis platform for the law enforcement departments in China’s Suzhou province to boost their performance in crime control; a supply chain management platform for a company in China’s Ningbo province to allow buyers validate the seafood goods that they are buying from the fishermen, allowing buyers to really paying for what the seafood is worth; CyberVein’s R&D center had also used blockchain and federated learning on large data sets to successfully achieve 80% accuracy in the diagnosis of different types of keratitis, which was better than 96% of the doctors that volunteered to participate in the experiment.
The blockchain technology should not be used in isolation. Instead, it should be actively integrated with other new technologies such as big data, cloud computing, IoT and AI, to accelerate the exploration of blockchain application scenarios under technological integration. CyberVein has done just that, and has a dedicated research center, Zhejiang University-CyberVein R&D Center, to improve and experiment on the different combinations of these technologies.
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