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May 30 · Issue #142 · View online
3 Things You Need To Know From The Convergence Ecosystem
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News for our readers from London. On the 20th of June, Fetch.ai - the world’s first adaptive, self-organising, “smart ledger’ will be holding an evening of presentations and discussions. Fetch founders Humayun Sheikh and Toby Simpson will be presenting the team’s vision and progress. Sign up for the event before seats run out. Today’s issue covers India’s telecom authority’s interest in using blockchains to reduce spam, quadratic voting and the need for ethics in addictive technology |
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1. Privacy of telecom users: Trai to use blockchain as weapon against spams
India may be far from having its version of GDPR, but the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) will soon be coming to the rescue of people with a solution enabled by…. you guessed it, blockchains! With an increasing number of services selling consumer data such as phone numbers and addresses in the region, spam calls and texts have rendered the phone numbers of many useless. Putting a limit on commercial communications is difficult within existing infrastructure as spam calls often occur from SIM cards with numbers that are similar to retail consumers. The Telecom Authority in the region will soon be using a blockchain to track consent and frequency of contacting consumers. TRAI Chairman, RS Sharma stated that “Blockchain will ensure two things — non- repudiation and confidentiality. Only those authorised will be able to access details of a subscriber and only when they need to deliver service… Trai will become the first organisation to implement this kind of a regulation" With over 900 million telephone subscribers in the region, if done effectively, this may be the largest implementation of a consumer-facing blockchain project by a regulatory authority.
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2. Quadratic Voting: A New Way to Govern Blockchains for Enterprises
As blockchains seep into enterprises, the need for optimising how decision making works with them drastically increases. A blockchain with hundreds of organisations on it would need a mechanism for stakeholders to come to a decision effectively. Quadratic voting is now coming into the discussion as an enabler for this. According to Forbes, the system provides a better way to make collective decisions that avoid the tyranny of the majority. It does so by tying economic value to the votes cast by individuals. Where traditional elections would provide each with one vote, quadratic voting makes it possible for a person to purchase additional votes to express how strongly they feel about a matter. However, each extra vote would cost more than the previous one. Each election cycle would collect tokens as a payment mechanism for these votes, and then redistribute the tokens across voters equally to ensure the system isn’t being gamed. The earliest variant of this “experiment” in on-chain governance is live on Eximchain. Through tying financial value with votes, the system may be capitalistic, but could drastically deter bad actors from attacking the network. Read more on the matter from Forbes coverage here.
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3. Tech Ethics: Addictive technology
Discussions of the ethical context behind decisions made by firms are rare until a catastrophe like Cambridge Analitica takes place. A multi-part series by Josh Dover look at the addictive nature of present-day platforms. Between notifications, feeds and gamification, Web 2.0 platforms may have taken into little consideration the toil the nature of their products take on human psychology. Sean Parker, an early investor in Facebook, was vocal about how Facebook was designed to “ exploit human tendencies”. Josh Dover sheds light on the matter with interesting anecdotes, and scary after-effects of the “addictions” tech-enabled platforms create in this day and age. Metrics like the average daily user (DAU) are often laid heavy emphasis on by shareholders as profitability often depends on it. If Snapchat and Facebook’s declining penetration in the millennial crowd points to anything - platforms built on “exploitation” eventually bear the brunt. In Snap’s case, it has been four quarters of declining earnings reports. As we lay the foundations for Web 3.0, it is important to take into account the ethics of creating consumer-oriented apps and the long-term impacts of tweaking products for “stickiness”. Grab Josh’s piece here.
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