Interestingly the problem of people excluded from the banking system has been addressed by statutory regulation in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/basic-bank-account... ; see also discussion at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldfi... which covers the question of people with inadequate ID.
Getting your email account wrongly banned is an injustice, whether trivial or costly, and whether or not you have alternative arrangements. That's why people are (generally) rightly cross that it's happening. That feeds into wider questions of "why is justice so expensive" and "how does a local justice system address the bad behavior of a multinational". These questions tend to get resolved incredibly slowly.
Edit: see Which? who are always good on consumer issues: https://www.which.co.uk/news/2021/09/why-banks-are-freezing-... : alleged suspicious activity; https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/22/exclusive-h... inactivity
Traditional British solution: a QUANGO and an Ombudsman.
I wonder if the effort behind this is a Baptist and Bootleggers moment. Surely some maybe most want to solve something that they see as a societal problem, others see opportunity a la payday lenders, and others see an opportunity for social control. Maybe the people who see not-banking as a social problem also want to use the end result to "nudge" participants in the right direction.
To put it more bluntly, my eyeballs are watched by AI to make sure I pay attention enough to deserve the full use of my vehicle.. it's beyond punitive, it requires my positive behavior.
ALSO bonus, if I did something with my vehicle that resulted in losing my account, I would also lose access to my home electricity system.
A normal car in 2022 will not constantly surveil you. No critical functionality is tied to an online account in any non-Tesla mass-produced car that I am aware of.
On the surveillance point, I worked for an auto software company that partnered with a big auto manufacturer on a feature. We were granted access to an API that could geolocate any vehicle made by this company in real-time given its VIN. I volunteered my car's VIN to test with (I drove the same make as the company we partnered with) and confirmed that the API returned real-time location data on my 2019 vehicle. If you own a car that was built in the last 10 years, you are more than likely emitting your location to an internal service maintained by the manufacturer.
https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/
You do have the ability to opt-out, but it's not usually a simple process.
Somehow I am not sure why, we as technical people, and I would even think that most of the people in these fields are also into fiction and sci-fi, we are taking only the worst things from novels and stories, instead of the good ones, VERY slowly transforming our society in an dystopian nightmare.
Since this is Hacker News I'm sure there will be some who can say the two are compatible, but it will only appear that way to the wealthy and the elites -- the rest of us will gain none of the benefits and will be seen solely as "customers" or "partners" from which revenue must be extracted.
One only need look at the transformation of business from selling products to selling services, changing a sales relationship into a rental relationship. For businesses operating key or critical technical infrastructures this is equivalent to a corporate "universal basic income", such as will never occur for the common man.
Not quite. Few businesses have ever been focused on improving the human condition. The new thing is their ability to control our lives, and our acceptance of that, both in terms of laws and our quiet consent.
For cars I don't think this future is distant at all, ten years max.
I have only one objection here: Doesn't feel all that slow to me.
Maybe one day your Tesla will simply drive off if you don't pay the bills, or worse work for the SEC
Just like your fridge may not dispense water if you buy the wrong filter. Or your random IOT enabled device will refuse to work if you don't let it phone home with surveillance data.
Although I was joking about the SEC thing, what happens if Elon get's a grudge? Some would say it's your fault for buying the car, but some guarantees for consumers are useful.
This is true. Generally if you stab someone the police would seize the knife as evidence, but after your trial if the prosecution didn't file a forfeiture case against the knife, then it is still yours and you can get an order from the judge to return it :)
p.s. civil forfeiture cases give the best names, e.g. United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls, 413 F. Supp. 1281 (D. Wisc. 1976)
Maybe not take it from you, but with new cars that are always connected (Tesla et. al). They can certainly make them quite terrible if they want to... access to superchargers has been removed when "owners" use unauthorized work shops for instance.
Alternatively, the government will just take over basic id services (think first.last@yourcountry).
Anything that you get from the internet is a service. Even connecting to the internet is a service. And providing a service is ongoing work.
What we need is recognizing services as essential and guaranteeing people has access to them. This is something for the government to do, and the guaranteeing access part is quite complicated when the service can be exploited like email.
- Decentralized file hosting for all the emails using IPFS instead of Google's servers
- Decentralized login using ENS / Ethereum Name Service instead of Google's login
- a UI on top of your data, plus an outbound server for relaying to/from non-blockchain email accounts
Overall, you end up with portable data thanks to IPFS, and a login through ENS to whatever UI you want to use/pay for.
This seems like a win to me. Haven't seen anything yet that pulls this together but the pieces are there. Maybe someone here wants to prototype it.
The only part stored on the blockchain is the address itself. The files are not stored on the blockchain.
More here: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/what-is-ipfs/
Appreciate your question! That should get you started.
Beyond that, it depends on what you mean by "computations".
Our example is setting up decentralized email. What computation is needed to send and receive email?
1. You may mean the computation needed to encrypt and decrypt the emails. That would happen on your computer locally.
2. You may mean the computation to send and receive emails. I'm not sure how/where this would happen in this example. It might be on the blockchain somehow.
I'm curious about this as well so will be learning more about dapps (decentralized apps). Starting here
https://blog.chronobank.io/what-is-a-decentralised-applicati...
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/dapps
For messaging dapps, check out the new Blockscan chat by the creators of Etherscan : https://decrypt.co/91226/etherscan-creators-launch-ethereum-... (note: NOT very decentralized yet)
This is past my level of expertise, but you could map out what those clock cycles of a mail server are going towards. For example, serving files, like we talked about, can happen on IPFS. No compute needed there beyond what IPFS already does.
Perhaps in the new era of tech we'll have better data portability and ownership. Sure, maybe Google can kick me off but they should still let me export all my data.
See my reply below about public blockchains.
There is really nothing you could do with a car to prompt the car maker to take it from you. And the state will only take it if you break the law in particularly dangerous ways.
When it comes to other possessions it's even harder for anyone to take them away from you. If I take a kitchen knife and stab someone with it I will go to prison for sure, but I don't think they will take the knife away. They definitely won't ban me from buying knives.
But when it's a digital service, even something as crucial as a banking service, it's seen as normal that you can lose them for posting offensive things on twitter. Perhaps it's because we haven't had these digital services for long enough to consider them as really belonging to us, so we accept that they can be taken away at the slightest provocation.