MedSpas are booming, and are often a path for individual nurses to become business owners

Moxie

moxie

Web3 has quickly become one of the most exciting yet controversial ideas to emerge from blockchain. While the general concept of a truly decentralized, user-owned web is appealing, there remains a lack of concrete detail about how the paradigm would work in practice. Critics have also pointed to inconsistencies around the current implementation of early Web3 projects. A recent by the cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike, who created the instant-messaging app Signal, highlights some of these contradictions with forceful clarity. Marlinspike raises serious technical questions about the nascent Web3 industry that aren’t easily answered by blockchain platforms and ecosystems. But several of his observations align with the design of the Internet Computer blockchain, which indicates how emerging technology can help Web3 become a reality. blog post Web3’s Problems Web3 has attracted plenty of media attention because, as put it, it promises “to reduce [our] dependency on large tech companies like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon.” At a time when , this is an outcome few could disparage. But this independence from tech giants is based on decentralization — of both governance, in the sense of users exercising certain voting and participatory rights, and networking technology. one recent overview Big Tech has become something of a bogeyman In his blog post, Marlinspike highlights various compromising flaws around Web3. Users, he points out, continue to rely on centralized servers to access blockchain platforms and protocols. A typical Web3 app might use a decentralized blockchain to store certain data, but its users still need to rely on centralized platforms and/or servers in order to interact with the app. “Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain,” Marlinspike writes. “In fact, even when you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to Infura!” In other words, centralized middlemen are still required for the “client/server interface” — though the backend is on a blockchain, the rest of the stack is hosted on centralized infrastructure. This is similarly true of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — one of the key elements of Web3 — which Marlinspike writes do not actually store their associated digital assets or media on a blockchain. NFTs simply “contain a URL that points to the data,” with a centralized platform or server hosting the data itself. These issues demonstrate how many supposed Web3 projects are only marginally decentralized at best, with centralized servers and platforms responsible for maintaining the core infrastructure on which they operate. But while few Web3 applications actually operate entirely “on-chain,” in the sense of their frontends and backends both being deployed on a blockchain rather than just the backend, the Internet Computer offers end-to-end decentralization. This means that in addition to applications having a blockchain backend, their entire frontend and user interfaces also live on the same decentralized infrastructure. While Marlinspike rightly notes that people “don’t want to run their own servers, and never will,” the Internet Computer obviates the need for application developers to deploy their own infrastructure while eliminating dependencies on centralized hosting services. One of the key features that distinguishes the Internet Computer from other layer-one blockchains is that its protocol runs on nodes that are of independent data centers, none of which are cloud providers. The nodes form different subnet blockchains that interoperate and run that can deliver web content to browsers, providing an alternative IT stack. distributed across a network smart contract software The Internet Computer’s end-to-end decentralization also bears on Marlinspike’s complaint regarding NFTs, which generally point to digital assets that are stored on centralized platforms and servers. In his blog post, Marlinspike reports that an NFT he created was taken down on OpenSea, and that when he went to view it on his MetaMask wallet, it had disappeared. This is because MetaMask, like many other third-party wallets, relies on OpenSea — a centralized marketplace platform — to identify its NFT data. Once OpenSea removed the listing, the NFT seemed to vanish into thin air, even though it still existed on the Ethereum blockchain. The Internet Computer avoids this problem by storing the entire digital objects and not just NFT metadata directly on its blockchain network. Even if a marketplace delists or removes a particular NFT’s digital object from its platform, the NFT remains on-chain, available for anyone to retrieve. AllSeeingSeneca, , recently demonstrated this by minting her new collection on Ethereum while hosting it on the Internet Computer, ensuring that it runs on the blockchain. As reported: “Hosting the NFTs on the Internet Computer should ensure that the NFT artwork lives forever on a public blockchain without threat of a takedown or cloud-outage issues.” the lead artist of Bored Ape Yacht Club Rolling Stone Marlinspike also notes that decentralized protocols tend to develop and evolve more slowly than centralized platforms. “If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time,” he writes. “A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.” An ability to be updated more quickly, he suggests, could allow centralized platforms to consolidate control of the emerging Web3 space. The Internet Computer’s governance is controlled by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called the Network Nervous System. The NNS community adopts or rejects proposals to , avoiding hard forks. Hundreds of such proposals have already been adopted, enabling the Internet Computer Protocol to rapidly evolve. For example, the community adopted a proposal to begin work on integrating the Internet Computer with Bitcoin’s network last September, and is coming this year. upgrade the protocol full implementation Marlinspike describes Ethereum’s failure to specify how royalties are handled with ERC-721 (non-fungible) tokens meaning that OpenSea has taken the lead and developed its own, unilateral way of dealing with them. The Internet Computer’s adaptability gives it a better chance of avoiding such a scenario. The Future Of course, there’s no telling how technology like the Internet Computer will contribute to the maturation of Web3, to say nothing of whether innovations can manage to resolve all of the problems the new paradigm will encounter as it evolves. The central question, which Marlinspike leaves unexplored, is conceptual rather than technical: What exactly should Web3 look like? Answering this means going beyond the vaguely stated principle of ‘decentralization’ and creating effective applications that genuinely address the issues that Web3 purports to resolve. No doubt this will take time, and multiple rounds of trial and error, but in a world where Big Tech still wields far too much power, it’s a question that necessity will force us to answer sooner or later.

A Blockchain Answer to Moxie’s ‘Impressions of Web3’

A world without hierarchy is the ideal of traditional anarchism, a political philosophy against authorities that maintain unnecessary coercion over people. It often proposes a society without money as well, and that’s likely where it differs more from the Crypto-anarchism idea first proposed by the computer engineer and libertarian activist Timothy C. May in 1988. Here’s a clue: it includes cryptocurrencies. But the “crypto” part isn’t only for cryptocurrencies. Indeed, as you may have noticed already, Crypto-anarchism is a much older concept than cryptocurrencies themselves. The name comes from cryptography, a set of mathematical techniques and technologies designed to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. That’s the main goal of crypto-anarchism: to protect private information against higher authorities, using cryptography for that. May visualized a future in which anonymity and financial freedom would come first for everyone. As it reads in his “ :” Crypto-Anarchism Manifesto “Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable (...) These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.” That’s just the starting point, though. This ideal would birth numerous interesting characters and technologies over the years —including cryptocurrencies. Freedom, Privacy, and Decentralization It’s easy to see why someone would deliver this political proposal. Mass surveillance is a global issue these days, as it’s been especially remarked after Edward Snowden exposed the global surveillance activities conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013. So much power and knowledge could easily lead to civil rights abuses, as it already happened (and it’s happening right now) in numerous jurisdictions. China, for instance, is quite famous for its censorship, surveillance, and news manipulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo_FM3mjBCY&embedable=true By using these tools, it wouldn’t matter where you are, because your online data would be safe, and you would still be able to transact with others using decentralized money (not issued by a government or central authority). Cryptography is the answer proposed by May to keep our privacy rights and freedom. Of course, decentralized money would appear later, with the first proposals (pre-Bitcoin) issued by remarkable cryptographers like Adam Back, David Chaum, Wei Dai, and Nick Szabo. Names like these would be inscribed in a new movement based on Crypto-Anarchism, started by May along with John Gilmore, Judith Milhon, and Eric Hughes. It all started like a shared mailing list by sort-of libertarian cryptographers in the early 90’s, but quickly evolved into an activism movement to defend privacy: . the Cypherpunks As we can see now in the Cypherpunk Manifesto (1993) by Hughes, they consider that the most efficient way to protect privacy is through crypto technologies. “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age (…) We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy (…) We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any (…) Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and (…) we're going to write it.” Cryptographic Tools Crypto-anarchists and cypherpunks cryptographers have delivered a series of useful and generally free-to-use software tools to protect our privacy and freedom worldwide. Bitcoin, of course, is on the list —but it’s not even the first one, nor the only one. To mention some important ones, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), developed by Phil Zimmermann in 1991, is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. It is widely used for securing email communications and files. Tor browser, even if originally developed by the US Navy, was quickly adopted and nurtured by cypherpunks. Signal, a popular encrypted messaging app, was developed by the cypherpunk Moxie Marlinspike. WikiLeaks, famous for publishing classified, censored, or otherwise restricted information and promoting transparency and government accountability, was founded by another cypherpunk: Julian Assange. The privacy-focused BitTorrent, which revolutionized P2P file sharing, was created by Bram Cohen, who was a participant in the original cypherpunk mailing list. Even Zooko Wilcox, the founder of Zcash (a privacy-focused cryptocurrency) is a supporter of this ideology. Without a doubt, more crypto tools are coming from more developers worldwide, considering that the data privacy software market to grow from $2.76 billion in 2023 to $30.31 billion by 2030. And that’s only outside the open-source world. is projected Some Concerns It's important to recognize that no system, whether centralized or decentralized, is immune to criminal activities. Crypto-anarchism is no different, and May admitted it in his Manifesto as well. It’s a bit worrisome, even, because he just states that crypto tools will change our society and preserve our privacy, but they’ll also bring crimes to the table. “The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.” No obvious solution is offered there to this potential issue, but we could check the traditional anarchism approach to crimes —or how they prefer to address it: society's harm. , that distinction is important: victimless actions like smoking weed, stealing food from the wealthy, or sharing state secrets, considered crimes by governments, wouldn’t be punished in an anarchist community. For anarchists Only serious harm like murder, rape, or violence would require attention by some security volunteers. In this specific case, we can wonder how crypto-anarchism (and cryptocurrencies) would address harmful risks like terrorism financing, money laundering, or all kinds of illegal markets in the Darknet. For now, the answer is clear: we still need to work with centralized authorities and share some of our information if we want a safer world. However, this could change in the future, with new decentralized ways of compliance. Decentralized Compliance Technologies like Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) systems provide individuals control over personal information, allowing selective disclosure for compliance, verification, or reputation. Decentralized compliance solutions are emerging in response to the challenges of regulating decentralized financial systems. Ledger forensics tools, such as those offered by companies like Chainalysis, facilitate the analysis of transactions to address compliance concerns. In that way, the public and pseudonymous nature of most cryptocurrency chains would be an advantage to trace misbehavior among participants without fully compromising privacy. In addition, utilizing and decentralized governance mechanisms can provide tools for creating self-executing agreements and transparent decision-making processes. This can help ensure that decentralized systems are used responsibly and ethically. smart contracts The terms are discussed by all parties prior to signing, and the outcome can be enforced by the code itself. Besides, on-chain governance processes contribute to self-regulation, allowing token holders to participate in decision-making. These solutions aim to balance the principles of decentralization with the necessity of compliance in an evolving regulatory landscape, providing a foundation for responsible and transparent decentralized financial ecosystems. Obyte as a Tool for Privacy and Freedom As a ledger without middlemen, is aiming to be an incarnation of crypto-anarchist and cypherpunk ideals of freedom, privacy, and decentralization. Obyte First of all, the whole ecosystem is based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure that eliminates the central figures of miners and validators and replaces them with much less powerful (OP). Order Providers . Once a transaction is made, it’ll stay forever on the DAG, without middlemen’s approval. No one needs “permission” to transact in the Obyte DAG, and their transactions can’t be impeded, censored, or stolen Besides, Obyte offers the best of both worlds: a transparent ledger where to transact with public tokens, and the option to use privacy coins to preserve full confidentiality. like Blackbytes These privacy tokens can be traded P2P only, and only the involved users will keep the transaction data on their own devices. If someone tries to find a trace of them in the public ledger, they’ll find nothing. is also available in the Obyte ecosystem in the form of attestations. They’re an internal feature on the wallet, where After verification, they won’t need to share personal data with third parties, but just the attestation itself. Self-sovereign ID anyone can quickly verify their real name, email, GitHub account, or investor status. By offering full decentralization, user control, privacy features, smart contracts, resistance to censorship, and global accessibility, could be a powerful tool to preserve your freedom and online rights. Obyte Featured Vector Image by Freepik

Exploring Crypto-Anarchism: From Privacy to Cryptocurrencies and Beyond

ক্রিপ্টো-নৈরাজ্যবাদ অন্বেষণ: গোপনীয়তা থেকে ক্রিপ্টোকারেন্সি এবং তার বাইরে

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探索加密无政府主义：从隐私到加密货币及其他

Our online privacy is at stake these days. Big companies are trying to get our personal information everywhere, and that could lead to data leaks, blackmailing, spam emails, phishing, scams, etc. Not protecting our data isn’t protecting ourselves. So, this time, we’ll talk about five open-source and free-to-use privacy tools that you can support via Kivach. As we’ve mentioned in previous articles, is a powerful and user-friendly charity platform based in Obyte. It’s designed to donate cryptocurrencies to open-source projects on GitHub. Besides, it possesses a unique feature: This way, the crypto donation would flow like a cascade, and expensive middlemen fees (e.g., Patreon or PayPal) would be eliminated. Kivach the recipients have the option to donate a percentage of donations to other open-source projects, automatically. Let’s look into some interesting privacy tools that you can use for free, and that may receive your . support via Kivach 1. Signal This is a highly regarded open-source messaging app known for its commitment to user privacy and security. It was launched in 2014 by cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike and Brian Acton, a co-founder. The app's user base has steadily grown over the years, reaching around 40 million users worldwide by 2022. WhatsApp Signal's standout feature is its It offers text messaging, voice, and video calls, as well as the ability to send multimedia messages. Signal also provides features like disappearing messages, group chats, and support for voice and video conferences. Its commitment to open-source development and privacy-focused design has earned Signal a loyal and expanding user base, including individuals, activists, journalists, and those concerned about their online privacy. end-to-end encryption, which ensures that only the intended recipient can decrypt and read messages. Currently, Signal is maintained by the nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation. The app is completely free to download and use on mobile devices (Android & iOS) or desktop machines (Windows, Linux, and macOS). They welcome donations in numerous national currencies and also in cryptocurrencies. You can donate to them using Kivach, where they appear as , and signalapp/signal-android signalapp/signal-desktop, signalapp/signal-server, signalapp/signal-ios. 2. GrapheneOS GrapheneOS is a privacy-focused and security-centric open-source operating system designed for mobile devices. It was created in 2014 by Daniel Micay, a highly regarded security researcher and developer. GrapheneOS places a strong emphasis on enhancing the security and privacy of Android smartphones and has gained popularity among users seeking a more secure mobile experience. includes features such as a security-hardened kernel (the connection between hardware and software), fine-grained permission controls, enhanced encryption, and regular security updates. , . For this reason, it doesn’t offer Google apps or services natively. They’re only available through a sandboxed compatibility layer. GrapheneOS It provides a more secure environment for smartphone users and aims to protect against a wide range of potential threats including surveillance and unauthorized data access Funding for GrapheneOS primarily comes from user donations, sponsorships, and community support, allowing it to remain independent and focused on user privacy and security. They accept PayPal, wire transfers, GitHub Sponsors, and several cryptocurrencies. You can help them with Kivach too: grapheneos/vanadium. 3. Pi-hole This is an ad-blocker software specially designed for small, energy-efficient devices like Raspberry Pi. It was initially created by Jacob Salmela in 2014 and has since grown into a widely used project with contributions from the open-source community on GitHub. Besides Raspberry Pi, it’s also available for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS Stream. Unlike other ad-blockers, Pi-hole can block ads and tracking domains in a whole network, like a firewall. It maintains an extensive blocklist of known ad-serving domains and can be customized to filter additional content. Pi-hole's user base spans tech-savvy individuals, families, and organizations seeking to reduce the intrusion of online ads and protect against potential malware. After installation, it’s necessary to set Pi-hole as the computer’s DNS server, and it’s also possible to pair it with a VPN to use it remotely —for instance, in a smartphone. The project runs entirely on donations. They accept funds via Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Google Play, PayPal, and several cryptocurrencies. You can use the latter option through Kivach, where you’ll find them as pi-hole/pi-hole. 4. WireGuard A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a technology that creates a secure, encrypted connection over the Internet, That’s what WireGuard does as a completely free-to-use app for Windows, macOS, Linux, Ubuntu, Android, iOS, and other operating systems. protecting your online privacy and data by masking your IP address and routing your traffic through a remote server. It was created by Jason A. Donenfeld and first released in 2015. WireGuard has rapidly gained popularity for its simplicity, robust security, and speed, making it a go-to choice for individuals and organizations seeking a reliable VPN solution. It is known for its minimalistic codebase, making it easier to audit for security vulnerabilities. That’s why a long list of commercial VPN brands have chosen it as a connection protocol. The WireGuard team accepts donations via PayPal, GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, Liberapay, Bitcoin, and Stripe. You can also send them more cryptocurrencies through the and Kivach, where they’re available as Counterstake Bridge wireguard/wireguard-go. 5. Cryptomator CryptoMator is an open-source encryption software that provides secure, client-side encryption for cloud storage services. It was created in 2014 by Sebastian Stenzel for personal use and later launched to the public with the German company Skymatic GmbH. CryptoMator's user base comprises individuals, professionals, and organizations looking to enhance the privacy and security of their files stored in the cloud. Key features of CryptoMator include end-to-end encryption, which ensures that The software is available on various platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, making it versatile for users across different devices. However, it’s important to note that only desktop versions are free to use. files are encrypted on the client side and remain private even when stored on third-party cloud services like Dropbox or Google Drive. The only thing you’ll need to get started is installing the software and creating a password. No more complex steps are required. To support the free version, they accept donations via PayPal, credit card, bank transfers, and CoinPayments. If you want to avoid all the middlemen fees involved on these platforms, you can use Kivach to send them cryptocurrencies. They appear as cryptomator/cryptomator. Bonus: Blackbytes To reach a good level of privacy, you’ll need to combine several privacy tools. We offer you another one in Obyte: its privacy coin, . . To make private transactions, GBB divides the internal data of its transactions into two parts. One part is publicly available and registered in the DAG as an undecipherable hash. Blackbytes (GBB) This is an asset designed to be used exclusively for P2P, anonymously, and outside centralized cryptocurrency exchanges The rest of the related information (amount, involved addresses, dates, parent transactions, etc.) is sent directly to the recipient(s) via end-to-end encrypted private message. Therefore, only the involved users have this data on their own devices (in the form of a digital file), offline. Blackbytes can also be sent online. You can buy and sell Blackbytes through the and several integrated chatbots . Additionally, just to increase your privacy level, you can enable the browser Tor from your wallet, by adjusting your Global Preferences (Settings). Obyte wallet (Chat Tab – Bot Store – Blackbytes.io Exchange) Remember to tell them! If you’re going to send some cryptocurrencies via Kivach to any open-source project of your preference, don’t forget to tell them about the donation. Initially, they may not know that they received something. If they don’t have an Obyte wallet yet, they’ll need to download it and pass through a (Chat Tab – Bot Store – GitHub Attestation Bot) to verify their GitHub account and claim the funds. GitHub attestation Besides, consider that you can explore open-source projects on GitHub yourself and make suggestions to appear in our next list! Please comment on them below, on our , or via . You can also read our previous episodes to discover more interesting software: Telegram channel Discord Kivach Donations: 5 GitHub projects it has helped so far How You Can Support Key Open-Source Initiatives With Kivach 5 Open-source Projects You Can Support With Kivach — and Cryptocurrencies 5 Open-source Projects You Can Support with Kivach and Cryptos, Episode III Featured Vector Image by jcomp / Freepik

5 Open-Source Projects You Can Donate to via Kivach, Episode IV: Privacy Tools

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GM. This is Crypto Player One, the daily newsletter on crypto gaming, NFTs, and the Metaverse. We are the protein bars of crypto gaming - sweet and nutritious. This Wednesday comes with: Daily Trivia. Bloomberg's top finance writer talks NFTs and the Metaverse. In Other News. Meme of the Day. Daily Trivia What's the name of the first interactive analog computer game? Scroll down to find out the answer. Bloomberg's Top Finance Writer Talks NFTs and The Metaverse Matt Levine, one of the best finance writers in the world, wrote an entire 40,000-word issue of Bloomberg Businessweek covering all things crypto. This is the second time in the history of Bloomberg that a writer has written a cover-to-cover issue of the magazine. So, as fans of Matt, we had to read it. While he talked about a bunch of stuff that's outside of the scope of this newsletter, he discussed NFTs, the Metaverse, and online communities. Here are the best bits: 1. NFTs Matt points out that most NFTs don't live on the blockchain. How could that be? Well, Matt refers to a by the founder of Signal, Moxie Marlinspike. blog post In the piece, Moxie explains how NFTs contain an URL that points to the data storing your image, but that data doesn't live on-chain. So the NFT links to a server that stores its image, title, and description. And anyone with access to that server can change the NFT. So what does that mean for the NFT space in general? , intellectual property rights and royalties are not enforceable on the blockchain. As we recently found out Many NFT companies sell their projects by offering image rights to the IP or promising to transfer those rights to the holders. But all of that happens off-chain, and it's not legally enforceable. So, in the end, when you buy an NFT, you get a pointer to a piece of digital art. Matt puts it beautifully: "These NFTs may not represent ownership in any particularly binding sense, but they represent a feeling of ownership. The technological and legal connections between blockchain and JPEG and ownership are a bit thin, but the connections are enforced culturally." He gives an example with Bored Apes. It's an online community with its own real-life events and social norms (using a monkey NFT as your Twitter profile pic.) 2. The Metaverse Matt doesn't know what the Metaverse is. Let us help you, Matt. It's a term describing a potential future. A future in which we all live, work and play digitally. He does mention that if indeed that's the future, buying, monitoring, and distributing digital goods online will be important. And we can make all of these goods scarce with NFTs. 3. Online Communities Mark Zuckerberg built one of the most valuable companies in the world, Meta, by focusing on human connection. And now, his pivot to the Metaverse goes to show that his vision is that most, if not all, parts of our lives will take place online. And if crypto has taught us something is that the human social life going online has a sh*t ton of economic value. People form communities online, making them valuable and getting some of that value for themselves. Want to read the entire 40 000 word article? Click here! In Other News The Web3 ticketing company, YellowHeart, launched a metaverse music venue. Oasys, the blockchain focused on crypto gaming, launched its mainnet. Seba Bank has started offering institutional-grade, certified, and audited hot and cold storage custody for blue-chip NFTs. Meme of the Day Answer Tennis for Two Want to Stay On Top of All Things Crypto Gaming and NFTs? Sign up for the daily newsletter - it’s free!

🎮 Bloomberg's Top Finance Writer On NFTs and The Metaverse

There is no way for mankind to actually build another habitable planet that resembles Earth, so if climate change, nuclear warfare, or some other catastrophe does affect our environment to the point that it becomes uninhabitable, we will all need to have an alternative place to live and survive. This is where the idea of becoming an interplanetary species becomes valuable. Of course,  without technology, this would be impossible. So, it is important to understand where we stand today - in terms of what technology we already have, and what we would still require to have a chance at surviving on another planet that does not provide us with the same protections as Earth. First, it is important to acknowledge the great lengths air travel has gone to since its beginnings on a North Carolina beach in 1903. Man first ventured into space in 1961 when Soviet Cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, orbited the Earth, and then just eight years later, in 1969, Astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the Moon. Now, nearly 120 years later, we have machines roving about the surface of Mars, learning about the planet to ascertain the possibilities of human habitation there in the future. It is clear that we have the technology to send machines to other planets and conduct a wide array of experiments. But do we have the technology to land on Mars and sustain life there, perhaps indefinitely? Let us assume we have already resolved the issue of traveling 39 million miles through space for nine months just to reach Mars as it orbits nearest the Earth (called Mars Close Approach) and landing safely on the surface. Since Mars’ atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide, the first challenge is ensuring a safe and lasting supply of oxygen without which we would die within about 15 seconds, as we either freeze or asphyxiate; our blood boils and our lungs rupture. So oxygen is our number one need. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, which continues to persevere in its quest to explore the red planet, has a lunchbox-size instrument onboard called MOXIE, which has successfully converted carbon dioxide to oxygen. Scientists believe a much larger version of MOXIE could be used to produce oxygen in quantities sufficient for human survival on the planet. The second challenge is ensuring a lasting water supply. Mars has two polar ice caps made of water ice clouds, CO2 ice clouds, and solid water ice. Water also exists as permafrost in the in the planet’s soil at mid- to high latitudes across the planet. It does snow on Mars, on occasion, but the tiny Martian snowflakes are made of carbon dioxide rather than water. NASA is developing an excavator device named (Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot) designed to mine water, fuel, and ice from Mars’ planetary soil. A water extractor will then be used to heat the soil and capture the evaporated water, which can then be condensed and stored for future use. RASSOR Food is the third challenge. Astronauts are limited as to how much they can bring with them to Mars. The obvious answer is to find a solution to growing plants on Mars with the help of technology. published an article in 2019 detailing some of the challenges including how much land could be practically used. “…when you think about land, you’re really talking about building an enclosed structure. You have to pressurize it, you have to heat it, and you have to light it to protect against the Martian environment. There’s almost no atmosphere. It’s very cold. So, the land turns out to be the most important driver. The more land you have to use to grow food, then the more construction, the more power, et cetera.” Smithsonian Magazine The author of the article notes that humans on Mars will likely need to live off lab-grown meat, products made with insect protein, and vegetables grown on Mars. This leads us to the fourth challenge. Without a magnetic field, Mars is bombarded by radiation, which makes it highly dangerous for humans. All of the technical aspects of traveling to Mars and surviving with food and water are irrelevant if we cannot protect ourselves from deadly radiation. Galactic cosmic rays damage DNA and increase our risk for cancer. So, without a protective magnetic shield and a thick atmosphere like we have on Earth, we are dead meat on Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover, , carried an instrument called the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD). Its purpose was to learn about radiation on the planet and prepare scientists for future human visits and habitation there. RAD has helped scientists determine that there are ways to reduce the risk of radiation exposure. The central idea as of now is to burrow 15-20 feet into the ground and build shelters there. which landed on Mars in 2012 These shelters will protect inhabitants from extreme radiation as well as the extreme cold that permeates Mars. Temperatures average -81 F but could reach as low as -220 F. Regardless of where they spend most of their time and sleep, Mars’ inhabitants will need to venture out at least occasionally so the need for radiation-proof spacesuits and vests is paramount. Many more challenges exist of course and there will need to be many layers of contingency for emergencies, but most people seem to agree that the challenge is conquerable and Mars is inhabitable. One day and that day will come, mankind will become an interplanetary species. Famed science fiction writers Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, among others, will be proud. The next Mars Close Approach will take place soon on Dec. 8, 2022. Look up in the sky. It may very well be the future home for your great-grandchildren.

Can Mankind Survive as an Interplanetary Species? 

¿Puede la humanidad sobrevivir como especie interplanetaria?

L'humanité peut-elle survivre en tant qu'espèce interplanétaire ?

क्या मानव जाति एक अंतरग्रहीय प्रजाति के रूप में जीवित रह सकती है?

人類は惑星間種として生き残ることができますか?

A humanidade pode sobreviver como uma espécie interplanetária?

Loài người có thể tồn tại như một loài liên hành tinh?

人类可以作为星际物种生存吗？

Evolution of Communication From ancient antiquity to the present, we have been using different modes of communication. It started with letters. Conveying a message to others took days, sometimes even a month. Later on, technology evolved, and that changed the way we communicate. Today, messages are the default way to communicate with other people. We usually chat with others with the help of messengers. These changes have brought a significant impact on communications. Each evolution has changed the speed of communication. Let us discuss the messaging methods we have used from the past to the present. It is one of the oldest methods. From early BC, people used this method to pass information. This method was relatively slow, and if the weather conditions were terrible, our letter wouldn't reach the other destination. People find it difficult. So the letter was replaced by the telegraph. Letters: The telegraph made long-distance communication (inter-continental) easier. This was the first form of electric communication in which sounds and visual representations were used. However, it became time-consuming and difficult to decipher the messages that were transmitted. Thus, telephones succeeded in telegraphs. Fax and telegraph machine: Telephones were the marvel of their time. The prospect of hearing a loved one’s voice even when they were thousands of miles away made everyone go barmy. But at first, the telephone was widely used in government sectors, and then slowly, adopted by people in their households. Telephone: Enter text messaging. Pagers were widely used in the 1980s. People found it useful because it was small and portable. They could carry it everywhere and send messages to others. Some pagers had the option to send voice notes. But as technology further developed, pagers also became delayed messaging services. Pagers: Mobile phones used wireless networks to send SMS near-instantly. In fact, SMS is an acronym for Short Message Service. After the evolution and adoption of mobile phones, SMS became the go-to standard for text-based communication. However, the latency of the messages was dependent on the strength and availability of the wireless network. If there are any network issues, there may be a delay in sending and receiving messages. SMS: Instant messengers are the messengers that we use today - Facebook messenger, Instagram messenger, Whatsapp, Viber, Threema, Telegram, Wickr Me, Wire, Apple iMessage, Signal, Element, Session, BChat. People can send and receive messages in real-time with their friends and family. Instant messaging has also become popular by adding additional features such as voice calls, video calls, sharing files, voice notes, images, videos, payments, etc. But there’s a catch. They profit by commoditizing your data. Let’s explore this. Instant messaging: Web2.0 Vs Web3.0 At present, most of us are using Web2.0 applications. Web2.0 applications are predominantly centralized. Users of Web2.0 applications need to provide their personal details in order to use them. These details are stored in centralized servers. Centralized architectures, due to their innate nature, are susceptible to hacks that lay bare your personal details for the world to see. Moreover, these apps bend the rules for governments and regulatory bodies. Besides, your personal data is handled by people who work for the firm. By submitting your age, date of birth, gender, social security number, bank details, and credit card details on the application, you’re providing a digital footprint of yourself to the insiders of the company, hackers, and government agencies. Each centralized application tracks and collects your device’s IP address, location, and other sensitive metadata, which is then shared with third parties. For example, with the help of your location data, local vendors may promote their business by sending targeted ads to your inbox. Due to these issues, centralized applications came under the scrutiny of for-privacy NGOs, privacy-enthusiasts, the media, and the general public. People who have become aware of this are looking at alternatives to centralized apps. As a result, centralized applications began implementing end-to-end encryption as a means of protecting user data. But what is encryption and how does it protect our data? Let’s take a look at it. History of Encryption The Hebern Rotor Machine There are many kinds of encrypted applications that are used. In the early 1900s, the Hebern Rotor Machine, an electronic device, was used to send encrypted messages from one person to another. The person on the other end can decrypt the message using another Hebern rotor machine. Here, a polyalphabetic substitution cipher was used. The Enigma The Enigma was developed by Hugo Koch in 1919. It was the device used by  Nazi Germany during the Second World War to send and receive encrypted messages. These encrypted messengers played a significant role in sending secret messages during the war. Encryption in Enigma was done by using the iterative cipher. Data Encryption Standard (DES) In the late 1900s, a better version of encrypted messengers evolved. The American government adopted the Data Encryption Standard (DES) developed by IBM. The algorithm takes the plain text in 64-bit blocks and converts them into ciphertext using 48-bit keys. DES uses the symmetric Feistel network, which divides the block into two halves before going through the encryption steps. Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is an underlying technology used in current cryptography. It was developed by Ralph Merkle. Each user will generate a public and private key pair and distribute the public key. After obtaining an authentic copy of each other's public keys, users can establish shared secrets offline or through an insecure channel. Here, a symmetric key cipher is used. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) The Advanced Encryption Standard or Rijndael was adopted by the U.S. in 2001. It was standardized for the encryption of messages by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). AES uses symmetric block encryption with a block size of 128 bits, which involves using only one secret key to cipher and decipher the information. Here, a symmetric block cipher is used. Elliptic Curvey Cryptography In the year 2005, Elliptic Curve Cryptography was introduced. It is more robust than the current RSA algorithm. Like the Diffie-Hellman key, it also uses public and private keys. These keys are used to encrypt and decrypt the data. TextSecure Protocol Later on, in 2014, Text Secure Protocol (Signal Protocol) was created by Open Whisper Systems and is currently used by the Signal and Whatsapp centralized messengers. This is the protocol that is used even in decentralized messaging applications like Session and BChat. Centralized messengers: was launched in 2009. It is an end-to-end encrypted messenger. WhatsApp is free and offers simple, secure, and reliable messaging and calling, available on phones as well as a desktop version too. It supports sending and receiving a variety of media like text, photos, videos, documents, and location, as well as voice and video calls. It is used by billions of people from all over the world. The major issue with WhatsApp is that users need to provide their phone numbers to create an account and all users' data will be stored on centralized storage servers. WhatsApp was acquired by Meta (formerly Facebook) for $19 billion in 2014. Ever since then, and vice versa. This data includes, but is not limited to your phone numbers, transactional data, and other service-related information. Whatsapp: WhatsApp user data is shared with Meta was launched in 2014 by WhatsApp’s founder Brian Acton and security researcher Moxie Marlinspike. It is also an end-to-end encrypted messenger. In fact, WhatsApp uses the encryption protocol developed by Open Whisper Systems, the foundation that backs Signal. Signal is a messaging app like WhatsApp that allows you to send text, images, files, GIFs, and make voice and video calls. The Signal Android app can be used as an alternative to your SMS application. However, Signal lacks a cloud backup feature, so your chat history would be lost if your phone was stolen or damaged. It is possible to get them to a new phone using the chat backup feature, but it must be the same type as your current phone. Signal: Signal was launched in 2012. Users need to pay money to download this application. It doesn't store your data on a central server; your data is only stored on your local device and uses a client-server protocol. As it does not require a phone number or any other personally identifiable information, this helps anonymize the users. It is an open-source end-to-end encrypted messenger. Mostly used for business purposes, they need to purchase credentials before using the application. Threema asks for your GPS location upon installation. It is an unknown reason why they collect users' locations. The app forces a new ID with each login of a new mobile device, so old history cannot be recovered. No password is required to delete an account, so anyone can delete your account without your knowledge. Threema: Threema Why Were Centralized Messengers Replaced By Decentralized Messengers? Although centralized and decentralized messengers sometimes use similar encryption protocols, decentralized messengers are more secure than centralized ones. In decentralized messengers, you don't need to submit any personal details to create an account. Let's see a few examples of decentralized messengers. is a decentralized application launched in 2017. It is a mobile-friendly dApp that uses the whisper V5 protocol. Here, the messages sent by the user will be encrypted. The status dApp is developed on the Ethereum blockchain. Users can trade SNT and ETH tokens and make peer-to-peer transactions on the Status dApp. Status: Status The Secretum dApp is yet to be launched. It is built on the Solana blockchain. They use the ALF protocol. The primary use case of the Secretum dApp is to make crypto trading easy. An OTC desk is built-in within the dApp. Users can trade crypto directly without the need for a centralized exchange or NFT marketplace. Secretum is powered by the SER token. Secretum: is built on the oxen blockchain. Here they use Text Secure Protocol by Signal or encryption. This protocol is used to initiate, maintain, modify, and terminate real-time communication between users. The Session dApp was launched in 2020. The dApp is end-to-end encrypted, and users can create an account anonymously. The Session ID is an alpha-numeric code, which is the user’s public key. Users can share this public key with others to send them a message in session. It is a secure messaging platform for those who seek privacy. Though the OXEN token isn’t a utility in-app, it is used to secure the oxen servers that provide storage and relay messages. Session: Session is built on the Beldex blockchain. Bchat also uses Text Secure (Signal) Protocol for encryption. The dApp is yet to be launched, however, BChat has a built-in crypto wallet that allows you to trade the platform’s native cryptocurrency BDX right from their chatbox. The masternodes on the Beldex network act as the storage server and route messages from source to destination. BChat does not collect personal data or metadata. Users' IDs (BChat IDs) are used to communicate with others. So, user anonymity is preserved. BChat: BChat To Conclude: As of now, we are using centralized applications and losing our privacy. Privacy is a basic right in one's life. Without our consent, no one has the right to know or use our personal data. It's time to think and move to secure alternatives. Decentralized messengers are not entirely perfect, they’ve got constraints of storage and latency. But they’re evolving and certainly protect your privacy. They do not have a large user base now, but with centralized organizations and ad companies using people’s data for personal gain, the privacy that these messengers offer will surely attract billions of people in times to come. "If you care about privacy, switch to decentralized messengers."

Why are Decentralized Messengers Better than Centralized Messengers?

Where does the term Web3 come from? According to , the term came from Ethereum¹ network developer Gavin Wood in an April 2014 blog post: . Wikipedia ĐApps: What Web 3.0 Looks Like The first paragraph sets out very clearly the motivations for a web redesign, below with my emphasis: As we move into the future, we find increasing need for a zero-trust interaction system. Even pre-Snowden, we had realised that However, post-Snowden the argument plainly falls in the hand of those who believe that large organisations and governments routinely attempt to stretch and overstep their authority. Thus we realise that . The chance of an organisation not meddling with our data is merely the effort required minus their expected gains. Given the realist will realise that the potential for convert misuse is difficult to overestimate. entrusting our information to arbitrary entities on the internet was fraught with danger. entrusting our information to organisations in general is a fundamentally broken model they tend to have an income model that requires they know as much about people as possible A possible summary of this vision, back in 2014, would be something along the lines of — , well, now that we have Bitcoin² we can rethink whether the model of financing the web by selling personal data remains acceptable. Those were exciting days that brought conversations about the foundations of this possible new world. Two essential texts from this same year are Michael Goldstein’s “ ”, in September, and “ ”, by Nick Szabo, in December (which I mentioned before in on my Portuguese blog in 2015). Everyone’s a Scammer The dawn of trustworthy computing another post about smart contracts In both linked on Wikipedia and in from Ethereum’s website, the values of are two major components of this promise of a reimagined web. Galvin’s interview the materials decentralization and minimization of trust In this utopian world, the term Web3 carries a promise of replacing a need for trust in the powerful few (big techs on Web2) with something more widespread, auditable, censorship-resistant, accessible (in the sense of ), and managed by the participants themselves. “ ” permissionless Less trust, more truth. But what about NFTs? Isn’t web3 something related to monkey JPEGs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8f-BQFo7lw Crypto Curious — South Park Rereading those old texts today, many years later. One might ask herself what led the idea of a post-Snowden web to with image collections, a marketing tool for opportunists, a full of vapourware, centralized projects, scammers, and frauds of all kinds. In short, it is a super harmful and dystopian . become synonymous gold rush hype it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency. Moxie Marlinspike — My first impressions of web3 If you have two hours and want to know a very skeptical opinion of the NFTs I recommend watching this video: “ ” (at 1.5 speed it’s pretty easy). But if you’re short on time, just watch chapter 4, which is an excellent summary of NFTs in 20 minutes: Line Goes Up — The Problem With NFTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g Line Goes Up — The Problem With NFTs Perhaps it is the natural course of buzzwords that carry great promises, to be co-opted by the marketing rush, and become meaningless. Is there any wheat in this mountain of tares? Does a hype as big as this still deserve attention? If you follow where is going, and also the flow of talents (the real scarce asset) between startups in the technology area, this is a case of a wave “too big to overlook,” in the words of journalist Kevin Roose in his for the New York Times. He writes (and I agree): venture capital guide to crypto I’ve also learned, in my career as a tech journalist, that when so much money, energy and talent flows toward a new thing, it’s generally a good idea to pay attention, regardless of your views on the thing itself. By comparison, during the , the euphoria and fear of missing out directed fortunes to . The subsequent burst of the bubble brought great lessons to our society. But not everything was a failure; projects like and the were born during this period. And other major survivors, like Google and Amazon, seem to have enjoyed some benefits from being there from the start. dot-com bubble several wrong bets Wikipedia Internet Archive I consider it important to observe, know and even participate with discretion, in the subcultures, memes and technologies that are part of the lives of young people and early-adopters today. For this generation, buying shitcoins, getting hacked, losing money, embarking on bogus ventures, dreaming of Lamborghini, spending their allowance on game items and skins, is part of the path of finding each other, finding peers, living, and growing. In a way, all these bad experiences are also . schools A young woman who learns to write on Solana, or some other today, will not have totally wasted her energy, she will end up with important knowledge in her bag. The same goes for someone who installed Metamask to collect kittens and was disappointed with the price of “gas”. This person had contact with , had some training and had to stop to think about individual sovereignty. Rust smart contract altcoin BIP39 A CEO, CTO, or company director interested in some because someone in a suit sold him a “solution”, may eventually stumble upon and start his own individual journey towards the orange pill. And so on… Attempting things and failing is still more educational than not trying at all. Or in the words of the military John Paul Jones, father of the US Navy: “ ”. permissioned ledger Antonopoulos videos those who do not risk cannot win Reclaiming the term To close, I think it is important to claim back this — to be once again synonymous with some ideas of autonomy, independence, sovereignty, privacy, freedom of expression — and direct our efforts toward a world with less concentrated power, more free software, more home servers, more robust and initiatives, in short, a , after all, as André Staltz says, in his response by Moxie Marlin: “ ”. buzzword self-hosted true Post-Snowden Web to a generalization some people want to run their own servers I like : this tweet Appendix: Retrospective of the last eight years From the origin of the term Web3, in those first years after Satoshi's gift to the world, until today, a lot has happened. In the Ethereum field, we had tokens ; the wave of ; the ; ; ; second layer networks like Polygon, other and alternate networks… ERC-20 ICOs "The DAO" hack crypto-kittens ERC-721 EIP-1155 forks, In the field of Bitcoin, with which I particularly have a greater alignment of values, there were the ; the UASF ( ), and movements that ensured important in the protocol; has flourished, and continues to evolve (see recent entry ); -focused and ; open projects of and homemade with a focus on usability; ; about home mining; ; Brazilian communities … block size wars BIP148 No 2x upgrades layer 2 Lightning Network Taproot privacy wallets exchanges hardware wallets full nodes space satellite demystification El Salvador are talking more And, of course, the help that certain gave to accelerate awareness that the separation of money and state is important. political arbitrariness Footnotes Ethereum: an “ ” that purports to be a “decentralized” computer, or, in the words of Gavin Wood: “ ”. altcoin a completely generalized global transaction processing system You have to consider the context, Gavin Wood’s text was written at a time when people were looking for a “ ”, he himself believed that Ethereum was this evolution and was selling this idea that his competing network was supposedly better. In my summary, I took the liberty of using Bitcoin, as it was the project that actually gave us what was not there before, it was the one that solved the problem of transferring value in cyberspace. Bitcoin 2.0 Originally published in Portuguese at . Egoismo Duplicado Header photo by on . Wioleta Zakrzewska Unsplash English translation by and revised by me. Marcio Galli

Let’s Talk about the 'Real' Web3

Web3 gets a lot of criticism. And I mean . a lot There's even a movement dedicated to curating the hardest-hitting criticisms of Web3 on the Internet. With all the flak Web3 gets online and offline, you have to wonder: Why does everyone hate Web3? Understanding Web3 Criticism Web3 is the vision of a decentralized Internet, where control users—not Silicon Valley behemoths—control their data. The concept originated in a 2014 paper by Ethereum co-founder, Gavin Woods, and has come to signify a user-owned Internet that allows everyone to communicate and exchange value without relying on trusted intermediaries. The Web3 technology stack includes decentralized applications (dApps), blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts. If Web3 is so revolutionary, why does it trigger vitriolic criticism from some of the biggest names in technology? The simple truth is Web3 is the kind of lightning-rod topic that's bound to draw reactions—whether from bullish supporters or fiery critics. As a result, everyone is trying to ride the coattails of Web3 criticism to Internet superstardom. "Everyone" here includes The New York Times, Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, socialist publication Jacobin Magazine, and leading tech publications like TechCrunch and Vox. Of course, there's more here, here, here, and here. Critics not only target Web3 but also attack the building blocks of the technology. This means you'll find the Financial Times calling crypto a Ponzi scam, CNET saying NFTs don't make sense, or The Verge describing blockchains as "meaningless". I could dig for more links, but you get the idea—Web3 is gaining steam, and many people don't like it. Now, some of these people have good reasons for criticizing Web3. The technology is relatively new, with many kinks to work out, yet evangelists describe it as the greatest technological revolution since the arrival of the Internet. I'd be mad, too. In fact, I recently criticized smart contracts in a recent article, highlighting their design flaws and limited real-world applications. But here's the thing: Technology evolves, so I expect the introduction of smart contracts, scalable blockchains, and environmentally sustainable cryptocurrencies. That's why I remain bullish on Web3 and its ability to remake the Internet into a better place for all. always smarter However, some people are dead-set against the technology and believe it offers no solutions or creates new problems. These people are the focus of the article. After going through a long list of anti-Web3 material online, I have a good idea of the various profiles of Web3 haters. This next section discusses the different types of people who hate Web3 and their reasons for criticizing the technology. Let's dig in, shall we? The Hard-Nosed Journalist I'll start with our good friend here—the hard-nosed journalist. Trained to be straight as a ruler and report the news without fear or favor, the hard-nosed journalist takes no prisoners on the job. You can expect the hard-nosed journalist to ask the tough questions, criticize anything and everything, and provide independent, against-the-grain commentary on societal issues. All of that is good. In fact, I wager the world would be worse off without journalists. We'd probably never know about Watergate, Guantanamo Bay, the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade, or Big Tech's desire to monopolize the Internet if journalists hadn’t risked their lives to find out the truth. However, it's become the unspoken rule in journalism that bad news gets more coverage than good news. Good news may inspire people, but it's the bad news that drives clicks and keeps the lights on. People love bad news, and the media ruthlessly exploits this negativity bias to attract more eyeballs. That explains why so many stories and op-eds in mainstream media concerning Web3-related concepts like cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are intensely negative. It makes economic sense to give readers negative news about a sector if that's what they want. Take for example this story from The Guardian about right-wing extremists raising funds with crypto. Or this one from Wired about Russian hackers using Bitcoin to fund operations. There's nothing wrong with journalists seeking to highlight the dark side of Web3. Given the rate of criminal activity—ICO fraud, hacks, exit scams, Ponzi schemes, money laundering, et al—that happens in the industry, we need people to call out bad actors. But when an entire industry consistently is negatively reported in the news, we need to question the fairness and balance of journalists. It gets worse when journalists try to undermine the entire Web3 industry on the basis of a few criminals. They literally act like criminals aren't early adopters of new technology. Whether it's cars, pagers, or cell phones, criminals are always one of the first groups to recognize the potential of new innovations. I suspect journalists know the danger of biased reporting, but the need to attract readers overrules the desire to comply with journalist ethics. So, next time you see an anti-Web3 article from one of 'em, hard-nosed journalists, my advice is to take it with a pinch of salt (I prefer ice-cream). Do not listen to the media on blockchain or Bitcoin or anything remotely related to Web3. The Contrarian The Cambridge Dictionary defines a contrarian as "someone such as a writer or politician who likes to disagree with other people and express opinions that are unpopular." Put simply, a contrarian is someone who likes going against prevalent thinking. This doesn't mean the contrarian's take on issues is particularly correct. If anything, public rejection of the contrarian's ideas is proof that those ideas lack merit. But contrarians don't need to be correct about anything. So long as they can produce unpopular opinions, their share of public attention is guaranteed. Again, people love the negative stuff—and contrarians give them loads of it. Contrarians are always against popular things or ideas. The contrarian is the type of person who said the Internet was overhyped in 2000, predicted the death of hybrid cars, and dismissed the idea of exploring Mars. Web3 has been riding the hype curve since last year, so I can understand the intense reactions the topic triggers in contrarians. There's no shortage of contrarians trying to break the Internet by criticizing Web3 in articles and blog posts. Some of it, like this one from Moxie Marlinspike, try to address real issues in Web3 . constructively The rest are simply ego-boosting, clickbaity articles poorly disguised as informed commentary. Once an article starts with something like "Web3 Is Bullshit" or "Nobody Cares About Decentralization," you can bet the author is desperately trying to be contrarian. I have no problems with contrarians. After all, our capitalist thrives because people can contribute to a diverse marketplace of ideas. That doesn't mean I regard them highly, either. People seem to forget how easy it is to criticize. As Dale Carnegie said: "Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do." It's much harder to fix things and build products that offer consumers a better experience, something many in Web3 are trying to do. No one would care about Web3 if the current Internet was oh-so-good. Are there problems with Web3? Yes. But there are people—smart people, I must add—working to solve these problems. Contrarians offer no value beyond showing us what the problems are. It’s an intellectually lazy act that’s no different from idealistic teenagers scrawling “Society is fucked” on crappy t-shirts. The Doomsday Prophet Merriam-Webster defines doomsday prophets as "people who predict that bad things will happen." What it fails to add is that some doomsday prophets are people to predict bad things will happen. paid Doomsday prophets, or pessimists, have always exploited negativity bias to their advantage. People like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman built an entire career on issuing alarming predictions that never materialized. Now, the same doomsday prophets have turned their attention to cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and everything related to Web3. Guess who's leading the pack? Paul Krugman. The same man who said "the Internet would fizzle out" in 2005, and predicted that "the Internet's effect on the economy would be no greater than fax machines." The doomsday prophet is the kind of person who says Bitcoin will cause the Earth's temperature to rise by two degrees celsius based on calculations done with questionable data. Thankfully, we still have rational people who can debunk these wild theories and show that, yes, things are not all doom-and-gloom. Doomsday prophets predicted "the fall of Bitcoin'' in 2011 and declared Bitcoin ''a bubble ready to pop'' in 2013. In 2022, yet another prophet of doom says Web3 will fail because "you can't solve politics with technology." You'd think doomsday prophets would have learned a thing or two about predictions, but what do you know? As the popularity of Web3 increases, you can expect more, more, more, and more doomsday predictions about crypto, blockchains, NFTs, and Web3 to circulate online. But no one is fooled about the motive behind these predictions: to gain attention and drive buzz. The Luddite According to the Oxford Dictionary, a Luddite is "someone who dislikes new technology." The Luddite is a different flavor of Web3 critic, one who hates the tech because he is a) resistant to new technology b) unwilling to learn anything. Compared to their 19th century counterparts, modern-day Luddites are found in the highest echelons of society. A person could be the CEO of a hedge fund and be a Luddite without anyone knowing. However, you can smell a Luddite by their marked criticism of new technology. These are the people who ask generic questions like, "What problems does this technology solve?" even if the topic has been discussed repeatedly. Of course, a week or two of research should solve this problem. But, alas,  the Luddite's hatred of new technology is too deeply ingrained for him to consider the possibility that this technology have some benefits. might Luddites are resistant to technology for many reasons. But the most enduring is the threat new technology poses to their jobs, and by extension, their lives. The original Luddites destroyed machinery during the Industrial Revolution to protect their manual jobs. Modern-day Luddites want to destroy Web3 because it threatens to overturn the broken economic structure that enriches them. You can see it in the way legacy institutions routinely describe cryptocurrencies as Ponzi schemes, dismiss decentralized finance (DeFi), or deride blockchain technology. I totally get it. If something like AI writing software threatened my job, downplaying its importance would be my Life Mission. However, acting this way is rarely ideal. A better strategy would be to look into strategies for adapting to new technological trends and positioning for future survival. In a capitalist society, change is inevitable; new ideas always replace old ideas. Television killed cinemas, news websites killed newspapers, and iPods killed mp3 players. On and on it goes. This process of "creative destruction" is what fuels innovation in the 21st century and moves society forward. Legacy institutions trying to protect their businesses by spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) concerning Web3 is the equivalent of trying to stop a moving train instead of getting on it. Some blue-chip companies like JP Morgan have made a U-turn on blockchain technology, crypto, and the wider Web3 revolution. Still, you can expect more Wall Street types to resist Web3 and throw everything they have at it. The catch? Web3 isn't going anywhere soon. And like those Luddites of yore, modern-day Luddites will have no choice to adapt or lose out. The Soapbox Speaker Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, public speakers would stand on soapboxes (discarded crates) at street corners and attempt to garner support for a specific cause. Some of history's greatest thought leaders and revolutionaries got their start in soapboxing. Soapboxing has carried over into the 21st century, but the mechanics have changed. For example, Donald Trump proved the power of rallying supporters around particular issues by riding the waves of American anti-immigrant phobia and white nationalism to the White House. From failing politicians to environmental do-gooders, there's no shortage of people using Web3 as leverage to garner supporters. Politicians like Elizabeth Warren would have you believe that cryptos are threatening the financial system and should be regulated to death. A simple history lesson, however, shows crypto was designed to solve our broken financial system and ensure things like the 2008 financial crisis never happen again. In a similar fashion, so-called environmental activists score relevancy points by painting blockchains and cryptocurrencies as the world's no. 1 environmental problem. That's when you see articles like this saying Bitcoin mining will destroy the Earth and accelerate the climate change apocalypse. Perhaps some due diligence will show Bitcoin miners have resorted to using renewable sources of energy, like wind farms and hydroelectric plants. Moreover, are we going to pretend like the banking system doesn't consume similar amounts of energy? I suspect our friendly soapboxers here know the truth, but then that's not enough to gain new supporters. They must show relevancy, and Web3 is the newest bull to sacrifice for the goal. The Final Word I don't doubt that Web3 has many problems. But the constant barrage of criticisms I see on the Internet every day is baffling and show the human tendency to resist innovation for often selfish reasons. extreme Perhaps in the future, people will learn not to fear what they don't understand. For now, you can expect people to keep hating on Web3 and reaping the rewards. Not that it should bother true believers in Web3 technology. I mean, there's a long list of people who predicted that the Internet would never take off. It takes years, decades even, for people to see the potential in technology. Some are lucky to discover it early, while others fail to see it until it's here. Will Web3 fail or succeed? Only time will tell. In the meantime, you can wait for the next anti-Web3 article and laugh at those desperately trying to stop a change whose time has come. WAGMI. First published here

Who is Hating on Web3?

NFT and Metaverse make it spicier: high stakes and high rewards with low security make the system vulnerable, as stated by high-tech experts. Is it so? And is there a solution? For more than a year, “NFT-gold rush” is making professional investors, foundations and ordinary people buy, sell and discuss the paradox of NFT: a pixel-art series of - #5822 - for more than $23,000,000; a collection of NBA Top Shots with LeBron James’ “Cosmic” dunk was sold for $208,000; even an act of literal art destruction - burning of the “Morons” original by famous street artist Banksy - was “encased” in NFT and sold for $308 000. CryptoPunks Also, not only images are sold via NFTs. Unique cars, antiques, jewelry, even - they are sold via NFTs on a daily basis. High prices, a sense of technical superiority - all these things stimulate high interest from everyone. But when professional investors buy a bunch of pixels for hundreds of thousands - experts of blockchain, cryptography and digital rights are thinking about questions of reliability, security and trust in the new, NFT-zed world (Metaverse, as it is called now). precious stones worth several tens of millions USD Critique of NFT comes from different people. Ordinary investors find it conflicting with ideas of decentralization and freedom of ownership - when original object depictions are stored in exclusively OpenSea, when OpenSea can just delete a depiction and that all, no NFT, no ownership, just a link in blockchain leading to nowhere. Digital Security experts ask other questions: complex structure of oracles, providing links between blockchains and centralized storages of NFT trading platforms - are like “black box” for many developers. It is too complex and if something breaks - it is impossible to predict what consequences this will lead to. Web3.0, the next stage of Internet development, is all about decentralization and equality (and NFT also, as it is an instrument of Web3.0). Is there a “little” conflict between ideas and reality? Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal Messenger and cyber-security expert, put it as best as possible in his article - he covered every aspect of NFT production and ownership, from wallets to trading platforms, from personal security to moderation and censorship. “My first impressions of web3” As an example, he created one NFT linked to different pictures on OpenSea and Rarible. But in the wallet, this NFT becomes the third picture. According to the rules of platforms, nothing above is forbidden. But in a couple of days, this NFT was removed from his wallet. “After a few days, without warning or explanation, the NFT I made was removed from OpenSea… The takedown suggests that I violated some Term Of Service, but after reading the terms, I don’t see any that prohibit an NFT which changes based on where it is being looked at from, and I was openly describing it that way. What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea removed my NFT, it also This is web3, though, how is that possible?” - writes Moxie Marlinspike in his blog. no longer appeared in any crypto wallet on my device. At the conclusion of all his research, Moxie writes one very important thing for every Metaverse creator: The current decentralized Metaverse is building on morally old, centralized and vulnerable tech - like a colossus with feet of clay. And no one, from investors to tech experts, wants to see him fall. What can we do? Is there something to give a smooth and stable transition to real Metaverse in decentralized and equal Web3.0? “We should try to reduce the burden of building software”. There is always an answer. Decentraland Originated back in 2016, Decentraland is truly the oldest Metaverse with a wide variety of tools: a virtual reality space for communication and interaction, the possibility to enhance it by own creations, create and stake digital assets, NFTs, and run virtual auctions. Through several transformations, Decentraland came to the idea of ultimate Metaverse/gaming/trading space and has been actively implementing it for 2 years. The Sandbox As the name of the project states, it is a sandbox - platform for gamers and content creators, working in voxel-art style. With extensive numbers of objects tradable on NFT exchange platforms, The Sandbox is one of the biggest 3D Metaverses with NFT-zed game objects. Via trading of user-created NFTs, The Sandbox evolution can be defined by users in a truly decentralized way. These two examples are visionaries of a future, where fantastic ideas of Cyberspace from the middle 1980’s are real. But now we have powerful mobile devices and interfaces we are used to. There are not so many examples of Metaverse builders, who take it into account. One of them is . This project aims to build not only a decision for Web3.0 and future Metaverses, friendly to the current user and mobile devices, but also a smooth transition from current-existing old and complex technologies to new one, simple and extendable as for professional developers as for ordinary users. ExtraChain “level 0” “NFT is one of the best tools to connect digital and virtual, a bridge to transfer the value from real world to Metaverse and back. We understand it and want to adapt it to the rules of real-life” - says , CEO of ExtraChain Foundation. Yuriy Snigur ExtraChain defines a set of rules and tools required by Metaverse: - basis for all decentralized interactions, because there is no decentralization without a distributed file system. For example, NFT-object image, stored in DFS, cannot be removed by someone, only by the will of the owner; Decentralized storage - to ensure that no central node can capture the control over user actions; Decentralized computing - DeFi became a part of our life very fast and it is growing even faster. ExtraChain will not ignore this trend and aims to launch an on-chain mechanism for asset price formation and asset staking/farming. These tools will be accessible as for creators aiming to use fast native algorithms for their tokens/NFTs, but also for users supporting their favorite tokens or content producers; Decentralized asset exchange - ExtraChain includes a set of bridges to other popular but old approach technologies: Ethereum, Decentraland, Solana, Tron etc. These bridges make it possible to smoothly transfer assets two-way. Cross-chain action **“**With these basic principles we try to cover all aspects of a decentralized approach to application and service development. A limited set of tools - but with limitless possibilities” - states , CTO of ExtraChain Foundation. Vladyslav Halasiuk ExtraChain team wants to make Web3.0 real, not the overcomplicated, “decentralized” in name only, but simple for usage and transparent for anyone. No wonder they chose such a motto:

NFTs Are Trending: But Are They Reliable, Secure and Trustworthy?

Although much of the concern and criticism surrounding Signal’s integration of MobileCoin is understandable, I’d like to offer an alternate perspective. I believe this was an honest attempt by the Signal team to improve the financial privacy of their users. I’ll list what I believe to be the most common questions/concerns along with my thoughts. Feel free to skip through them to read what interests you the most. But why? Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, has made it clear through his actions and words that he is a cypherpunk at heart. I genuinely believe he wants to improve the world and bring social change through the use of cryptography. He has worked full-time on Signal ( ) for over 11 years. It’s one of the best tools for privacy out there. No ads. No subscriptions. No data collection. Signal is a work of passion by someone that cares. formerly TextSecure I believe Moxie wants to provide the same level of privacy and security for not only your communication, but your financial life as well. If you can message your family & friends with total privacy, why shouldn’t you be afforded the same courtesy for the payments you send them? Unfortunately, this degree of privacy is not possible within the traditional financial system. If Signal were to integrate Stripe or PayPal, this would completely void any privacy, as all your personal information is legally required to be sent to these payment processors. But I don’t care about cryptocurrency? That’s absolutely fine. The feature is disabled by default, neatly tucked away in the settings. If you don’t go out of your way to enable this option in the settings, nothing about your experience using Signal will change. You won’t see any pop-ups or intrusions, and other users cannot send you any MobileCoin if you did not explicitly opt-in to the feature. Won’t governments ban Signal now? So far, we haven’t seen any indication this will happen. It has been possible to install open-source Monero wallets in the App Store and Play Store nearly anywhere in the world for many years now (excluding authoritarian countries — but they’ve already banned Signal anyway). For the most part, non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets are easily accessible. Even if governments have a change of heart, Signal has specifically prepared for such an event by implementing a server-side flag which allows them to . If a country does ban MobileCoin, Signal can immediately disable this feature for that specific country. disable the payments feature on a per-country basis Isn’t this just a cash grab? Rather than asking about a cash grab, I’d like to reframe this to a question of . Billionaire donations by the likes of Brian Acton won’t always be there to save the day. Sooner or later, Signal will have to face the question of sustainability head on, and personal donations often aren’t enough. The Tor Project, a 501c3 non-profit just like Signal, has been financially struggling for years, and had to once the pandemic hit. funding lay off a third of its staff Although there are undoubtedly many ways in which the token distribution could have been improved upon, I do think it’s worth emphasizing that Moxie has stated that neither he nor the Signal Foundation own any MobileCoin. Josh Goldbard, the founder of MobileCoin, that he created MobileCoin to fund Signal. Non-profit organizations have restrictions on expenditures and salaries. If MobileCoin donates much of the money they receive from token sales to Signal, Moxie legally cannot pocket everything and walk away. He has had 11 years to cash out on Signal and has never done so, which is why I don’t believe he is doing so now either. has stated point-blank MobileCoin has been in the works for over four years. Why spend so much time and effort for a quick pump ’n’ dump? Why reimplement many complex cryptographic primitives in Rust, or put a painstaking amount of effort into porting things over to the safer Ristretto curve scheme? They could have just forked Monero’s C++ codebase and been done with it in a week. I honestly believe that MobileCoin is a legitimate project that is trying to meaningfully move the ball forward on fast, easy & private transactions. Why not Monero? Monero is an amazing project that has done some remarkable things over the years. It has many valid use cases with a vibrant community, but there are a few usability drawbacks. First, you cannot send two consecutive transactions without waiting 20 minutes. This is because Monero requires at least 10 block confirmations before you can spend any XMR that was sent to you. When you spend, you are sending the remainder to yourself, which essentially locks this balance until 10 blocks have been confirmed. This also means that if a friend sends you some money to help you cover a purchase, you cannot use the money they sent you for at least 20 minutes. Second, although 0-conf can work, merchants will often take conservative approaches and require a certain number of block confirmations before proceeding with your purchase. This means it will often take two minutes (the confirmation time for one block) before things are confirmed. Conversely, MobileCoin has finality under five seconds. at least Third, private transaction retrieval requires downloading blocks to your phone and manually filtering them. If you’ve ever used the Monero CakeWallet, you’ll know it can sometimes take quite a while before everything is synced and you actually see your full balance. MobileCoin solves this by using , which allows for instant and private transaction retrieval without putting a heavy computational load on your phone. fog It’s important to remember that Signal is trying to make very complex cryptographic innovations simple and accessible to the average user. If you want to compete with Venmo, it needs to be fast and easy, every time, without fail. Isn’t Intel SGX regularly broken by 0-day exploits? It is, but that’s okay. MobileCoin’s usage of SGX is simply additive. Under the hood, they use much of the same tech as Monero such as ring signatures and RingCT. Even if you assume that Intel SGX is completely broken in every way possible, MobileCoin provides the same amount of privacy as Monero. The purpose of SGX is to provide defense-in-depth by potentially mitigating heuristic analysis that CryptoNote protocols are vulnerable to. at least In addition, the security of the consensus protocol does not depend upon SGX. MobileCoin uses a Federated Byzantine Agreement inspired by the Stellar consensus protocol, which is independent of SGX. Isn’t MobileCoin very centralized? Federated consensus does certainly have its downsides, but making this compromise wasn’t due to malice or greed. In the research spheres of cryptocurrency, there is . Decentralization, security, and scalability: pick two. the scalability trilemma This is an active area of research with many possible solutions. I don’t know if MobileCoin’s solution is the best — in fact, I’d be very surprised if it was. But at least it’s an understandable compromise. Fast privacy. Both Monero and Zcash simply do not provide the same user experience that is offered by MobileCoin. Right now, the members of the federated consensus are available on . All of them are non-profit organizations, one of which is Fight for the Future, which organized the to save net neutrality. the MobileCoin Foundation website very popular campaign Aren’t the fees really high? Currently, the fees are around $0.50 per transaction. This is pretty high, but it’s simply because they haven’t gotten around to adjusting it to match the current MOB prices (it’s currently a fixed fee at 0.01 MOB). The only purpose of the fees is spam deterrence. As the amount you send is encrypted, a malicious actor could just spam the network with millions of $0.00 transactions. This fee makes it costly to perform such an attack. The target fee price is $0.04 per transaction. Why haven’t they been more transparent about the token distribution? If anyone has read through Josh Goldbard’s comments on Hacker News, you will undoubtedly understand the frustration here. In multiple instances, he simply avoids answering a question altogether in his replies. I don’t believe he is trying to hide any foul play here. It’s just that doing with cryptocurrencies in the United States is a regulatory mess. Only two weeks ago did the SEC announce that they are that uses its own cryptocurrency. Here’s a quote from their response: anything investigating some niche video platform LBRY A disgusting implication of SEC vs LBRY is that if we had simply walked away in 2018 with more than $5,000,000, there would be no allegation of wrongdoing. By continuing to improve LBRY rather than walking away, SEC says we broke law. The laws are really messy, and it’s really unclear as to what’s what. This is why MobileCoin has taken the approach of initially blocking all US persons and being extremely careful with what they publicly say until there is more clarity. This is not to say they perfectly handled their communication. Even within the bounds of the law, many things could have been done better by both MobileCoin and Signal. But at least there is some basis for this initial lack of transparency. Who are you? I don’t work for MobileCoin nor am I an investor. I’ve been following the project for a few months now because I do think it has some genuine potential. Admittedly, I would have invested in MobileCoin if I had the opportunity, but as I am a US citizen, I did not. The only exchanges with any liquidity that offer MOB right now are FTX and Bitfinex, both of which require KYC information and don’t accept US customers. Conclusion Although I do believe many have presented very reasonable objections to this integration, I think we should cut Moxie a bit of slack and just see how things play out before jumping to conclusions.

Signal's Integration With MobileCoin Isn't As Bad A News As You Think

While science-fiction films and literature have long portrayed robots and augmented beings in a fascinating and often scary light, modern society is changing and beginning to embrace this technology. So far, the use-cases have been reasonably regulated and targeted, yielding some promising applications. The battle against the coronavirus pandemic, for example, has recently proven to be a valuable use-case. Much was unknown about the virus early in the pandemic, especially in transmission and exposure risk. Furthermore, there was not enough qualified personnel to perform the requisite testing and screening procedures, further straining the US testing ability. As a result, many healthcare systems have begun to employ and automated systems to meet these demands. The University of California at Berkeley’s research facilities were among the first to reroute robot infrastructure to assist with Covid-19 testing. “The new clinic, opening at UC Berkeley next week, will churn out diagnoses in 24 hours,” according to an early account of the phenomenon. robots Its employees are industrial drones, similar to those used to build cars and computers but specifically built for lab-tech work. These boxy bots are miniaturized factories that automate all of the processes. They lift test tubes, dispense chemical doses, and stack samples in tidy rows, each with a barcode. In their day jobs, the robots use magnetized “hands” to pull genetic material from cells to study medications, profile diseases, and learn how cancer grows. They’ll now work part-time as virus monitors, conducting up to 4,000 tests a day.” In the patient-care environment, robots have recently been used for critical functions. Take, for example, Moxi, a robot created by Diligent Robotics in Texas. Moxi “works full time and provides PPE, coronavirus and other lab samples, and COVID-19 studies,” according to one account. Moxi also gathers and delivers any things left for patients.” Andrea Thomaz, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Diligent write in the same piece on how Moxi has become an even more important part of the team during the pandemic: Robotics “In the hospital, day-to-day work has changed where patients are housed, what supplies need to get where you have fewer people running about in spaces because Moxi is bringing items from place to place. Throughout the month, Moxie shipped over 4,000 pieces of PPE to one of the Dallas hospitals where we are stationed. And not a single one of them needed a nurse to rush down to another unit to obtain.” This is not, by any means, a distinctly American phenomenon. India has recently made headlines for Mitra’s use, a 5-foot robot with facial recognition and an attached tablet that has helped minimize infection and transmission in Covid-heavy hospital settings. Organizations are now using this technology for cleaning and disinfection in a totally unrelated sense to avoid contamination and transmission on yet another level. The US Department of Defense recently researched and tested the use of a sophisticated robot device for decontamination. “The robot has four wheels and a mechanical arm that uses shortwave ultraviolet light to decontaminate surfaces,” according to the article. The current version of the robot needs humans to supervise and “drive” it, but the intention is for it to become fully autonomous.” “The advantage of robots to deploy UVC lamps for decontamination is that you can minimize human exposure to UVC light, and the robot can reposition the lamps over surfaces you want to decontaminate using its arms,” says Dr. Thomas McKenna, a program officer in ONR’s [Office of Naval Research] Warfighter Performance Department. There were no COVID-19 when the robot was built, but the combination of mobility and manipulation is a good fit for this mission.” LG, a well-known electronics company, is expected to unveil its own disinfection-capable robot this year, targeted at “hospitality, retail, corporate, and education customers.” Indeed, this technology’s future applications are endless, and this new business opportunity for robotics companies can only rise. Regulatory officials, scientists , and industry experts, on the other hand, must continue to keep a close eye on where this technology is going and how it is established to ensure that the highest standards of protection, privacy, security, and effectiveness are consistently met. Previously published at https://www.techsaa.com/robots-have-been-important-in-the-fight-against-covid-19/

How Robots Are Helping To Battle The Pandemic

The proposed system is anonymous but vulnerable to trolls and spoofing Last week, Google and Apple announced that they were working together to develop . privacy-protecting technology that could enable COVID-19 contact-tracing apps The idea is elegant in its simplicity: Google and Apple phones would quietly in the background create a database of other phones that have been in Bluetooth range — about 100 to 200 feet — over a rolling two-week time period. When users find out that they are infected, they can send an alert to all the phones that were recently in their proximity. The broadcast would not identify the infected person, it would just alert the recipient that someone in his or her recent orbit had been infected. And, importantly, the companies say they are not collecting data on people’s identities and infection status. Nearly all of the data and communication would be stored on users’ phones. "Either you keep this anonymous and potentially somewhat exploitable, or you just go full Black Mirror." Samy Kamkar, chief security officer of Openpath But building a data set of people who have been in the same room together — data that would likely be extremely valuable to both marketers and law enforcement — is not without risk of exploitation, even stored on people’s phones, security and privacy experts said in interviews. “Either you keep this anonymous and potentially somewhat exploitable, or you just go full Black Mirror and tie it to people and identities,” said Samy Kamkar, a security researcher who is cofounder and chief security officer of access control company , in an interview with The Markup. Openpath So far, the companies have only submitted framework proposals for a service they say will roll out in May, and many details remain to be worked out. The companies appear not to be building their own apps; they say they are building from public health authorities. Based on what information the companies have shared publicly so far, here is a look at the pros and cons. the underlying technology that can be used in apps The Advantages Users can choose whether or not they want to alert the people they’ve been in close contact with that they’ve tested positive for the virus. It’s opt-in. Using some , the information that users’ phones transmit to other phones is not tied to their identity. Rather, the phone transmits what the companies are calling a “rolling proximity identifier” that changes every 15 minutes. Each phone stores a local database of all the rolling identifiers it has seen. It’s anonymous. clever cryptography (Google and Apple explain how "rolling proximity identifiers" are exchanged.
) When users choose to identify themselves as infected, their phones transmit a “diagnosis key” that allows other phones to identify the associated rolling identifiers in their local database. Most of the activity — sending and storing identifiers — takes place on a user’s phone. Only one central server receives the diagnosis key and the associated day that it was uploaded. That server does not contain any user identity or precise location information. It’s mostly decentralized. Google said in public documents that . (This new service is not to be confused with a Google website that was launched to help California residents find places to get tested, which .) No personal information is required for use. no personally identifiable information will be collected requires users to create a Google account The system will create and verify a user’s identity with a called the “tracing key,” which is created and stored on a user’s device and never revealed. The tracing key is used to generate the other keys that are broadcast — the rolling identifiers and diagnosis keys. secret key The Disadvantages Because there is no verification of user identity or whether a user is actually infected, people could use this service to fake being contagious. It’s vulnerable to trolls. Renowned University of Cambridge security researcher Ross Anderson captures the threat perfectly in his : critique of the proposal The performance art people will tie a phone to a dog and let it run around the park; the Russians will use the app to run service-denial attacks and spread panic; and little Johnny will self-report symptoms to get the whole school sent home. Bluetooth signals are broadcast over open channels and therefore can be captured by anyone who is listening for them. That means that someone could grab a user’s rolling identifier and blast it out in some other location, making it seem that the user was in two different locations simultaneously. It’s vulnerable to spoofing. The lack of a central location database means it would be difficult to guard against such spoofing, said security researcher Kamkar. “You could make a botnet out of this,” he said. But he added that he thinks spoofing may be an advantage from a privacy point of view because it could make the data difficult for law enforcement to use as legal proof of proximity. (Cops could get the data when they take your phone when investigating a crime.) If spoofing and trolling become prevalent, users will mistrust and ignore the alerts that they receive, making the system useless. False alerts could weaken trust in the system. (Google and Apple explain how users receive alerts.
) It’s also not clear how the system will calculate the amount of exposure to an infected person who triggers an alert. If the algorithm is trigger-happy, it could send alerts for every person you passed for a few seconds on the sidewalk. If it’s too cautious, it could fail to send an alert for the lady who sneezed when she was standing behind you in line at the grocery store for just a minute. Many users don’t realize that a significant number of apps on their phone are , who then aggregate it into large databases that they sell to hedge funds, advertisers, and others. That’s how we got all those . Other apps may try to grab the data. sending their location to third parties maps of people traveling despite the warnings to stay home Similarly, other apps on a user’s phone could seek to receive and store the identifiers being broadcast by nearby phones. After all, many apps are already using Bluetooth signals for what they call “ .” proximity marketing Moxie Marlinspike, creator of the , said that overall he thinks the contact-tracing framework is “nice” but that when users choose to reveal their presence history, they may not realize that the advertising industry is also likely listening. “It’s just kind of unfortunate that there’s a whole industry (ad tech) that is already ‘in proximity and watching’ for different reasons,” he said in a text exchange. Signal encrypted messaging app "It’s just kind of unfortunate that there’s a whole industry [ad tech] that is already ‘in proximity and watching.’" Moxie Marlinspike creator of Signal , Google said it doesn’t collect any user location data. Some location information may be exposed to the central server. In its public documents But in practice it seems that some location information may be used, security experts say. After all, users in Brazil won’t need or want to download information about users who have tested positive in Norway. And so to save users from having to download a massive database of the entire world’s keys, some location data will likely have to be attached to the central database. , Google describes how a user will periodically download “the broadcast keys of everyone who has tested positive for COVID-19 in her region.” Google did not respond to a request for comment. In public documents . Decades of research shows that large by combining information from other sources to reveal sensitive information about individual people. Anonymous data is always vulnerable to being re-identified supposedly anonymous data sets can often be deanonymized Cryptographer Serge Vaudenay, of the , describes ways that people could be re-identified through contact-tracing apps : École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in his critique of the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing proposal It is actually surprising that decentralization creates more privacy threats than it solves. Indeed, sick people who are anonymously reported can be deanonymized, private encounter[s] can be uncovered, and people may be coerced to reveal their private data. , Google said  the service will “only be used for contact tracing by public health authorities for COVID-19 pandemic management.” It’s not clear how apps using the service will be vetted. In its public documents But it’s not clear how the system can retain its anonymity if it’s also tied to public health authorities who are perhaps seeking to collect data for other purposes. It’s also not clear how closely Google and Apple will be vetting apps health departments build using the technology. Historically Google has been much more permissive about apps it allows on the Android platform than Apple has been about letting apps onto the iPhone. And the elephant in the room is that developing an effective contact tracing system may require a level of COVID-19 testing that is not currently available in the United States, where tests are currently being heavily rationed. (The Markup has , New York City, and Washington, D.C., seeking their algorithms for determining who can get tested.) It relies on testing, which is currently inadequate. filed public records requests in all 50 states Credits Originally published as " Will Google’s and Apple’s COVID Tracking Plan Protect Privacy? " with the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Will Google's and Apple's Contact Tracing Preserve Privacy?

Back in the '60s, we saw the to the moon and now we are in the to Mars. The coming year is going to bring some exciting news and adventures about life on Mars. NASA is not alone this time either, there are several other space agencies sending Mars missions. But why are these space organizations spending their millions on such missions? Just to know one thing— could humans live on Mars? Does life exist on the red planet? biggest and heated space race space race Interestingly, everybody wants to know about that and the answer is YES! According to NASA's chief scientist Jim Green, humans will "absolutely" be on Mars in the future. We are going to Mars because of certain reasons that make human life possible. The living conditions are closer to earth in terms of temperature and sunlight. Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth and it’s possible to grow plants by compressing the atmosphere. That does not mean we could walk openly as we do on Earth. Due to the extreme radiations, reduced air pressure, and huge dust storms, Mars’ environment isn’t human friendly and we are still not prepared for that. That’s why extensive research is being carried out to test all the possibilities of life on the neighboring planet. "The first journey to Mars is going to be really very dangerous, the risk of fatality will be high and there's just no way around it." — Elon Musk Therefore, humans can live there under complex life support systems known as Mars Colonization. The race to Mars is the just beginning of that journey to make human life possible and make it our second home. Here are the exciting Mars adventures: 1. Mars Perseverance Rover NASA has already sent numerous successful and currently, the Curiosity rover is still operational and sending massive data stored on NASA's cloud platform about Martian climate and geology. About three weeks ago, NASA launched a to Mars which is now on its way to the red planet. It’ll reach in February 2021 after covering a massive distance of more than 400 million kilometers in seven months. The Perseverance rover will enter into the Mars atmosphere on February 18, 2021, according to the schedule NASA has shared on its official website. missions to Mars newly designed Perseverance Rover The rover is equipped with a drone and several cameras. These cameras contain advanced features and differ quite a lot from cameras we use with our computers.  Additionally, the rover has two microphones attached for the first time. For the first time, this rover is accompanied by a small Martian chopper— Ingenuity. This robotic helicopter is designed to explore Mars' environment and test oxygen production in the atmosphere. It will also help the Perseverance rover to find interesting locations on Mars. Ingenuity will be the first robotic helicopter to fly on a planet other than Earth. The Perseverance rover will determine humidity, dust particle size, radiations, wind speed, and pressure. The rover’s key instrument MOXIE will produce Oxygen in the planet's atmosphere that will eventually support human life on Mars. 2. Emirates Mars Mission UAE launched the Hope orbiter as it’s the first-ever mission to Mars which will explore the weather conditions and dust storms on the planet. The Hope orbiter was launched three weeks ago and just like the Perseverance rover, it will reach in February 2021. The core objective of the mission is to study the atmospheric layers of Mars and the existence of liquid water. Additionally, it will also gather the data about the weather in different geographic areas of Mars. That data will be shared among 200 universities in the world for further research and analysis. 3. Tianwen-1 It is the that was also launched on the 23rd of July and has already covered 3 million kilometers. The key objective of this mission is to find the evidence for current and past life and to produce the surface maps of the planet. The mission consists of a lander, a rover, and an orbiter. Upon successful landing, the rover will perform an experimental analysis of the Mars soil. NASA’s asteroid camera has already spotted the spacecraft heading towards Mars. We hope that this mission will also give us deep insights into life on Mars. Chinese Mars mission 4. SpaceX — Missions: Mars SpaceX is the leading space company and it is to enable Mars colonization. Launched back in 2002 by one of the world’s most genius minds— Elon Musk, has achieved a lot of milestones in space exploration. It’s the first private space company to successfully launch, orbit, and . It’s just amazing to watch how SpaceX brings back the rockets on their targeted destinations. building the infrastructure SpaceX recover a spacecraft The company is going to send the first crewed flight in 2024 with the help of a known as Starships. According to Elon Musk, in the first crewed mission to Mars, only 12 people will fly to the planet to build a power system and grow plants on Martian soil. newly built infrastructure Elon Musk believes that by 2035, there will be thousands of rockets flying a million people to Mars, in order to enable a self-sustaining human colony—  Steve Jurvetson Finally, I’d like to recall the moment we saw Neil Armstrong touching the surface of the moon for the first time in history. Just imagine how exciting it’ll be to watch the first luckiest person in the world who’ll touch the surface of the giant red planet. We’ll truly be traveling in the future. Faisal Rehman is a Freelance Systems Administrator and a writer at softwarespice.com . With 10 years of technology and systems experience, he writes about small business hosting and how to start a successful blog .

The Ongoing Mars Missions: Are We Ready to Live on the Red Planet?

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Aug 26, 2018 See update 2018-08-29 One of the key tradeoffs in blockchain design is whether to build more functionality into base-layer blockchains themselves (“layer 1”), or to build it into protocols that live on top of the blockchain, and can be created and modified without changing the blockchain itself (“layer 2”). The tradeoff has so far shown itself most in the scaling debates, with block size increases (and ) on one side and layer-2 solutions like Plasma and channels on the other, and to some extent blockchain governance, with loss and theft recovery being solvable by either or generalizations thereof such as , or by layer-2 solutions such as . So which approach is ultimately better? Those who know me well, or have seen me , know that I will inevitably say “some of both”. However, in the longer term, I do think that as blockchains become more and more mature, layer 1 will necessarily stabilize, and layer 2 will take on more and more of the burden of ongoing innovation and change. sharding the DAO fork EIP 867 Reversible Ether (RETH) out myself as a dirty centrist There are several reasons why. The first is that layer 1 solutions require ongoing protocol change to happen at the base protocol layer, base layer protocol change requires governance, and . it has still not been shown that, in the long term, highly “activist” blockchain governance can continue without causing ongoing political uncertainty or collapsing into centralization To take an example from another sphere, consider Moxie Marlinspike’s . A document by a company defending its right to maintain control over an ecosystem it depends on for its key business should of course be viewed with massive grains of salt, but one can still benefit from the arguments. Quoting: defense of Signal’s centralized and non-federated nature One of the controversial things we did with Signal early on was to build it as an unfederated service. Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all. And: Their retort was “that’s dumb, how far would the internet have gotten without interoperable protocols defined by 3rd parties?” I thought about it. We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s. To answer his question, that’s how far the internet got. It got to the late 90s. That has taken us pretty far, but it’s undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. And right now, at the application level, things that stand still don’t fare very well in a world where the ecosystem is moving … So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today. At this point in time, and in the medium term going forward, it seems clear that decentralized application platforms, cryptocurrency payments, identity systems, reputation systems, decentralized exchange mechanisms, auctions, privacy solutions, programming languages that support privacy solutions, and most other interesting things that can be done on blockchains are spheres where there will continue to be significant and ongoing innovation. Decentralized application platforms often need continued reductions in confirmation time, payments need fast confirmations, low transaction costs, privacy, and many other built-in features, exchanges are appearing in many shapes and sizes including , , and more. Hence, “building in” any of these into a base layer blockchain would be a bad idea, as it would create a high level of governance overhead as the platform would have to continually discuss, implement and coordinate newly discovered technical improvements. For the same reason federated messengers have a hard time getting off the ground without re-centralizing, blockchains would also need to choose between adopting activist governance, with the perils that entails, and falling behind newly appearing alternatives. on-chain automated market makers frequent batch auctions combinatorial auctions Even Ethereum’s limited level of application-specific functionality, precompiles, has seen some of this effect. Less than a year ago, Ethereum adopted the Byzantium hard fork, including operations to facilitate needed for ring signatures, ZK-SNARKs and other applications, using the curve. Now, Zcash and other blockchains are moving toward , and Ethereum would need to fork again to catch up. In part to avoid having similar problems in the future, the Ethereum community is looking to upgrade the EVM to , a virtual machine that is sufficiently more efficient that there is far less need to incorporate application-specific precompiles. elliptic curve operations alt-bn128 BLS-12-381 E-WASM But there is also a second argument in favor of layer 2 solutions, one that does not depend on speed of anticipated technical development: . This is less easily visible in Ethereum 1.0-style blockchains, where there are certain models that are reasonably universal (eg. Ethereum’s account-based model is one). In blockchains, however, one type of question that does exist in Ethereum today crops up: how to do cross-shard transactions? That is, suppose that the blockchain state has regions A and B, where few or no nodes are processing both A and B. How does the system handle transactions that affect both A and B? sometimes there are inevitable tradeoffs, with no single globally optimal solution sharded not The involves asynchronous cross-shard communication, which is sufficient for transferring assets and some other applications, but insufficient for many others. Synchronous operations (eg. to solve the ) can be bolted on top with , but this requires multiple rounds of cross-shard interaction, leading to significant delays. We can solve these problems with a , but this comes with several tradeoffs: current answer train and hotel problem cross-shard yanking synchronous execution scheme The system cannot process more than one transaction for the same account per blockTransactions must declare in advance what shards and addresses they affectThere is a high risk of any given transaction failing (and still being required to pay fees!) if the transaction is only accepted in some of the shards that it affects but not others It seems very likely that a better scheme can be developed, but it would be more complex, and may well have limitations that this scheme does not. There are known results preventing perfection; at the very least, puts a hard limit on the ability of some applications and some types of interaction to process more transactions per second through parallelization. Amdahl’s law So how do we create an environment where better schemes can be tested and deployed? The answer is an idea that can be credited to Justin Drake: layer 2 execution engines. Users would be able to send assets into a “bridge contract”, which would calculate (using some indirect technique such as or ) state roots using some alternative set of rules for processing the blockchain (think of this as equivalent to layer-two “meta-protocols” like and on top of Bitcoin, except because of the bridge contract these protocols would be able to handle assets whose “base ledger” is defined on the underlying protocol), and which would process withdrawals if and only if the alternative ruleset generates a withdrawal request. interactive verification ZK-SNARKs Mastercoin/OMNI Counterparty tooltip Note that anyone can create a layer 2 execution engine at any time, different users can use different execution engines, and one can switch from one execution engine to any other, or to the base protocol, fairly quickly. The base blockchain no longer has to worry about being an optimal smart contract processing engine; it need only be a data availability layer with execution rules that are quasi-Turing-complete so that any layer 2 bridge contract can be built on top, and that allow basic operations to carry state between shards (in fact, only ETH transfers being fungible across shards is sufficient, but it takes very little effort to also allow cross-shard calls, so we may as well support them), but does not require complexity beyond that. Note also that layer 2 execution engines can have different state management rules than layer 1, eg. not having storage rent; anything goes, as it’s the responsibility of the users of that specific execution engine to make sure that it is sustainable, and if they fail to do so the consequences are contained to within the users of that particular execution engine. In the long run, layer 1 would not be actively competing on all of these improvements; it would simply provide a stable platform for the layer 2 innovation to happen on top. Even if execution engines are something that gets partially or fully moved to layer 2, consensus on data ordering and availability is still a highly generalizable and necessary function; to see how difficult layer 2 execution engines are without layer 1 scalable data availability consensus, the in research, and its of naturally extending to fully general purpose blockchains, for an example. And if people want to throw a hundred megabytes per second of data into a system where they need consensus on availability, then we need a hundred megabytes per second of data availability consensus. Does this mean that, say, sharding is a bad idea, and we should keep the blockchain size and state small so that even 10 year old computers can process everyone’s transactions? Absolutely not. see difficulties Plasma difficulty Additionally, layer 1 can still improve on reducing latency; if layer 1 is slow, the only strategy for achieving very low latency is , which often have high capital requirements and can be difficult to generalize. State channels will always beat layer 1 blockchains in latency as state channels require only a single network message, but in those cases where state channels do not work well, layer 1 blockchains can still come closer than they do today. state channels Hence, the other extreme position, that blockchain base layers can be truly absolutely minimal, and not bother with either a quasi-Turing-complete execution engine or scalability to beyond the capacity of a single node, is also clearly false; there is a certain minimal level of complexity that is required for base layers to be powerful enough for applications to build on top of them, and we have not yet reached that level. Additional complexity is needed, though it should be chosen very carefully to make sure that it is maximally general purpose, and not targeted toward specific applications or technologies that will go out of fashion in two years due to loss of interest or better alternatives. And even in the future base layers will need to continue to make some upgrades, especially if new technologies (eg. STARKs reaching higher levels of maturity) allow them to achieve stronger properties than they could before, though developers today can take care to make base layer platforms maximally forward-compatible with such potential improvements. So it will continue to be true that a balance between layer 1 and layer 2 improvements is needed to continue improving scalability, privacy and versatility, though layer 2 will continue to take up a larger and larger share of the innovation over time. Justin Drake pointed out to me another good reason why some features may be best implemented on layer 1: those features are public goods, and so could not be efficiently or reliably funded with feature-specific use fees, and hence are best paid for by subsidies paid out of issuance or burned transaction fees. One possible example of this is secure random number generation, and another is generation of zero knowledge proofs for more efficient client validation of correctness of various claims about blockchain contents or state. Update 2018.08.29:

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