Ideal or delusion? Blockchain's dream of social tools

Original title:Ideal? Delusion? Dream of social tools in blockchain

DR little buddy & NBSP;DappReview

& have spent Takeaway:Before alipay 750 branch, after three war WeChat, social network can increase and retain users, has been the merchant's dream resources. When users use social networks, it is natural to obtain users' sensitive data. While bringing convenience to users, it also USES data to push advertisements accurately, extracting user value and even manipulating user behavior. Some friends believe that the security, confidentiality and dissemination of blockchain are the medicine to change the bad habits of the industry. Is this really the case?

In March 2018, Cambridge Analytica collected unauthorized information about more than 50 million Facebook users and targeted them with political ads. The company was hired by the trump campaign during the presidential election, which has left Facebook embroiled in a scandal over data leaks and election rigging.

People realize it.Facebook, the world's friendliest network, doesn't really think of you as a friend:

1. Facebook stores your sensitive information

2. Facebook has sold it to third parties for years without proper authorization

3. Facebook is a tool for "political manipulation" on a global scale, not just an "advertising platform"

A Twitter campaign to remove Facebook followed, and zuckerberg was "interrogated" by the us government, sending Facebook's share price tumbling.

Of course, users know that the social platform is selling their privacy, and Facebook's misstep may simply have gone too far and had a nasty impact on the interests of those who spent billions of dollars on the campaign. Users' chats, clicks and searches have long been used for data analysis and advertising, and they have gone from tolerating to habituating.

If you don't pay, you're not the customer, you're the product.

& have spent Blockchain hope & NBSP;

As a distributed network, block chain is considered as the antidote to social network, which can be divided into the following three aspects:

 1.±-日来来 

Chat is one of the core functions of all social platforms, but all mainstream social platforms and their chat tools are unqualified in the encryption of chat.

This picture is the realization of some encryption requirements of popular chat software on the market. The first row is the name of the chat software, the first column is the encryption requirements, red represents substandard, yellow represents partial compliance, and green represents compliance. It can be seen that in more than half of the cases, the chat encryption is not good,And none of them are quite up to par(Threema and Wire are the best, and Skype, the famous one in the middle, is the worst.)

& have spent 2. Authentication/certification & cake;

Encrypted chat raises some regulatory issues, but blockchain authentication makes up for them. According to statistics, each network user has created more than 130 accounts on average, which need to be authenticated dozens of times every day. These accounts store the user's name, ID number, email address, mobile phone number, bank card, biometric and other important and sensitive data. There is an urgent need for an authentication method to solve so many account management problems. There are many login verification methods for existing social accounts, such as WeChat, QQ, alipay, Facebook and Twitter. However, due to the relationship between factions, no one social account can verify all apps. What's even more puzzling is that sometimes after logging into a social account, the user has to enter various information to register. It seems that the login is just to tell the social network what new things I am using to make its data more complete.We need social networks to provide a universal, non-stakeholder, secure and convenient means of authentication.

This gives blockchain a chance to cut in. Authentication has been a promising direction for blockchain to become a killer application. The transparency, high security and tamper-proof features of blockchain are important components of authentication. On the block chain, 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 identity ID on the chain. After creation, only users can activate this ID to log in to other accounts. This can greatly reduce the problem of identity fraud on the Internet, and in life even one twin brother cannot pass the authentication of another. People, companies, institutions at all levels, animals and even objects can have their own identities on the blockchain.

The core difficulty of authentication lies in the data transmission from offline to online. Online blockchain must require offline cooperation to complete this step. Sovrin is a blockchain authentication project based on Hyperledger technology, an open source blockchain technology supported by the Linux foundation, dedicated to realizing cross-industry collaboration of blockchain.

Sovrin ledger is operated by collaborators who abide by the rules of the Sovrin network. These collaborators are credit granting institutions in the economic system, including aalto university, IMB, deutsche telekom, cisco and other well-known institutions or companies, who can provide users with real information offline and transfer it to the chain.

Sovrin is currently experimenting with institutional/enterprise-class authentication, and British Columbia recently launched a VON (verified network) OrgBook BC(BC directory of institutions) Beta offering 500,000 institutions in the province the opportunity to issue online authentication and certificates. OrgBook BC USES the technical services provided by Sovrin and Hyperledger. After collecting the merchant information, OrgBook BC verifies the merchant information through the information in the Sovrin partners. The government of British Columbia, private businesses, non-profit organizations and others can establish trust relationships and verifiable certificates online. The provincial government of British Columbia, Canada, has since become the first government to have DID (decentralized ID) on the Sovrin network and to deploy products using Sovrin and Hyperledger.

Other blockchain authentication products such as LifeID, Veres One and uPort have also been launched.

 3.Agnieszka Token 

The success of any social network depends first and foremost on its network effect expansion. Users join social networks because other people are already there.

Creating meaningful network effects is one of the most difficult tasks of any enterprise. For social media networks, it's the business itself.

According to the Coinbase survey, 18 percent of U.S. students now own cryptocurrency, and there is a growing acceptance of decentralized networks and currencies in college courses that are increasingly decentralized. Once established, decentralized networks have stronger vitality. Git, Linux, ethereum and ethereum communities all have decentralized properties. Now that you have cryptocurrency, users who care about decentralization are potential users of the blockchain social implementation.

The value attribute of Token is also a great advantage of blockchain social. It is a double-edged sword. We have seen the crazy propagation ability of some tokens.

The value of Token can also motivate users to generate better content in returnSteemit is currently a good blockchain-based blog and social media. It is built on the Steem Chain and allows users to reward their favorite works with cryptocurrency. Steem USES DPoS consensus and graphene technology to process 10,000 transactions per second.

The following three tokens designed by Steem are Steem Power, Steem Dollar and Steem Dollar to explain how Steem develops the network and maintains the stability of the economic system:

1. Steem Power (SP):& have spent Publishing quality content and replies on Steem can get SP, which will be reduced if reported by other users. SP is the influence of users on Steem. For example, if you vote for an article (thumb up), both the author and you will get a certain amount of revenue. The higher your SP, the more revenue you will get. Don't you always vote and make money? No, voting consumes your voting power, and the lower the voting power, the less valuable the voting power is, and the voting power is regenerated daily.

2.Steem:Steem, like bitcoin, is a system currency with good liquidity. Steem and SP can be converted into each other. Steem can be converted into SP through powerup. SP can be converted to Steem through powerdown, but the powerdown process has strict time and quantity limits.

3. Steem Dollar (SBD):A stable currency in the system, anchored at 1:1 to the dollar. At the time of content release, you can choose a 100%SP and a SP/SBD 50/50 mode. The latter encourages users to cash, skips the process of switching from SP to Steem, and reduces the impact of Steem issuance on currency price. The SBD can also purchase services promoted on Steem to increase your exposure.

Steem has been running for two years and currently has around 4500 weekly active users, making it one of the dapps with the largest number of real users on the blockchain.Every day there is a huge amount of blockchain and non-blockchain related premium content, and a good article can earn anywhere from tens to hundreds of dollars.

Avid Steemit users sort out the Steemit user's manual

https://bookdown.org/baydap/steemh/jbcsp-.html

UGC social platform led by douyin and kuao-shou has a good fame ability, but the platform does not give users direct liquidity, users need to receive advertising or sell things for cash. The block chain social platform integrates the realization system into the social system by means of precise Token and economic system design, so as to motivate users, which is very advantageous in the development of social network.

& have spent The difficulties and challenges of blockchain & & NBSP;

The above three factors, from the logical is just "we think the block chain will solve social networking disadvantages reason", the "reason" is not able to as a solution, in fact, block chain can do, with what kind of path implementation - will appear to discuss with the attitude of turning - all under the control of the influence of subjective technical and commercial competition.

Technically, as we discussed in "blockchain without c-ends", technology as an abstract term is not necessarily directly accessible to the public.Blockchain is likely to be just such a specific technology as a plug-in for the foreseeable short term.

The application with the most c-terminal gene in the block chain is Dapp (decentralized application), but at present, consumers can clearly feel the difference between Dapp and ordinary application --Use threshold is too high. You need to figure out how to manage resources like wallets, private keys, public keys, CPU/RAM, etc. Regardless of ordinary consumers, DR friends, as media practitioners in the industry, still find it extremely troublesome.

If these problems are not solved, it is impossible to imagine the large-scale popularization of Dapp in C terminal. Financing $16 million game company Mythical Games founder of Rudy told DappReview "we need to let the players feel when playing block chain blocks the existence of the chain, which is we can set the goal of" on the first day of admission.

Even in the gaming industry, which is closest to users and highly correlated with virtual assets, blockchain is more like a plug-in to an industry system than the operating system itself.

"High threshold" is the first hurdle for blockchain as an independent industry, followed by the second is the ability to expand technology.DappReview a friend, worked in big games division as executives, he said, when the customer service department is receiving the most complaints top-up arrive time,It's only been two minutes since the payment arrived, and the player is already feeling the wrath of "being cheated". Their patience means that the response time of the game must not be slow.

However, the current TPS speed of the block chain is quite unsatisfactory. It is hard to imagine that the current public chain can support the real-time data throughput of the social network, plus the additional functions such as aggregate payment, e-commerce and live broadcasting. After all, if you compare the infrastructure of the Internet, the public link feels like dial-up.

Look at the pattern of business competition.

In terms of business environment, if an independent block chain social platform wants to challenge WeChat, it will face the same situation as the "three Britain" war against WeChat, and the problems of multi-flash, toilet MT and chat are not different for it.

Robin li said a great truth"In many cases, Chinese users are willing to trade privacy for convenience.", the security features of the block chain cannot constitute an attraction to users. I think this need not be repeated.

What's more, the cost of moving acquaintances from the social domain is unimaginable. Today, the social platform we are most used to is WeChat. Even if users add friends on other platforms and want to further their relationship, they will still say "let's add WeChat, ok?" And in each vertical domain, also have quite a few small giant occupy.

Replacing the old with a new business system is not a natural and free process. This is essentially a process of slowly making up for the costs of abandoning the old system with the dividends created by the new one.If the old system is developed enough, the longer and more painful the process will be.

To sum up, the optimistic and conservative expectation is that, at least in the short to medium term, blockchain may still be suitable to exist as a plug-in in the existing social theft system, changing the social network ecology from the inside out.

& have spent Conclusion:

Blockchain can provide some solutions to existing social networking problems, but these solutions will require users to make huge changes and touch the core interests of social giants. How many users left Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Not much, because people rely more on Facebook than they do on privacy. Even elon musk's Tesla keeps its Facebook page. This is normal, because this is an age of trade-offs. A new era will begin with a generation that values privacy and security more than compromises on Facebook.