“India, as a very large but relatively mild example, has established a track record of telling Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms to remove information that is unfavorable to their current administration, and those platforms comply. In many countries that are more restrictive, social media platforms are completely controlled or banned, leaving their population in the dark and disconnected from the rest of the world.”
https://www.swanbitcoin.com/the-implications-of-open-monetary-and-information-networks/
“A middle-ground method that seems to be beginning to work at scale is the idea of distributed servers or “relays”. In this model, not every user has to run a server, but individual servers are relatively easy to run, are financially incentivized to be run, and are therefore numerous enough that there is no way to control or censor the network. The result is a rather decentralized web of servers that connect to each other, and users that connect to them.
A good example of this is Nostr.”
“A nice attribute of this model is that if someone has a really good idea for a new type of social media platform, they don’t have to worry about network effects. They can create a new experience, meaning a new client interface, connect it right into the Nostr protocol, and make it interoperable right from the start with every other Nostr user across existing clients. They can make use of the existing network effect, in a similar way that any new browser or new email provider makes use of the extensive network effect that already exists for those protocols.”
“Bitcoin is like a big decentralized spreadsheet that the world comes to an agreement on every ten minutes, using energy from miners and the rules enforced by the user-run node network as its arbiters of truth. This is an expensive process, but a valuable one that isn’t solved by other means.”
“The combination of an open monetary network and an open information network is pretty interesting. Programmable bearer asset money can move around frictionlessly across borders, and between platforms. Platforms can be interoperable with each other without directly working with each other to make it happen, simply because they are interfacing with the same underlying protocols. Server operators can be incentivized to maintain and enhance an information network via microtransactions.
A set of protocols that globally connect people in terms of identity, information, and value can reduce a lot of frictions and create a lot of new opportunities.”
“In 2013, a U.S. National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden leaked information to journalists that revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance capabilities extended far beyond what was previously known to the public. Specifically, the NSA was revealed to be able to directly tap into the systems of major telecommunications providers and large corporate software platforms to continually harvest information.
In one of the original reports on the leak, the Guardian revealed:
“The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, and other US internet giants, according to a top-secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.””
“Last year, a young Saudi woman and mother of two children, who was a student at Leeds University in the UK, was arrested when she returned home to Saudi Arabia and sentenced to 34 years in prison. Her crime was that she followed and retweeted various activists on Twitter, while she was in the UK. A coupled of months later, a 72-year-old Saudi-American dual citizen living in the United States was arrested and sentenced to 16 years in prison when he returned to Saudi Arabia for what was supposed to be a brief trip. His crime was that he tweeted critically about the Saudi regime while in the United States.”
“Going forward, if a meaningful portion of the economy shifts towards peer-to-peer global gig work, and money and information in general become more encrypted and private, and money is able to be self-custodied and moved around globally, then what does that mean for governments' ability to audit incomes and impose taxation on those incomes at the individual level? Such auditing and assessment could become much more expensive, and for sophisticated users, potentially becomes impossible.
One perspective would be that governments simply have to change their patterns of taxation over time, if indeed bottom-up open-source distributed privacy technology and open monetary/information networks become more widespread.”
