Ethereum Developer Explores the Dark Side of Bitcoin-Inspired Technology
▻http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum-developer-explores-the-dark-side-of-bitcoininspired-technolo
Vlad Zamfir is helping Ethereum make a world where any exchange can happen using blockchains. And he’s really worried about it
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IEEE Spectrum: [...] What kinds of bad things do you think we are likely to see?
Vlad Zamfir: Some of the things that come to mind immediately are things like hate speech, defamation, things that we deal with through censorship. There’s also a big privacy issue with blockchains. [...] With autonomous software it will be much harder for society to regulate and to stop these kinds of things.
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I worry about that a lot. I think that censoring hate speech is actually a good thing. I think that not having libel be publishable is a good thing. I think there’s a reason that society asks people to take it down.
A lot of this stuff at the moment is still a little bit sci-fi because we don’t have blockchain scaling yet. We don’t have privacy on the blockchain. But we’re working on this stuff very hard.
The more I make progress on them, the more scared I get.
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Spectrum: Do other developers in the community share your concern?
V.Z.: Generally, people don’t feel responsible. There’s a lot of feeling that we’re just producing general-purpose tools and it’s not up to us what people do with them.
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V.Z.: We need more than just—hey, let’s make money; hey, this is really interesting; or hey, here’s a good use case. I think if you’re going to bring autonomous software to the world you have to have a damn good justification. You have to say why, actually, if we don’t have this we’re definitely going to have a really bad outcome.
#Blockchain #Censure #Crypto-anarchisme #Ethereum #Liberté_d'expression #Numérique #Politique #Vie_privée #Vlad_Zamfir
