Topic: Institutions Turn Inside Out: Backend Systems Revolution via Blockchain (Read 356 times)

yeah, for sure. here it is:

The world’s largest search engine now processes an average of over 40,000 search queries per second. Every one of those key word combinations is saved and carefully categorized. It’s unclear exactly who’s prying eyes has access to this information, but apart from the scant few that exist in your local search history - it isn’t you.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The Emperor has no clothes

The procedure you and your friends use to interact with internet search remains shrouded in a veil of obfuscation, whereas Bitcoin’s internal operations could be likened to the Centro Hélio Marin of user data.

The functionality of the Bitcoin Blockchain is configured in such a way the entire inner workings of the systems are fully exposed at all times to anyone who cares to have a look at it. Far from a mere handy feature of the system, it is in fact integral to the entire operation of the multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency network.

No Limits

Information of all granularity levels, from complete Blocks to individual transactions, can be queried at any time by anyone with an internet connection. This stands in stark contrast to the status quo whereby the world’s largest search engines or micro-blogging services impose draconian rate limits on usage of their APIs.

In consideration of the way that these companies are organized, the limits perhaps provides a more egalitarian distribution of computing resources across the spectrum of interested parties. That being said, Bitcoin has demonstrated a radically alternative model for organizing backend infrastructure at global scale. 

API rate limits serve as a hinderance to developers looking to add value to services through the contribution of their original ideas. Bitcoin is essentially free from such restrictions and initiatives like Blockstack. The Semantic Blockchain Project is able to take advantage of this data to build useful and interesting services on top of the platform.

Wikinomics

The most prominent example of an organization embracing the value of user contributed content is of course Wikipedia. This platform revolutionized the way people consumed and distributed information, harnessing the collective intelligence, the hive mind, of interested amateurs.

Leafcutter Ants

The now classic ‘Mastering Bitcoin’ by Andreas Antonopoulos describes the epiphenomenal intelligence of Bitcoin with an analogy to a colony of leafcutter ants as an “interaction between many nodes [that] leads to the emergence of sophisticated behavior... Like an ant colony, the Bitcoin network is a resilient network of simple nodes following simple rules that together can do amazing things without any central coordination.”

Structuring a web-scale transaction network, across which large amounts of value flow daily, such that the internal operations are visible at all times is something novel. It is conceivable that the apparent success of this model might be the impetus to the creation of organizations structured along similar lines. This in turn might even help to bring about a more transparent society.

The unblinking eye of CCTV

The feeling one gets when encountering the unblinking eye of a CCTV camera on every street corner is strong reminder that while transparency is positive the flip-side of the coin, mass-surveillance, is perhaps less of a universal benefit. The re-identification of purportedly anonymous Netflix users is a lesson that the guarantees of "pseudo-anonymity" are weak at best, a reality that the folks at Ellipic, the Bitcoin analytics company, would be happy to remind you of.

However, if all search engine queries were available to the public we could do truly incredible analytics on them. It would be Kaggle on acid and steroids, but how long would it take for someone with the skills and inclination to identify you? What would be the consequences of that? What about the potential for groupthink and mass mediocrity that such a system would engender?

Institutions Turn Inside Out

As proficient as the largest search engines and micro-blogging services are, despite their hordes of rock-star programmers and mountains of caffeinated beverages, what they are trying to do is tap into the global zeitgeist. They want to give us, the consumers, what we want. At this point they need infer it statistically, to guess at it, but they aren’t oracular.

The Bitcoin network has a mainline directly into it the activity of their community and at the same time a fire-hose of data that anyone can tap into at any time, or any reason.

If, large microblogging services or search engines would expose all user content and queries to the degree that the Bitcoin network does the brain strains to imagine the amazing applications that could be conceived.

How long does it have to take before we have a chance to find out?

Is there any way you could post the article itself, Franky? You're not always reliable when parsing information (and the article has likely already been through one round of unreliable editing already)

summary of my reply
emperor has no clothes
making the source code open-source to see the secrets google employ to make their money wont happen because corporations dont want competitors doing exactly what they are doing.
imagine if everyone knew the secret ingredient that made a business unique.. that business wont be unique or profitable anymore

no limits
essentially this has begun, instead of the olden days of remote hosting files and the company having one copy. requiring either significant bandwith or limit on usage to ensure their single server doesnt overload.
data is saved in multiple locations (cloudhosting)
so for instance imagine a server only handled 100 quiries, and a user viewed a file 10 times.
thats 10 bandwidth hits on one server, (10% load of old remote hosting)
thats 1 bandwidth hit on one server (1% load of cloud hosting) each for 10 servers.
thus allowing 10x usage/bandwidth

Wikinomics
useful in ways, but still not perfect. it turns into a fight for reputation and distorting info if you have enough rep.

Leafcutter Ants
bitcoins invention is beautiful. but it not the 'technology model' that can work for any/all data. but atleast bitcoin can inspire centralised data services to think there is another way of doing things

The unblinking eye of CCTV
using transparent ledgers for things like medical records would not be a positive use of blockchain technology

Institutions Turn Inside Out
decentralizing data reduces the brain strain of one data centre and spreads it over multiple servers to allow more utility. this has already been
proven by cloud hosting and also hackers using hijacking-bots to perform large amounts of processes without needing a single location of powerful equipment. even scientists are doing this by networking multiple computers to make a 'super computer'

I would recommend finding a more reputable outlet to publish your work, CoinTelegraph.com has attracted bad press itself for their editorial biases against Bitcoin Core. For that reason, I and many others won't hit that website.

Here's an article I wrote about the "backend" systems organization of bitcoin and the consequences of such a model being adopted in different types of organizations.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/institutions-turn-inside-out-backend-systems-revolution-via-blockchain