ideal? Delusional? Blockchain's dream of social tools
Guide: Before there was Alipay with 750 points of social networking, and later there was Sanyingzhan WeChat. Social networks can increase and retain users, which has always been a dream resource for merchants. When social networks are used by users, it is logical to obtain various sensitive data of users. While bringing convenience to users, it also uses data to accurately push advertisements, extract user value and even manipulate user behavior. Some friends believe that the security, confidentiality, and dissemination of the blockchain are a good medicine to change the bad habits of this industry. Is this really the case?
In March 2018, Cambridge Analytica collected information on more than 50 million Facebook users without authorization, and targeted political advertisements to these users. The company was hired by Trump's campaign during the presidential election, which made Facebook deep in the scandal of data leakage and manipulation of the US election.
People realize that Facebook, the network with the most friends in the world, doesn't actually consider you a friend:
Facebook stores your sensitive information
Facebook sold it to third parties for years without proper authorization
Facebook is a tool of "political manipulation" worldwide, not just an "advertising platform"
Then a movement to delete Facebook broke out on Twitter, Zuckerberg was "interrogated" by the US government, and Facebook's stock price plummeted.
In fact, users of course know that social platforms are selling their privacy. Facebook may have stumbled this time because it has gone too far, which has had a bad impact and touched the interests of those who spent billions of dollars to participate in the US election. Users' chats, clicks, and searches have long been used for data analysis and advertising push, and they have changed from tolerance to habit.
secondary title
blockchain hope
The reason why blockchain, as a distributed network, is considered to be the antidote to social networks can be roughly divided into the following three aspects:
1. Chat encryption
Chatting is one of the core functions of all social platforms, but all mainstream social platforms and their chat tools are unqualified in terms of chat encryption.
This picture shows the implementation of some encryption requirements of popular chat software on the market. The first line is the name of the chat software, and the first column is the encryption requirements. Red means not up to standard, yellow means partly up to standard, and green means up to standard. It can be seen that chat encryption is not done well in more than half of the cases, and no software is fully up to the standard (the best are Threema and Wire, and the worst is the famous Skype in the middle).
If the status quo is maintained, one day in the future, your complaints about the job 996 will turn into a low work enthusiasm score and be handed over to the recruiter; discussing cryptocurrency transactions in the group will make you pay 5% more mortgages; Half of the high-end travel plans will only allow you to book air tickets and hotels that are more expensive than others.
Blockchain chat applications have been favored and developed by many companies or decentralized organizations. Dust, invested and developed by Mark Cuban (NBA team owner), currently has the most complete functions. Dust has developed the Mercury protocol for encrypted chat and issued its own Token GMT to regulate user behavior.
Dust positions itself as a collection of tools to protect users from modern risks, including the following features:
Encrypted chat: Chat information is encrypted based on the blockchain and will be destroyed within a certain period of time
Stealth Search: Search history in Dust's built-in browser cannot be queried
Watchdog: Information threat warning, input email account will display what information was leaked in which email address in which hacker attack. After the upgrade, you can receive the leakage report of the mailbox in real time, and protect the leaked information at any time. The picture below shows the email address and password of a mailbox leaked in the Youku leak in 2016.
Status, Conclusion, BeeChat,Chat tools such as ADAMANT are also constantly updated and upgraded, and the chat information in these chat tools is encrypted by the blockchain algorithm. This eliminates the leakage of chat information from the source, which should be perfected by all social platforms.
2. Identity authentication/certificate authentication
Encrypted chat will bring some regulatory issues, but blockchain identity authentication will make up for it to some extent. According to statistics, each Internet user has created more than 130 accounts on average, and dozens of identity verifications are required every day. These accounts store important and sensitive information such as user names, ID numbers, email addresses, mobile phone numbers, bank cards, and biometrics data. There is an urgent need for an identity verification method to solve so many account management problems. There are many existing social account login verification, WeChat, QQ, Alipay, Facebook, Twitter, but due to the relationship between factions, no social account can verify all apps . What is even more puzzling is that sometimes users have to enter various information to register after logging in to a social account. It seems that the login just now is just to tell the social network what new things I am using and make its data more complete. We need social networks to provide a universal, non-stakeholder, secure and convenient authentication method.
This gives the blockchain a chance to cut in. Identity verification has always been a direction for the blockchain to become a killer application. The transparency, high security and non-tamperable characteristics of the blockchain are important components of identity verification. On the blockchain, these keys are called Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI) because they are directly controlled by the entity that owns the identity. Users use a variety of information to create their own unique ID on the chain. After creation, only the user can activate this ID to log in to other accounts. This can greatly reduce the problem of identity fraud on the Internet. In life, even one of the twin brothers cannot pretend to be the other to pass the identity verification. People, businesses, institutions at all levels, animals and even objects can all have their own identities on the blockchain.
The core difficulty of identity verification lies in the data transmission from offline to online. The online blockchain must require offline cooperation to complete this step. Sovrin is a blockchain authentication project based on Hyperledger technology. Hyperledger is an open source blockchain technology supported by the Linux Foundation and is committed to realizing cross-industry collaboration of blockchains.
Sovrin ledger is operated by partners who abide by the rules of the Sovrin network. These partners are all credit institutions in the economic system, including famous institutions or companies such as Aalto University, IMB, Deutsche Telekom, and Cisco. They can provide users with offline real information and transfer it to the chain.
Sovrin is currently trying out institutional/enterprise-level identity authentication. Recently, British Columbia, Canada launched a VON (Verifiable Network) OrgBook BC (British Columbia Institution Directory) Beta version, providing online access to 500,000 institutions in the province. Opportunities for authentication and certificate issuance. OrgBook BC uses the technical services provided by Sovrin and Hyperledger. After OrgBook BC collects business information, it verifies the business information through the information in Sovrin partners. The government of British Columbia, private businesses, non-profit organizations and other institutions can establish trust relationships and verifiable certificates online. Since then, the government of British Columbia, Canada has become the first government to have a DID (decentralized ID) on the Sovrin network and deploy products using Sovrin and Hyperledger.
Other blockchain identity authentication products such as LifeID, Veres One, uPort and other identity authentication projects have also been launched.
The identity verification of the blockchain can also be extended to certificate authentication. Information such as ID card, degree certificate, driver's license, work card, bank card, etc. can be integrated into the identity information in the blockchain, making your blockchain account a It is a real "one card", and the information on this card is displayed one-way. Only when you want to prove it can be seen by others. Others cannot actively query your information, and the data protection is better. The benefits brought by certification on the chain can also provide solutions for multiple industries. Taking housing loan review as an example, when a bank applies for a loan, the bank will require data such as salary certificates, credit records, health records, and even driving records to evaluate the loan risk, Sovrin can integrate this information into your DID, and these data are uploaded by trusted institutions, so the bank does not need to worry about the credibility of the data, and the approval speed will be greatly accelerated.
3. Network Effect and Token
The success of any social network depends first and foremost on its network effect extension, users join a social network because other people are already there, and a user base is a necessary condition for socializing.
Creating meaningful network effects is one of the most difficult tasks for any business. For social media networks, it's the business itself.
According to a Coinbase survey, 18% of U.S. students now own cryptocurrencies, decentralization-related courses are also increasing in college courses, and people’s acceptance of decentralized networks and currencies is growing. Once a decentralized network is established, it will have more tenacious vitality. For example, Git, Linux, the Magic organization, and the Ethereum community all have the attribute of decentralization. Users who now own cryptocurrencies and care about decentralization are potential users of blockchain social implementation.
The value attribute of Token is also a major advantage of blockchain socialization. It is a double-edged sword. We have seen the crazy communication ability of some existing Tokens. Although they are not a good thing in themselves, they have proved the value of Token Attributes do allow it to incentivize users and the network to grow.
The value of Token can also motivate users to generate better content to get rewards. Steemit is currently a very good blockchain-based blog and social media. It is built on Steem Chain, and users can use cryptocurrency to reward what they like. work. Steem uses DPoS consensus and graphene technology and can process 10,000 transactions per second.
The following is an explanation of how Steem develops the network and maintains the stability of the economic system from the three Tokens designed by Steem, namely Steem Power, Steem, and Steem Dollar:
Steem Power (SP): SP can be obtained by posting high-quality content and replying on Steem, and being reported by other users will reduce SP. SP is the user's influence on Steem. For example, if you vote (like) an article, both the author and you will get a certain amount of income. The higher your SP is, the higher the income you will get. Doesn't it keep making money by voting all the time? Not so, voting needs to consume your voting power, the lower the voting power is, the less valuable the vote is, and the voting power will be restored quantitatively every day.
Steem: Steem, like Bitcoin, is a system currency with good circulation. Steem and SP can be converted to each other. Steem can be converted to SP through powerup. This process is equivalent to locking positions, reducing the circulation of Steem and keeping the currency price stable; SP can be converted to Steem after powerdown, but the powerdown process has strict time and quantity restrictions.
Steem Dollar (SBD): The stable currency in the system, pegged 1:1 with the US dollar. You can choose between 100% SP and half SP/SBD when publishing content. The latter encourages users to cash out, skips the process of converting SP to Steem, and reduces the impact of additional Steem issuance on currency prices. SBD can also purchase services promoted on Steem to increase the exposure of your articles.
Steem has been in operation for two years, and currently has around 4,500 weekly active users, making it one of the Dapps with the most real users on the blockchain. There are a lot of high-quality content related to blockchain and non-blockchain every day, and the income of a good article can range from tens to hundreds of dollars.
Steemit manual compiled by enthusiastic Steemit users
https://bookdown.org/baydap/steemh/jbcsp-.html
secondary title
Blockchain dilemmas and challenges
The above three factors are logically just "reasons we think that blockchain will solve social network ills". These "reasons" cannot be used as solutions. In fact, whether blockchain can do it or not How it will be realized—whether it will appear in a radically subversive manner remains to be discussed—all subject to the influence of subjective technology and business competition.
Technically, we have discussed in "Blockchain has no C-terminal". When technology is an abstract noun, it does not necessarily face the public directly. In the foreseeable short future, the blockchain is likely to be such a specific technology suitable as a plug-in.
The application with the most C-end genes in the blockchain is Dapp (decentralized application), but at present consumers can clearly feel the difference between Dapp and ordinary applications-the threshold for use is too high. It is necessary to figure out the management of resources such as wallets, private keys and public keys, and CPU/RAM. Regardless of ordinary consumers, DR partners, as media practitioners in the industry, still find it extremely troublesome.
If these problems are not resolved, it is impossible to imagine the large-scale popularization of Dapp on the C side. Rudy, the founder of the game company Mythical Games, which raised 16 million US dollars, told DappReview, “We need to let players not feel the existence of the blockchain when playing blockchain games. This is what we established on the first day of admission. Target".
Even in the game industry that is closest to users and highly related to virtual assets, the blockchain is more like a plug-in to the industry system than the operating system itself.
"The threshold is too high" is the first hurdle for blockchain as an independent industry, and the second is the ability to expand technology. A friend of DappReview, who used to be an executive in the game department of Dachang, said that at that time, the customer service department received the most complaints about the recharge time, and it took only two minutes for the account to arrive. Players already felt "cheated" " of anger. Their patience determines that the response speed of the game must not be slow.
The current tps speed of the blockchain is really unsatisfactory. The real-time data throughput of the social network, coupled with additional functions such as aggregate payment, e-commerce, live broadcast, etc., it is hard to imagine that the current public chain can support it. After all, if you compare the Internet infrastructure, the public chain now feels almost the same as the dial-up Internet access back then.
Look at the business competition landscape.
In terms of business environment, if we assume that an independent blockchain social platform wants to challenge WeChat, then the situation it faces is no different from that of the "Three Greats" fighting WeChat. For it, the problems faced by Duoshan, Toilet MT and Chat Bao No difference.
Robin Li said the truth that "in many cases, Chinese users are willing to trade privacy for convenience". The confidentiality of the blockchain cannot be attractive to users. I don't think it needs to be repeated.
What's more, the migration cost of acquaintance relationship in the social field is unimaginable. Today, the social platform we are most used to is WeChat. Even if users have added friends on other platforms and want to further establish a relationship, they will still say "shall we add WeChat?" In various vertical fields, there are also many small Giants occupy.
It is not logical and costless to replace the old one with a brand new business system. This is essentially a process of using the dividends created by the new system to slowly cover the costs of abandoning the old system. If the old system is sufficiently developed, the process will be longer and more painful.
Conclusion:
Conclusion:
Blockchain can provide some solutions to existing social network problems, but these solutions will require users to make huge changes, and also touch the core interests of social giants. How many users left Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal? In fact, not many, because people's reliance on Facebook is far greater than their hatred of privacy leaks. Even Elon Musk's Tesla still maintains a Facebook homepage. This is normal, because now is an era of trade-offs. There will eventually be a generation of people who gradually value privacy and security more than compromises with Facebook, and that is the beginning of a new era.
