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Blockchain Could Help Build a Non-Toxic Version of Today’s Social Media

avin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, and Frank McCourt, a billionaire tycoon, have agreed to collaborate on using blockchain and Web 3.0 tools to build an infrastructure to support a decentralized, non-toxic version of Facebook, or several of them to replace today’s social media.

Together, they announced the collaboration between McCourt’s Project Liberty and Wood’s Web 3.0 Foundation and its Polkadot project last week. They aim to create a foundation for alternative social media platforms by using blockchain and Web 3.0 technology so users can have more control over their data.

“Technology is cool. You can build a house with a hammer or kill someone with it. Let’s go build things with tech instead of killing people and destroying democracy,” said McCourt in an interview with Protocol.

Web 2.0 Undermines Democracy

According to McCourt, Project Liberty is about putting forward a solution and a place where people can migrate.

There are two needs for this migration: people find the place they live intolerable and a better place to move to.

The whole American project was also built on that premise; people were fed up with living in monarchy, saying, “we are going somewhere else and build a new world, a new country, new governance. It is going to work differently.”

Once we build a similar ecosystem, says McCourt, people will happily migrate. The new ecosystem will be as polished as Web 2.0. People will have everything on Web 2.0, but it would be healthier. Users will have control over their data and won’t be in a situation that undermines democracy.

Project Liberty is a project to save democracy, and for that, we need to fix technology. However, people need to realize what’s at stake to do this and have this mass migration.

We’ve been accustomed to democracy in an analog environment and institutions designed to serve that analog world. A democratic architecture for a digital environment is now required.

How Blockchain Processes User Data?

“In general, blockchain is largely utilized for storing and querying data permissions and the relationships between users within a network graph,” says Wood.

Individuals are linked to information. Data about connections between individuals and groups exist, and this data is usually encrypted. It moves around the network but securely. The only people who can decode it are members of the group or, in the case of point-to-point data, those on the other side of the link.

The methods for encrypting it are expected to be comparable to those already in use in apps like Signal.

The bottom line is that the data will not be stored on-chain. Data will be stored off-chain. It will be password protected. By creating the type of authorizations on the chain itself, those generating the data will pre-encrypt it with the keys of those authorized to receive the data.

“There’s a lot more going on right now. When people migrate, they’ll be moving to various distinct use cases in the end. Consider the future as a series of smaller Goliaths, not as a replacement for a current Goliath. Consider it an ecology of a thousand, if not 10,000, Davids.”, clarified McCourt.

There is a lot going on around blockchain in the backdrop. There was a lot of technology being explored and created, as well as a lot of experiments being conducted. And when the moment is right, maybe within the next three, four, or five years, we will see something that everyone can agree offers fair value to the lives of its users.

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