Private Blockchains Occupy Uncertain Area Under EU GDPR Privacy Regulations
A new study that was undertaken by Queen Mary University of London and the University of Cambridge, UK, came to some interesting conclusions about how blockchain could fit into the EU’s complex regulatory structure.
Source: Private Blockchains: Uncertain Area Under EU GDPR Privacy Regulations
Still, a problem remains: People don’t buy into blockchain applications unless they can make money. There is no evidence that people want to use it to “fix” journalism. There is also no evidence that anyone really understands how that would even work.
For now, Civil is essentially just another media operation with venture capital funding. The money underwriting it, from ConsenSys, remains, you know, regular money. The company uses some blockchain technology underneath the hood, including a plugin for its publishing software. But the technology remains difficult to comprehend, and, for any news consumer’s purpose, irrelevant.
They seem not to notice the pattern: decentralized technology alone does not guarantee decentralized outcomes. When centralization arises elsewhere in an apparently decentralized system, it comes as a surprise or simply goes ignored.
https://hackernoon.com/decentralizing-everything-never-seems-to-work-2bb0461bd168
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILJaqAQctyE
In a time of vulnerability, crypto investors are moving to Puerto Rico, attracted by lucrative tax incentives. They plan to regenerate the island using blockchain technology. But not all of the locals support their bold plans
Source: The perfect storm: building a crypto-utopia in Puerto Rico – video | US news | The Guardian
This is the website of the CoHuBiCoL research project, for which Mireille Hildebrandt received an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council, enabling to set up a team of both lawyers and computer scientists, to conduct foundational research into computational law. The site will be updated as we go along. Note that the official starting date is January 2019. We will investigate how the prominence of counting and computation transforms many of the assumptions, operations and outcomes of the law. The research targets two types of computational law:artificial legal intelligence or data-driven law (based on machine learning), andcryptographic or code-driven law (based on blockchain technologies).
Source: COHUBICOL
You actually see it over and over again. Blockchain systems are supposed to be more trustworthy, but in fact they are the least trustworthy systems in the world. Today, in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times those of the world’s most mismanaged currencies, and bitcoin, the “killer app” of crypto transparency, is almost certainly artificially propped up by fake transactions involving billions of literally imaginary dollars.
Source: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
Contents:
Cloud Communities: The Dawn of Global Citizenship?, kickoff contribution by Liav Orgad
Citizenship in Cloud Cuckoo Land?, by Rainer Bauböck
Citizenship in the Era of Blockchain-Based Virtual Nations, by Primavera De Filippi
Global Citizenship for the Stay-at-Homes, by Francesca Strumia
A World Without Law; A World Without Politics, by Robert Post
Virtual Politics, Real Guns: On Cloud Community, Violence, and Human Rights, by Michael Blake
A World Wide Web of Citizenship, by Peter J. Spiro
Citizenship Forecast: Partly Cloudy with Chances of Algorithms, by Costica Dumbrava
The Separation of Territory and State: a Digital French Revolution?, by Yussef Al Tamimi
A Brave New Dawn? Digital Cakes, Cloudy Governance and Citizenship á la carte, by Jelena Dzankic
Old Divides, New Devices: Global Citizenship for Only Half of the World, by Lea Ypi
Escapist technology in the service of neo-feudalism, by Dimitry Kochenov
Cloud communities and the materiality of the digital, by Stefania Milan
Cloud Agoras: When Blockchain Technology Meets Arendt’s Virtual Public Spaces, by Dora Kostakopoulou
Global Cryptodemocracy is Possible and Desirable, by Ehud Shapiro
The Future of Citizenship: Global and Digital. A Rejoinder, by Liav Orgad
Cryptocurrencies: Looking Beyond the HypeCryptocurrency technology comes with poor efficiency and vast energy use.Cryptocurrencies cannot scale with transaction demand, are prone to congestion and greatly fluctuate in value.Overall, the decentralised technology of cryptocurrencies, however sophisticated, is a poor substitute for the solid institutional backing of money.The underlying technology could have promise in other applications, such as the simplification of administrative processes in the settlement of financial transactions. Still, this remains to be tested.
Source: BIS Blasts Cryptos in Special Report: “Beyond the Hype” – Mish Talk
Unless there are governance processes that get Sybil-resistant input from node operators, on-chain governance therefore has always has the potential to disenfranchise node operators (and users) of the blockchain. If you are a blockchain node operator (or user), or if you care about blockchain node operators (or users), then I hope you will learn to regard on-chain governance proposals with extreme apprehension.
Governance is hard, especially for decentralized protocols. Allowing a community to govern a protocol does not make it any easier. On the contrary, it makes it exponentially harder and far more dangerous. The challenge is amplified when teams decide that the 1 token = 1 vote model is the best way to distribute power, and that all forms of hierarchies should be eliminated.One of the most important things to realize when creating governance models for decentralized protocols is that the model must be designed for the user, not for the token holder. This is where I believe a lot of broken models originate, when designing something that token holders will like, and not something that protects the actual users of a protocol. It is evident that there are a lot of projects who do not consider this, the opt-out model which some protocols implement are a clear indicator of this.1 token = 1 vote systems create terrible plutocracies, especially when considering who holds tokens.
Source: Against community governance – Dean Eigenmann – Medium
