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Blockchain decentralization combats this by... making all the activity public knowledge for everyone? I mean, I guess it "solves" a problem. No one company can

Blockchain decentralization combats this by... making all the activity public knowledge for everyone? I mean, I guess it "solves" a problem. No one company can gain an economic advantage via the dossiers they keep on people. At the expense of... nobody having any privacy ever again.

warkdarrior 4y ago
Companies will move from "data as competitive advantage" to "analytics as competitive advantage." The compa ies with the most and best ML scientists will dominate, even if all the data is public.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  I mean... that sounds worse. That sounds worse than what we have already. What we have is shit, and that sounds worse.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  People seem to conflate a whole bunch of things with decentralization. It is not a 'keep data secret', 'avoid centralization', pick one type of thing. Decentralization is not web3, it is not blockchain. It is: Avoid having a central point of control in the system. Facebook centralizes both the servers, and the corporatation that controls the systems, for example. 10,000 blogs run on different servers by different people are decentralized. Better example: email. Decentralized protocol and has the ability to keep information private for one person.
rglullis 4y ago
The fact that the data is in available to the public does not mean that everyone can access it. If identity is decentralized, individuals are free to create as many personas as they want. So you get privacy by creating one exclusive identity for each new relationship you have, and using that identity's "public key" to interact with the chain. And if later on you'd like to present some type of "you" as a an aggregation of these identities, you can do it with a keybase-style system.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  Yeah, no. Even assuming that's a thing people will actually do (which is unlikely, most people don't even create burner emails for every new site, and that's pretty trivial in comparison) that's still going to be pretty much trivially cross-corelatable. All those identities are going to need funding (because ultimately, web3 is about making people pay for every single thing they do. Also, yet another extreme inconvenience to the concept of single-use identities), so there will be immutable, perpetual records tying all those identities together.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > most people don't even create burner emails for every new site, and that's pretty trivial in comparison) No, creating an email account is not "trivial". Either you have to run your own domain or you need to go through a fairly lengthy process with different email providers. An alternative would be something like Mozilla Relay, but the it is too new and too late to become a feasible alternative for identity management. An example that I would accept (even though not really "trivial") would be the idea of creating alt accounts on reddit. If you look at those you'd see a lot more people creating separate accounts for different interests, and I could challenge you on the notion of how easy it would be to correlate accounts. Unless you work at reddit, I doubt that you can consistently identify accounts belonging to the same person by analyzing any type of patterns. The only trivial system currently in use for identity generation is Hierarchical Deterministic wallets. One single passphrase can derive infinite key pairs. To get a new identity you literally press a button. > All those identities are going to need funding Nope. It only needs funding if you want to make some transaction on the Blockchain. If all you need is a signature (to login to a website, or decrypt a message or publish a software package on an repository), any crypto wallet can do that for you. > there will be immutable, perpetual records tying all those identities together. See point above, it is not true. Moreover, even the data that would make sense to be in a blockchain can be encrypted. > web3 is about making people pay for every single thing they do. Careful, your blind prejudice is showing. Can you do me a favor? Could you stop with the strawmen and try to argue by considering the strongest and most charitable position from all the people that have been working and researching the space? If you have given 5 minutes of thought before barfing up your response, perhaps it would be more useful for both of us.

warkdarrior 4y ago

Companies will move from "data as competitive advantage" to "analytics as competitive advantage." The compa ies with the most and best ML scientists will dominate, even if all the data is public.

moron4hire 4y ago
I mean... that sounds worse. That sounds worse than what we have already. What we have is shit, and that sounds worse.
quickthrower2 4y ago
People seem to conflate a whole bunch of things with decentralization. It is not a 'keep data secret', 'avoid centralization', pick one type of thing. Decentralization is not web3, it is not blockchain. It is: Avoid having a central point of control in the system. Facebook centralizes both the servers, and the corporatation that controls the systems, for example. 10,000 blogs run on different servers by different people are decentralized. Better example: email. Decentralized protocol and has the ability to keep information private for one person.

rglullis 4y ago

The fact that the data is in available to the public does not mean that everyone can access it. If identity is decentralized, individuals are free to create as many personas as they want. So you get privacy by creating one exclusive identity for each new relationship you have, and using that identity's "public key" to interact with the chain. And if later on you'd like to present some type of "you" as a an aggregation of these identities, you can do it with a keybase-style system.

moron4hire 4y ago
Yeah, no. Even assuming that's a thing people will actually do (which is unlikely, most people don't even create burner emails for every new site, and that's pretty trivial in comparison) that's still going to be pretty much trivially cross-corelatable. All those identities are going to need funding (because ultimately, web3 is about making people pay for every single thing they do. Also, yet another extreme inconvenience to the concept of single-use identities), so there will be immutable, perpetual records tying all those identities together.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > most people don't even create burner emails for every new site, and that's pretty trivial in comparison) No, creating an email account is not "trivial". Either you have to run your own domain or you need to go through a fairly lengthy process with different email providers. An alternative would be something like Mozilla Relay, but the it is too new and too late to become a feasible alternative for identity management. An example that I would accept (even though not really "trivial") would be the idea of creating alt accounts on reddit. If you look at those you'd see a lot more people creating separate accounts for different interests, and I could challenge you on the notion of how easy it would be to correlate accounts. Unless you work at reddit, I doubt that you can consistently identify accounts belonging to the same person by analyzing any type of patterns. The only trivial system currently in use for identity generation is Hierarchical Deterministic wallets. One single passphrase can derive infinite key pairs. To get a new identity you literally press a button. > All those identities are going to need funding Nope. It only needs funding if you want to make some transaction on the Blockchain. If all you need is a signature (to login to a website, or decrypt a message or publish a software package on an repository), any crypto wallet can do that for you. > there will be immutable, perpetual records tying all those identities together. See point above, it is not true. Moreover, even the data that would make sense to be in a blockchain can be encrypted. > web3 is about making people pay for every single thing they do. Careful, your blind prejudice is showing. Can you do me a favor? Could you stop with the strawmen and try to argue by considering the strongest and most charitable position from all the people that have been working and researching the space? If you have given 5 minutes of thought before barfing up your response, perhaps it would be more useful for both of us.