Four Ways Blockchain Could Make the Internet Safer, Fairer and More Creative
upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for AnonymousLuser:
Four ways blockchain could make the internet safer, fairer and more creative
The internet is unique in that it has no central control, administration or authority. It has given everyone with access to it a platform to express their views and exchange ideas with others instantaneously. But in recent years, internet services such as search engines and social media platforms have increasingly been provided by a small number of very large tech firms.
On the face of it, companies such as Google and Facebook claim to provide a free service to all their users. But in practice, they harvest huge amounts of personal data and sell it on to others for profit. They're able to do this every time you log into social media, ask a question on a search engine or store files on a cloud service. The internet is slowly turning into something like the current financial system, which centrally monitors all transactions and uses that data to predict what people will buy in future.
This type of monitoring has huge implications for the privacy of ordinary people around the world. The digital currency Bitcoin, which surfaced on the internet in 2008, sought to break the influence that large, private bodies have over what we do online. The researchers had finally solved one of the biggest concerns with digital currencies-that they need central control by the companies that operate them, in the same way traditional currencies are controlled by a bank.
The core idea behind the Bitcoin system is to make all the participants in the system, collectively, the bank. To do this, blockchains are used. Blockchains are distributed, tamper-proof ledgers, which can record every transaction made within a network. The ledger is distributed in the sense that a synchronised copy of the blockchain is maintained by each of the participants in the network, and tamper-proof in the sense that each of the transactions in the ledger is locked into place using a strong encrypting technique called hashing.
More than a decade since this technology emerged, we're still only beginning to scratch the surface of its potential. People researching it may have overlooked one of its most useful applications-making the internet better for everyone who uses it.
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Citation: Four ways blockchain could make the internet safer, fairer and more creative (2019, July 12) retrieved 27 July 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-07-ways-blockchain-internet-safer-fairer.html
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