The risks of blockchain data clouds
Posted: 220920 Tue 1940
The promoted benefits of blockchain data clouds (mostly: your stuff cannot be censored away anymore, you have absolute control over your online data) are in my opinion far outweighed by its various abuse potentials.
Blockchain opens Pandora's box for all kinds of malicious content to be uploaded that cannot easily be regulated, from harassment (eg publishing personal data like home addresses for any attackers' delight, libel, insults, fake porn to incriminate targeted persons etc) up to high crime and instructions that can and probably will cost actual human lives. Free speech without limits will be abused heavily, that is a sociopsychological certainty, as with all freedoms that are not met with equal or greater responsibility and wisdom.
A blockchain fan recently argued that as a website owner, I was already practising a decentralized internet, which they claimed was the same as blockchain.
But no, I have central control over my data and that of my client users, and when on my website I or any of my client users were to host malicious/criminal content, it could easily be regulated. And that's a reasonable necessity. It also has abuse potential, mostly of censorship, but that weighs far less than the risks that I see from blockchain and other darknet technologies.
I am an anarchist and strive for a society of self-determination by self-administration in self-responsibility, but I'm not an anomist, seeking the chaos of anything-goes, which will inevitably always lead again to hierarchical power structures, causing lots of jungle law mayhem on its way.
Blockchain opens Pandora's box for all kinds of malicious content to be uploaded that cannot easily be regulated, from harassment (eg publishing personal data like home addresses for any attackers' delight, libel, insults, fake porn to incriminate targeted persons etc) up to high crime and instructions that can and probably will cost actual human lives. Free speech without limits will be abused heavily, that is a sociopsychological certainty, as with all freedoms that are not met with equal or greater responsibility and wisdom.
A blockchain fan recently argued that as a website owner, I was already practising a decentralized internet, which they claimed was the same as blockchain.
But no, I have central control over my data and that of my client users, and when on my website I or any of my client users were to host malicious/criminal content, it could easily be regulated. And that's a reasonable necessity. It also has abuse potential, mostly of censorship, but that weighs far less than the risks that I see from blockchain and other darknet technologies.
I am an anarchist and strive for a society of self-determination by self-administration in self-responsibility, but I'm not an anomist, seeking the chaos of anything-goes, which will inevitably always lead again to hierarchical power structures, causing lots of jungle law mayhem on its way.