The problem with Centralization
In many ways that actually matter, a decentralized platform is more secure than a centralized “Big Tech” platform, even if each individual installation is not. One major reason is the sheer variety of networks and firewalls one has to get through in order to even access to instances in bulk. With WeChat, Twitter or Facebook, a state actor simply has to establish a back-channel to the people running the platform itself. They can demand information, they can force them to keep the matter secret, they can try to put pressure to close various accounts and groups they deem “harmful”, or even take over people’s accounts and impersonate them.
As we have seen with the revelations out of the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, even the government of country with the most robust protections for Freedom of Speech has been able to do this at scale:
Then of course, there are the Snowden revelations about the NSA, as well as the Five Eyes cooperating on technology (including technology to spy on each other and share information). The governments can also get around their restrictions by buying information from private data brokers, which your Internet Service Providers can sell – including your browsing history and other sensitive information.
It’s not just governments that want your data – it’s everybody. Businesses. Advertisers. Repossession companies. Our founder, Greg Magarshak, wrote about this since 2014, as he was in the early stages of building the Qbix Platform:
Decentralization to the Rescue: Writing Data
Two major aspects of security for people and communities are protection against data corruption (writing data) and privacy protection (reading data).
To protect against data corruption, Web3 and Blockchains are helping to bring power back to the people, by making sure that each individual participant has their own private keys to sign transactions with. With today’s technology it’s simply impossible, even for a state actor, to impersonate many people at scale, to move a lot of money or change all the votes in an election. Power goes to the edges, the people who actually make individual decisions that get aggregated by a smart contract. And if the blockchain is properly secured, it’s also infeasible for a state actor to misappropriate “on-chain” funds and data, or even rehypothecate them without eh people’s consent, unlike what happened with centralized platforms like Celsius and FTX.
That is why we spun off Intercoin and built secure decentralized applications for communities worldwide, for things like voting, governance, org charts and payroll. Intercoin helps communities secure value on-chain as they get larger, and you can get in touch and use their open source software today!
To read more about this aspect of decentralization, please see our response to Moxie Marlinspike regarding why Web3 matters:
Decentralization to the Rescue: Reading Data
When it comes to reading data, once again, it’s an advantage not to have it all in one place. Every year we publish an Onion-like article about data breaches on an epic scale, which seem to happen with some regularity. Just like the Onion, the entire article is republished with just the names and incidents updated:
By contrast, imagine if the data was in millions of places around the world:
- some of them behind a firewall
- some of them running on computers in an apartment building or a rural village
- some of them communicating via a mesh network or VPN
A single app like Telegram or Signal can be banned by regulators in a country like Germany or Brazil, and they’ve already exerted pressure on them by threatening to do so. By contrast, an open platform like Wordpress or Qbix can be hosted on so many computers, encrypting their traffic with https, that no one can go after them all. By giving out back-end code as an open source, it truly becomes “The People Platform”.
However, while decentralization does make it harder for anyone to bulk collect the data, it also means that each small host can’t afford to invest too much into securing their own installation. That’s why important that the default settings of Qbix Platform maximize security as much as possible. To learn more, read this article: