Decentralize Today

It's been a few days, I don't know if you or anyone else will ever see this but....

> I personally wish that there were realistic options for self-hosted

man, me too! that would alleviate a lot of my concerns but the whole home server idea has struggled to gain any real traction.

>Which events are you talking about that make Google "exceptionally worse" than Apple?

There are a number of specific events as well as the over-arcing trend.

First and foremost, they aren't even hiding it anymore [1].

They have censored 1m websites and 2b individual URLs because other companies asked them too [2].

They monitor every god damn thing you do [3][4][5], yes even your android keyboard data [6].

And then make it available to law enforcement [7].

Finally, let's not forget, they are an ad company [8] so it's in their best interest to sell more ads.

So, all of that being said, the general trend is the most disturbing thing of all. As google grows their ad company, they are expanding into more and more areas of your life. Now, Ok Google is a household term [9], and they gather more and more data to sell more ads [10]. It entirely possible that you are spend more time with google than you do with anyone else. Your phone is next to you all day, you search with google, your email and chat is scanned by google, your keyboard actions are monitored by Google. Google earth takes pictures of our roadways and houses, google streetview takes pictures of the vehicles in your…

Found a great description:

'What can we do with a SNARKs-enabled Ethereum? Certain contract variables can be effectively made private. Instead of storing the secret information on-chain, it can be stored with users, who prove they’re behaving by the rules of the contract using SNARKs. Each of these uses require their own trusted setup, but once a circuit exists, it can be easily cloned.
Imagine an ERC20-like token that doesn’t publish individual holders’ balances, while still maintaining a public and predictable token supply, or a lending platform that keeps the terms of a loan private.'

https://decentralize.today/zero-knowledge-proofs-zcash-and-ethereum-f6d89fa7cba8

It's computationally expensive to trick the network by rehashing all blocks in the chain, which is essentially needing to re-do all the proof of work operations since the begging of the BTC ledger. This is how POW adds integrity, for bitcoin and how you can trust your not dealing with a tampered system.

I'm not saying it's efficient, but it's worked well so far.

Good explanation here: https://decentralize.today/how-does-proof-of-work-um-work-f44642b24215