Decentralization, and the resistance to censorship that comes with it, is one of the great qualities of the Bitcoin network (BTC). Initiated in December 2019, the BlueSky decentralized social network project, wanted by Jack Dorsey (the founder of Twitter), now seems to be taking shape.
A social network without centralized control?
The BlueSky project wants to create a new type of social network, which is both open source and decentralized, to better protect itself from any hostile state intervention. Of course, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) popularized by Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is the perfect foundation for this new social network.
This August 16, the project takes a new turn with the arrival at its head of Jay Graber, who is notably a former developer of Zcash (ZEC). The interested party himself announced the good news on Twitter:
“I’m happy to announce that I’ll be leading Bluesky, an initiative launched by Twitter to decentralize social networks (…) Over the past year, I’ve been working closely with a think tank to build a decentralized social ecosystem (…) my next task will be to hire to complete the Bluesky team. I look forward to partnering closely with Twitter and other companies as we embark on this journey. It won’t happen overnight, but we will share our progress along the way.”.
Jay Graber
A response to criticism of Dorsey’s omnipotence at Twitter?
Twitter founder and current CEO Jack Dorsey commented on the tweet and the appointment of Jay Graber by saying that it will now be possible “to move forward much more quickly.”
It must be said that Twitter has been heavily criticized for its strong centralization. One of the most recent major scandals was the censorship of Donald Trump’s account, even though he was still President of the United States at the time of this outright cut. The politician, as controversial as he may be, still has no right to speak on the bluebird network, since last January.
But even before that, in July 2020, the cryptosphere will also remember that, following a hacking of its life and death (and writing!) capabilities on the user accounts of its network, Twitter had been the theater of a huge giveaway scam.
From Elon Musk’s account to Bill Gates’, from Changpeng Zhao’s (CEO of Binance) to Joe Biden’s (who was only a candidate for the US presidential elections at the time), all of them could be hacked to broadcast a fake bitcoin donation message, which supposedly required to send BTC first to receive a donation, which of course never arrived afterwards (giveaway scam)
Whether it’s to ensure everyone’s right to free speech, or to avoid the huge and dangerous single point of failure problem, a decentralized social network would obviously be a very good technological advance. The question that remains is: are Twitter and its leader, specialists in monetizing content published by their users for their own benefit, really the best placed to do all this independently?