Centralization Strikes Again - October 2021 Edition
“The choice between keeping information in the hands of individuals or of organizations is being made each time any government or business decides to automate another set of transactions. In one direction lies unprecedented scrutiny and control of people’s lives, in the other, secure parity between individuals and organizations. The shape of society in the next century may depend on which approach predominates.” — David Chaum (from Scientific American, 1992)
Timeline
Oct 1 - Coinbase announces Coinbase Cloud, whom CEO Brian Armstrong calls “AWS for crypto”. Source
Oct 2 - Huobi Global—one of China’s biggest exchanges—announces it will withdraw from China and delist deposits, spot trading, and fiat trading by the end of December. Source
Oct 4 - Facebook and its related platforms suffer a 6-hour outage, including loss of SSO (single sign-on) services and internal communications in Facebook. The issue was caused by a disconnection from all of Facebook’s data centres. Source
Oct 4 - Frances Haugen, an ex-Facebook Data Analyst, blows the whistle on her former company, accusing Facebook of prioritizing profits over thwarting misinformation. Source
Oct 4 - A web scraper tries to sell the leaked personal data of over 1.5 billion users on Facebook on a hacker forum. Source Source2
Oct 4 - The US Government secretly orders Google to identify anyone who searched a sexual assault victim’s name, address or telephone number. Fears of “keyword warrants” threaten to implicate innocent web users in serious crimes. Source
Oct 5 - Circle Financial, a key backer for crypto stablecoin USDC, discloses receiving an investigative subpoena from the SEC. Circle is “fully cooperating” with SEC’s investigation, which includes giving up documents and information regarding holdings, customer programs, and operations. Source
Oct 6 - An anonymous hacker posts a 125GB torrent link and leaks the entirety of Twitch, its source code, and its user payout information onto popular internet forum 4chan. Source
Oct 6 - Lebanese security forces prevents depositors from storming Beirut bank after they have been blocked from withdrawing their money. Source
Oct 11 - Famed Bitcoin bull and crypto influencer Anthony Pompliano reports having been de-platformed by YouTube for “encouraging illegal activities”. Source
Oct 12 - ProtonMail goes down according to DownDetector. [I was *personally* unable to access my emails.] Source
Oct 13 - The Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange announces creation of a new asset class, called a natural asset company (NAC), that allows for corporations to hold the rights to ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land such as carbon sequestration or clean water for—here’s the kicker—the express purpose of profit maximization. Source [Thank you to Kai Bleek, Head of Project Management at ChainSafe]
Oct 15 - Steam bans all games that feature crypto and NFT’s, citing it does not allow games that carry “real world value”. Kotaku reports “Good Riddance” in a very unbiased, very credibly neutral journalistic report /s. Source
Oct 16 - Epic Games (creators of Unreal, Fortnite) strike back at Steam, saying it is “open” to blockchain games. Source
Ocr 23 - A previously redacted antitrust lawsuit filing against Google becomes newly unredacted. The illuminating document shows that Google frequently colludes and manipulates its advertising business, including a secret deal with Facebook called “Jedi Blue”. Source Source2
Oct 29 - Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen proposes taxes on the rich for unrealized capital gains. Source
Oct 29 - Facebook announces rebranding to Meta (for ‘metaverse’) in an attempt to shift away from a brand that has been associated with privacy intrusion and misinformation. Source
Op-Ed
The following post was written by myself for LinkedIn recently, inspired by Balaji Srinivasan’s podcast episode with Tim Ferriss. If you are interested in contributing to this OpEd, please reach out on Twitter @haochizzle, Telegram @haochizzle, or email tim.ho@chainsafe.io. We’d love to hear from you!
The future is not going to look like anything we have ever seen.
For most of our history, we have operated within strict bounds. Proximal friends, proximal work, proximal governance - thus proximal ideologies.
With the advent of 1) the Internet, 2) the Web 3.0 movement (which unlocks trust boundaries and cements digital provenance and provable scarcity as concepts), and 3) the remote work revolution... we are now seeing the traditional models of life - which has largely remained the same from the 50s to the early 2000s - now getting absolutely obliterated.
One of the silver linings of COVID is that it has accelerated this new, strange way of life. We work with colleagues from across the globe. Share intimate relationships with strangers across the Internet via forums and chat rooms like Discord, and now immediately become part of a tribe thanks to mission-centric DAO’s and NFT-bonded communities.
New forms of social coordination and organization are being rapidly iterated on thanks to the provably scarce and incentivized token economies. Products and services sprung up and out of the blockchain horticulture must necessarily carry merit - if they don't, people would abandon the project, or fork the code to create a better version. Distribution is taken care of because those that own tokens are incentivized to promote growth of their tokens via their social networks. "Product is merit, distribution is connection" - and there's no better way to distribute when participants in a token network have skin-in-the-game.
In the same vein, we are very possibly moving into the age of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs. Organizations which have no centralized decision makers, of which instead rely on consensus for governance. We will start seeing individuals become gun-for-hires (so to speak) for DAOs: where performance of a microtask may reward them via streamed payments to their public key address at any given time interval. Awards go to tasks for anything from coding, content production, curation, mediation/arbitration, or even proof-of-health (e.g. workout for 30 minutes with oracles measuring your resting heart rate using zero-knowledge tech to protect privacy).
It is simultaneously an extremely exciting time, and an extremely dangerous time. Those that are developing today’s protocols may govern a lot of humanity's future. They must do so in an intentional, meticulous, and deliberately thoughtful way. It is a large responsibility.
The future is not going to look like anything we have ever seen.
Like all great things, our newsletter starts humble and, well... unpolished. If you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to send them my way, or reach out on my Twitter.
ChainSafe is a global leader in blockchain protocol and infrastructure solutions for Web 3.0. We are contributors to major ecosystems like Ethereum, Polkadot, Filecoin, Mina, Cosmos, and many more.
Learn more about ChainSafe by visiting our website, through our Medium, via Twitter, visiting the ChainSafe GitHub, or joining the conversation on our Discord.
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