Blockchain Of The Future: Offering Total Privacy

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What if a system was unable to be hacked? Could data be so secure that it is not available for prying eyes?

This is the likely future of blockchain. It is a situation that might odd considering we are dealing with a technology that is an open, permissionless system where transactions are open for all to see.

Cryptocurrency is going to change the world in many ways that are not yet thought about by the masses. We are embarking upon a technology that is going to filter many aspects of life. It is not going to be concentrated in a single area like finance.

The ripple effect of technology is often what is overlooked.

Cryptocurrency is nothing more than cryptography that is applied a bit differently. There is nothing magical to it yet it is very powerful. As we innovate more, use cases are going to expand far beyond what we are concentrating upon today.

Technology is often blamed for something that is simply an effect of human nature. For example, it is no secret that social media is used for propaganda and mind control. Many point the finger to this as a cause of much of society's ills. However, we must keep in mind propaganda, false information, and misleading agendas were around long before social media.

Thus, we all experience the double-edged sword of technology. It has the inherent ability to massive good while also being used for nefarious purposes.

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Cryptocurrency is going to provide a great deal to humanity. Sadly, we see it also opens the door for mass surveillance by governments and other entities. As the technology evolves, many fear more control will be implemented.

Fortunately, development progresses forward and for every issue, there is a solution. Once of the biggest benefits to the "next generation" Internet is going to be security and privacy. We will see blockchains, with its decentralized data structure serve as a partial basis for a radically new way of communication.

Presently, to access anything on the Internet requires the transmitting of some basic information that identifies the users. When tied together, this forms a digital footprint that many entities can assemble. Of course, with all the hacks that took place over the last decade, much of that information is available for sale on the "dark web".

As this problem grows, more people start working on a solution. The early innovations are privacy coins such as Monero and ZCash. Remember, this is a technology that could be evolved for much greater use than just private transactions.

In fact, there is no need for transactions to be private if the parties involved are completely unknown.

Hence we have a concept such as zero-knowledge proof. Many feel this will be a major part of the Internet going forward. It will not only affect financial transactions but will radically alter social media. Picture a time when anyone, even in the more tyrannical places on Earth, can enter a zero-knowledge proof community and share without any indication of who he or she is.

What is zero-knowledge proof? Basically is it a way of gaining access to something by having some knowledge which is kept hidden by showing some other information that proves one has that knowledge.

Confused? Here is a little story from Wikipedia that summarizes how it works.

In this story, Peggy has uncovered the secret word used to open a magic door in a cave. The cave is shaped like a ring, with the entrance on one side and the magic door blocking the opposite side. Victor wants to know whether Peggy knows the secret word; but Peggy, being a very private person, does not want to reveal her knowledge (the secret word) to Victor or to reveal the fact of her knowledge to the world in general.

They label the left and right paths from the entrance A and B. First, Victor waits outside the cave as Peggy goes in. Peggy takes either path A or B; Victor is not allowed to see which path she takes. Then, Victor enters the cave and shouts the name of the path he wants her to use to return, either A or B, chosen at random. Providing she really does know the magic word, this is easy: she opens the door, if necessary, and returns along the desired path.

However, suppose she did not know the word. Then, she would only be able to return by the named path if Victor were to give the name of the same path by which she had entered. Since Victor would choose A or B at random, she would have a 50% chance of guessing correctly. If they were to repeat this trick many times, say 20 times in a row, her chance of successfully anticipating all of Victor's requests would become vanishingly small (about one in a million).

Thus, if Peggy repeatedly appears at the exit Victor names, he can conclude that it is extremely probable that Peggy does, in fact, know the secret word.

Here is another example from an article that discusses DARPA's interest in the technology.

Take, for example, a bank withdrawal. You may want a system that allows you to make a withdrawal without also having to share your bank balance. The system would need some way of verifying that there are sufficient funds to draw from without having to know the exact amount of money sitting within your account.”

Is it any great surprise this entity is looking into this technology and how to apply it?

So how does zero-knowledge proof technology improve security and privacy? If we look at the example above, just swap out the "secret word" for your identity. That is the underlying piece of information that is kept hidden. Hence, when going to a website, as an example, we do not provide username and password but some other form of information that shows we know the "secret".

This eliminates the digital footprint we cited above. Governments and other entities will not be able to gobble up all the unencrypted information that is out there and use it to compile a database of each individual.

We can also see how it will be quickly adopted once it starts rolling out. Peer-to-peer, encrypted interaction in chat groups, messengers, and even video will become the norm. This will really cut into the issues that confront us today.

As infrastructure is built out, we can rely upon the fact that as problem areas are identified, people will begin working upon them. With developers all over the world, there is a mass consortium of people who are concerned about subjects such as security and privacy. Blockchain is only going to be a bigger part of the world's data structure. With this expansion is going to come other innovations that address some of the glaring problems that pop up.

It is safe to say that privacy will be focused upon over the next few years.


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19 comments
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Bang, I did it again... I just rehived your post!
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I believe that artificial intelligence with quantum systems will one day be able to crack crypto passwords with very powerful computers. After all, blockchain technology is the technological product of today's time. It should constantly improve itself and keep up with the developing technology. I am also a code developer, it has been in my work on security. Nothing is impossible for humans. If someone has created a problem, someone can solve that problem. If a person can create a password, this person can also be a computer. Another computer or program or a person can crack that password. There is always risk in life. as in every action and invention made by humans. It's a good article. I enjoyed reading it, thank you.

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There are already some quantum resistant encryption techniques, and if we use quantum mechanics itself to perform encryption we then have something provably unbreakable. It's just a question of whether quantum error correction is a solvable problem:

If yes, all our old encryption techniques should be considered broken and will become immediately redundant, but in return we get 100% secure encryption.

If no, then we need not worry about quantum computers breaking classical encryption.


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If yes, then we will effectively be on the path a quantum internet that is radically more secure and faster. Of course, we are a long way from that so not to worry right now. Encryption standards are being worked on to make then quantum resistant. Since we will not see those computers rolling out next week, I believe the problem will be solved.

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Yeah, I believe experts estimate that quantum error correction is about 40-50 years away. I also read a really interesting paper saying it might be impossible due to some yet unknown physical law. The author suggests that NP-hard problems might be intrinsically hard.

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in 2025 the blockchain will establish itself in many sectors. Great post, as always

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If you wish to reveal your identity, you can do so. If you wish to operate under a pseudonym, you can do that. Or you can do both. Your choice how you want to be known in the blockchain. So simple.

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System unable to be hacked I don't think would ever be a thing. It would be nice for sure. Privacy for sure though is something we are starting to slowly take back and people are starting to take seriously. It's gotten WAY out of hand in just the 20 years where we signed away our freedoms and since then we have only lost more and more over time for no reason.

I've been moving towards protection as much as possible myself via VPNs encrypted messages and so forth. It's actually becoming a easier move every day as more decentralized systems start offering it. What might be really cool is a cryptocurrency fueled by the use of encryption and VPNs if one does not yet exisit.

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I think there were some proposed, I dont know how they ever turned out. It was during the ICO craze they were discussed so they might never have gotten off the ground.

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Is it bad that I had to read the example a couple of times to figure out what was going on. I think what caught me up was I was thinking of a physical ring like you put on your finger. Not the shape. That is my bad :) This is for sure interesting.

However, we must keep in mind propaganda, false information, and misleading agendas were around long before social media.

It's also important to make sure you are pointing your finger in the right direction with stuff like this. Many people blame social media sites when they should really be taking offense to the source.

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That is true but, of course, a lot of times the source is a "reputable" entity. There are agendas all over the place and the mainstream media is one of the worst.

So it is a situation where social media only sped up the flow of information, it didnt really create it.

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That's true to a point. However, when the social media sites start choosing what is allowed to be viewed and what isn't, then they are far more dangerous than the people creating the content.

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I think security should be a primary focus if they want to keep privacy working. It would probably mean making stronger patterns to have these secret words because I think people can reverse engineer it over time due to processing power and AI algorithms.

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One thing I don't like about blockchain is transparency. Same thing I didn't like about Hive for so much time. Why do we have to have public wallets? So plebs can know what whales to praise for upvotes...

In a governance system that's meant to work for the community, transparency is vital. If the current society and its governments would have had the transparency blockchain offers, we would have a better society.

It's a two edges sword.

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(Edited)

When you realise the privacy is the most important thing missing from Bitcoin you start to see why Monero is just sooooo sooo powerful. Bitcoin gets rid of banks, which seems fine by the rulers but not goverentments in fact it enables them. Monero gets rid of banks and governments. Atomic Swaps are now pretty much ready for Monero which is the pin that burst the system. We heading for a major false flag cyber attack, a big one. Monero will be all over the news eventually, at the moment they are still sweeping it under the rug when ever a ransom gets paid it gets paid in 'Bitcoin' according to the media. Truth is Monero is paid. Atomic swaps capabilities are going to be in full effect. Monero is more powerful than any crypto currency out there, it about to show just how disruptive it really is.

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Since a new major version of the web is being built, and it took some time from the previous one, we had time to contemplate what its faults were. And it is the first attempt to build it in a decentralized manner, without centrally imposed standards. Privacy was one of the challenges Web 2 didn't pass, probably on purpose. When I had my first contacts with blockchain, I was surprised to see there is practically no privacy on it, with few exceptions. It looks like after an initial full transparency movement, more people in the space start to realize what the benefits of privacy are for the regular persons, not even celebrities. So yeah, Web 3 will hopefully have a strong privacy component.

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The blockchain is quite safe, that is why it is its clear success and in the future it will be much more so

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