Sick of Zuckerberg Pimping You Out? The Blockchain Might Be Your Savior.
You may tell white lies to your friends and family to make your life easier, but we both know that you would never lie to a search engine.
…and since a search engine like Google has access to your most intimate thoughts, it knows you better than you know yourself.
The thing is, whether you like it or not — you are under constant surveillance.
Every time you send an email, perform a Google search or post on Facebook, you are algorithmically reduced into bits and exploited for profit.
Corporations are siphoning your most intimate details and selling them to third-parties for profit — you are essentially being pimped out by companies like Facebook.
In a sense, you are a digital prostitute.
But, the question is, is it exploitation if you are voluntarily using these services KNOWING that this is happening?
For instance…
Amidst the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal — Marky Zucks even admitted to reading your private messages on Facebook.
So, when you were certain that your private message on Messenger was actually private, you likely had an invisible, algorithmic eavesdropper snooping on your business.
Not only that, Facebook even keeps track of what you type out THEN DELETE without even posting — so that it could be used for potential sentiment analysis later.
To make things even creepier, Facebook is constantly buying data about you from thousands of third-party data brokers so that it can accurately infer even more about you, like: your sexual orientation, political beliefs, relationship status, drug use, and other psycho-graphic traits.
If Orwell was still alive, 1984 might as well be a documentary.
In other words, you literally have no control over how Facebook treats you or your data in the future.
The biggest challenge for end users is a lack of alternatives to massive social networks like Facebook.
Sure, there are plenty of privacy focused alternatives to Facebook, but who cares?
If your friends and family aren’t on them, per Metcalfe’s law, it’s useless due to a lack of network effects.
Good news is…
While there’s no true alternative to Facebook *yet*, plenty of brilliant technologists are currently building viable options for the future.
One potential option could be Tim Berners-Lee’s (Inventor of the World Wide Web) new project Solid, which is aiming to change the entire paradigm of how Web Applications will work by giving the end user true ownership of their data.
Another interesting alternative would be to run massive social networks like Facebook on the Blockchain.
A Blockchain-based Facebook wouldn’t be perfect, but it would have its own unique benefits.
Look, I am just as sick as you of hearing everyone trying to apply Blockchain technology to all sorts of ridiculous use cases.
But, stay with me here —just for a thought experiment.
Let’s imagine for a moment the implications of running a social network the scale of Facebook on the Blockchain.
Would it be a miserable failure? Or would it be so paradigm shifting that it would put Marky Zucks out of business as quickly as Kodak or Blockbuster?
Considering that Zucks just allocated an entire team for “exploring the Blockchain” at Facebook, he’s definitely concerned about it’s implications for Facebook.
Even with a bit of healthy skepticism, one cannot ignore the fact that there are ACTUAL benefits to running social networks like Facebook on the Blockchain.
For example….
If Facebook ran on the Blockchain…🤔
1.) The community would control the network’s data, NOT a corporation
Facebook is hosted by a centralized corporation that pays for it’s web servers by selling your data to ad companies. But, on the Blockchain, instead of servers, the social network would be run by community-driven nodes.
On the Blockchain, anyone is able to run a node and contribute to hosting the platform — which would give them voting power over what rules would be enforced on the social network.
Since your sensitive data is not sold to advertisers in order to pay for servers, the networks data would be owned by its users, not corporations. Not to mention, if you ever decide to leave the network, you’d be able to download an exact copy of ALL of your data since day one.
2.) It would be democratic and forkable
In the event that you don’t agree with how the network is run, you and others who agree with you can easily go your own way by forking the app.
Forking is the ability to take an exact copy of the app and all its data (without having to ask for anyone’s permission), and make any changes you want to take the network in its own direction.
When you fork the network, both forks can continue to exist, and they would both have an exact copy of the data from the beginning of time — users and nodes would then vote for which version of the platform they like by using it over its alternatives.
So, unlike Facebook, where if you decide to leave the platform because you don’t like the direction it’s going in, on the Blockchain, you wouldn’t lose years worth of content you’ve contributed to the site.
If someone wanted to build a Facebook alternative that was better, they could do it with the original content and data from all the users on the site.
Forking a Blockchain-based social network would ensure that all of your content, posts, and social graph data would remain intact.
3.) You would actually have Freedom of Speech, instead of the illusion of it
Unlike Facebook, no one would be able to ban you or prevent your messages from reaching certain people for political reasons. No one would be able to censor or report you even if your posts are controversial.
Since the API would be open, any developer would be able to implement custom filter mechanisms based on user demand so they could see the content they care about instead of a curated list of posts chosen by a corporation trying to maximize its profit.
In other words, you can say whatever you want, and if you don’t like what someone else is saying, simply use a filter to get rid of them from your digital life.
4.) You would never be a victim of the classic, corporate “bait and switch”
Remember when Twitter used to have an open API?
Back in the day, there were lots of popular apps that depended on the Twitter API (like Meerkat, etc.) until Twitter decided to close down their API and charge expensive fees for access in order to maximize their profits.
In the end, Twitter profited, and millions of users suffered with no recourse.
This type of “bait and switch” move is so common that there’s an endless cemetery of dead third-party apps that used to depend on centralized APIs.
If Facebook ran on the Blockchain and your app was built on public data, this would never be a problem — the data would be owned by no single entity, and there could be countless third party developer app implementations that would let you choose how to interact with that data.
Plus…
Corporations would have less control and be less profitable — but, due to the wealth of options in which users could interact with the network, they would have massive benefits.
But, if it were on the blockchain then wouldn’t all my data be public?
The short answer is: Yes.
Remember: Expecting nascent Blockchain technology to solve ALL the problems this early would be like expecting Henry Ford’s Model-T to have self driving features right out the gate.
Good news is that — privacy features like this will be an inevitability with Blockchain apps.
Currently, there are teams working on figuring out how to implement strict privacy controls (with something called zk-SNARKs, for example) — so it’s only a matter of time.
But, it’s important to realize that…
If Facebook ran on the Blockchain, from a user-experience standpoint, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Are you impressed yet?
Like it or not, there are incredibly compelling benefits that are simply not possible with any centralized platform owned by a company.
…and guess what? These are not a bunch of pie-in-the-sky, crystal-ball type predictions either.
We at Loom Network are already laying down the foundations necessary to run large-scale games and social-apps like Facebook on their own blockchain (called DAppChains).
Not only that, we are planning on publicly releasing a SDK that will allow any developer to deploy decentralized Blockchain apps that cannot be censored by any central authority.
It’s hard to predict the future, but…
Considering that BILLIONS of dollars of investment are going into Blockchain technology, AND the fact that more and more of the smartest minds in Silicon Valley are jumping into this space by the day — something revolutionary is definitely brewing.
Yes, every idiot and their mother is slobbering about Blockchain this and Blockchain that, but let’s take a moment to set aside our biases and actually consider the fact that there are legitimate reasons to put a social network like Facebook on its own blockchain.
There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.
— Marc Andreessen, Founder of Andreessen Horowitz
Maybe it’s a Tulip mania — but maybe it isn’t.
Remember, even during the dot-com bubble, it would have been unwise to ignore companies like Amazon.
There are plenty of analysts and experts that think this Blockchain business is nothing but a momentary blip — a digital tulip mania that will end up being an irrelevant footnote in the annals of history.
You know what?
They could be right.
But, I would wager that history is littered with far more experts that got it all wrong.
An experienced specialist may be among the last to see what is really happening when events take a new and unexpected turn. When faced with a major paradigm shift, analysts who know the most about a subject have the most to unlearn.
— Richards Heuer, Central Intelligence Agency
The question is — when it is all said and done, are you going to be someone who adapted to the disruptive nature of Blockchain technology?
…or will you be among the masses that got left behind?
Most people (incorrectly) believe that nothing can replace a formidable opponent like Facebook.
But, with Blockchain Technology, even at its nascent stage, a revolution has already started to simmer.
…and for the very first time since Facebook went mainstream, people seem unhappy enough to consider alternative options.
If history is an accurate indicator of the future, and companies like Kodak and Blockbuster are case studies on Goliaths being made irrelevant by up-and-coming technologically-superior Davids — mass adoption of Blockchain Technology might also be the reason for Facebook’s eventual demise.
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