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RE: Tauchain and the privacy question (benefits of secret contracts and private knowledge)
- This post is great but the discussion below it is gold 🏅
- I have BIG existential issues when it comes to restricting knowledge. Probably one might argue that the rapid development of Blockchain is due to the lack of those restrictions and that putting the walls up will just make this "alternative solution" a mirror to the capitalist corporate driven economy of now.
Designing it in a way where the benefits of innovations are not distributed evenly among everyone (due to privacy/restrictions whatever) but yet still ARE distributed is probably the ideal solution to a lot of problems were dealing woth, however the big question is if a balance like this is achievable and will not be another whale birthing factory
Technical problems are easier to solve than social problems. The technical problem is whether or not by cryptographic means can we protect data ownership rights.
If you own a piece of data then you can set the access restrictions? This is a problem cryptography can solve to a point. It becomes a matter of using technology to guarantee certain rights.
What about the benefits and risks? The potential for abuse? This all depends on how you choose to implement privacy and not whether you have privacy at all. Implement privacy in the pro-social way and you get the benefits. The benefits are known based on whether people are happy or unhappy while also being kept safe.
So in an ideal world you can share it all and get only the benefits. In the current world if you share it all you'll get risks which may far exceed the benefits. The technical solutions should be about controlling the risks associated with sharing and magnifying the benefits. The risk for example if you share how much is in your bank account is you can become a victim and blockchain only helps increase that risk. On the other hand if you develop a private wallet now you help reduce that risk but then it creates some additional risks unless you have it implemented in such a way that you can reduce those risks using technical means.
In other words you can keep your transactions shielded while also proving for example to the IRS or whomever that your transactions are clean without having to reveal to any human the transactions. In other words using cryptography to prove clean money is technically possible to do. I promote that we give privacy where it is necessary and transparency where it is legally required but in a way which doesn't violate personal privacy.
So a way to think about society is a network of stakeholders with different interests. You the individual have your own interests. The IRS has it's interests. The competitor has their interests. Your data sharing policy should be set up to protect your interests but this does not mean you must protect your interests at the expense of for example the IRS or some legal regulatory agency.
Your interests could be that you want to reduce your own regulatory risk, your financial risks, your legal risks, etc. The IRS or whomever has their own mission. The rational solution would be to set your data sharing policy in such a way to reduce your risks (including your risk of being a focus of IRS). The easiest way to do this is to simply develop a technical means where you can prove to the IRS that you've paid your fair share of taxes on your transactions (even if you keep your transactions shielded).
How is this possible? Well that is one of the promises of advanced cryptography such as homomorphic encryption. The idea that we can keep our data encrypted and still compute it. The IRS example is probably a bad one because the tax code is so hellishly complex that implementing something like that would be difficult but for many examples such as reputation scores and peer matching algorithms you can get major benefits keeping all the data encrypted.
A peer matching algorithm for example could bring people together who don't know anything about each other but whom the machines know intimately. This would actually solve a real social problem using the privacy preserving technology which can't be solved with more transparency. Transparency can't make people trust each other or bring people together. Transparency also doesn't detect lies from truth. Big data can be analyzed to get to know a billion people and then a matching algorithm can connect the right people to each other.