Power to the People
The inventor of ecash makes the case for individual blockchain—the hacker repellent of the future
NOT LONG AGI, I USED TO WAKE UP TO my alarm clock, brew my own coffee and read the newspaper. Now, my smartphone greets me with a deluge of information, my internet-connected espresso maker beeps and automatically whirs into action, and I sit with my devices as they ply me with advertisements and tempt me to answer surveys.
User-friendly digital interfaces have brought great convenience, but they’ve extracted a price: access to our words and our search queries and the places we visit. The algorithms that grant us convenience by making some tasks easier also put us into boxes and social groups—not always accurately—in ways that may one day be used against us.
Recent news of hackers gaining access to bank and social media accounts has brought home the need to do something about digital privacy. Many people are coming around to the view that they should be empowered to control what happens to their personal information.
What we should be concerned about is not only the content of our daily interactions—what we write in our emails, for instance—but the patterns revealed by our digital activity and the metadata associated with our interactions. (An email’s metadata, for instance, might include information about where it originated and where it is going.) Tracking metadata on just two types of activities—messaging and payments—is enough to reveal an individual’s religious and political beliefs, health, family, friends and all manner of relationships.
Blockchain technology is in its infancy, but many people recognize its potential to protect us from abuse of our metadata. It is a distributed type of computing, independent of the central computers owned by a corporate entity such as Google or Facebook. That means no single entity has access to all the information kept in a blockchain. And nobody can keep track of a person’s metadata, sell it to advertisers, hand it over to the National Security Agency— or, in some dystopian Black Mirror future, use it to calculate a social score that determines our place in society.
By using a blockchain for our individual interactions—rather than Google, Facebook, Amazon and so forth—we could protect ourselves from the risks of metadata manipulation. The places to start are messaging and purchasing, but a blockchain for ordinary people could also be used for legal agreements, health care and personal ɿnance. Such a chain would require new technology; it would have to operate as fast as credit card payments and text messages, make liberal use of encryption to safeguard privacy and security, and accommodate potentially billions of users.
But if we can create such a platform and get people to use it, the payoff to individual privacy would be invaluable.