RE: A series of random crypto thoughts: marketing and privacy
Hey there - great article
This stuff intrigues me too. I know where you're coming from re part one of the above: I'm not a libertarian: not even close. I (personally) believe in the good of collective communities and even (gasp!) taxation. Seriously.
But that's beside the point here, suffice to say that extreme libertarian (or even, to be honest not so extreme) freaks ordinary people out. A lot. So toning it down in the marketing is probably a really good idea.
Regarding the second part of your piece - about privacy - I'm not sure about the conclusions that a) steemit needs to be like Facebook or that it it even wants to; and b) Not sure that privacy mode might not be able to be built into future versions of steemit.
But I definitely agree on the need for privacy in blockchain land broadly.
How would a 'specification work? (feel free to reply via a new post when you've had a think 👍)
A specification would probably not force people to use a specific encryption, or too specific of privacy tech. But for example, it might require masking IP's in some manner of who is sending, it might also require an analysis of what type of systems are used to make a transaction private... whether the system itself hides the transactions in some way, or there are adequate dumby / false transactions to sufficiently make it private. I think tech masking the originator's IP address is pretty essential for privacy tech going forward.
So it would be an outline of principles I think, and what sort of systems manage to uphold those principles in their design. Once we have gone farther in this area, we might reach a point where there is best practices and we could simply have a technical list of things to implement to make something private the best way possible.