REVOLT! Menlo, Ethereum and Dapp tools for change. – Nathan Windsor
We are in the uncanny valley here, folks. This current “half thawed” crypto winter is still at best, meek. By now, either you’re hodling crypto, or you’re totally uninterested in what your hodler friends have been ranting about. Here’s the thing. What is ACTUALLY happening, is that crypto is becoming mainstream right beneath your eyelids.
We are witnessing the battle between privacy and control. China will issue its own state-backed crypto, which is terrible for everyone except the controlling Chinese government. If you’ve been living under a rock, China is now operating concentration camps with China harvest organs from living humans, “The organs of members of marginalized groups detained in Chinese prison camps are being forcefully harvested — sometimes when patients are still alive, an international tribunal sitting in London has concluded.”
When China issues its own crypto, it will be a literal nightmare for humans living in China. So, if you care about human rights, pay attention. It’s time to understand what’s actually going on there, and how it relates to the surveillance capitalism in the US and EU. If you haven’t listened to this Snowden podcast on Joe Rogan, do so here.
Facebook is also moving forward with its own corporate surveillance token, Libra, despite mainstream Congressional opposition. What most people don’t get is that one reason the banks and the Fed are scared of this is that there are more users on Facebook than are banked, and Facebook has more info on credit worthiness on its users than banks have. That’s got people really scared. But since our Congress can hardly get its act together to impeach the criminal syndicate that is Trump and his cronies, and they hardly understand how to regulate Facebook despite its $5B fine, you can basically discount this Congress’s ability to do any meaningful tech legislation under Warren/Bernie decides to nationalize Facebook (which I actually support.)
Just for reference, the Fosta-Sesta act is deeply effecting the abilities of digital platforms to publish, so this link will be relevant later as I will try to explain later. Though it was intended to curb sex trafficking, it actually threatens the future of the internet as we know it.
Yes, globalization succeeded, and now protests against neoliberal policies, corruption, and lack of meaningful action on climate change are erupting all over the world; look at Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Uganda. and organizers are getting screwed by mainstream tech companies who take down their apps, and their ability to organize. Microsoft-owned Github took down the APK for organizing political protests in Catalonia. Apple took down a similar app used in Hong Kong. The message is so clear even South Park can see it: as a capitalist company, we’re willing to bow down to whatever the oligarchy who controls the money demands.
In some sense, this censorship behavior from companies is the same type of greed that we see running China. In fact, I make the argument that China’s concentration camp behavior is capitalism- it is the fundamental worship of capital above all else; humans and the environment be damned.
For those of us who do not want our data controlled by incompetent and corrupt governments, there is a long movement of privacy focussed and censorship resistant technologies that can be used, and are being used.
I’d like to make the case for a censorship resistant framework to build censorship free, decentralized applications that can help movements like those we see in Catalonia and Hong Kong.
Since 2016, I have run a blockchain development firm, Macroscape, and I’d like to be a part of the revolt against authoritarian control. So here’s what I’d like to build.
- A decentralized reddit: “Low Down.”
- A decentralized tool to help organizers affected by the corporate takedowns.
My main concerns are to
- Creating a sustainable, and workable product that end users actually use.
- Create a product that doesn’t appeal to just crypto heads.
I will be using Sketch to design the interface and then export it to React using Anima. Then I’ll edit the React code to interact with Ethereum. I will post separately about this.
I will be using Menlo, a framework for building decentralized applications over distributed AWS nodes. Here’s a little tutorial I did on how Menlo works.
Later on once the app is stood up, I will switch from Ethereum to Avalanche, for the consensus algorithm. If you need some more info on why Avalanche, check out: https://slideslive.com/38920007/pos-security-and-ethylene
Here are the initial screens I have designed, and here is a link to the prototype.
Published at Thu, 14 Nov 2019 20:13:42 +0000
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