Loose Change - The free-for-all on the paid internet highway...
Disclaimer: Italics links are to web miners that could trigger security warnings.
A few days after the bitcoin's SegWit2X fork cancellation, quietly posted a video of Kovri as plan to a more secure way to transfer Monero and any other cryptocurrencies. While it is quite technical in its scope, It does state the facts that a small powerful group can compromise the integrity that decentralization supposed to help. And while the features of Kovri is planned to be shared amongst the larger community, it would be integrated to Monero by default making it an even more appealing privacy coin.
Much like bitcoin, Monero and Coinhive has initially gotten a bad reputation as unscrupulous web developers or hackers have sneaked in their codes into websites to auto-mine. But recently, Coinhive has been making significant strides to appeal to web visitors to opt-in on mining and discouraging auto-mining scripts. Gone are the days of simple and fishy looking mining request replaced with a more slick AuthedMine user interfaces. Given these new tools, web developers have been taking advantage of this and are using them to full effect with a notable example such as the Star Citizen's wiki.
Unfortuantely, EasyPrivacy (AdBlock) has added Coinhive's AuthedMine to their block list. The community's response ranged from voicing concern to outright anger as to how important and beneficial this technology is to everyone involved. While Coinhive's original "user base" were the likes of the pirate bay and porn sites, the new users are using the technology as captcha security checks, an alternative revenue stream for tutorial video in russian, and even stopping modern day slavery.
And herein lies the issue... the original internet social media platforms was meant for people to share content that people like. While it was a great way to learn about things they would never look into, the providers of these conduits couldn't monetized them. So by opting out of our privacy and by data mining, companies found a way to earn what we share. Trouble is, they control our reach and who we can share it to. While having a gatekeeper sounds terrible in terms of free speech, sometimes censorship isn’t about controversial issues as not sharing is as good a shutting down a site. (Hi Google!) So, can internet platform providers give content creators a better deal or will they be blocked, locked, and curated to fit their whims?