Crypto
No doubt that almost every young person in the world knows crypto now. But lots of people in tech seem to dislike the concept of crypto. For example, two of my friends in Waterloo Software Engineering have said that they don't want to get in touch with crypto at all. More sarcastically, one of them worked for a crypto company during his second coop, and one applied to one of those crypto companies in the upcoming coop. Of course, the reason was they are US companies so they pay much more (so I guess crypto isn't that bad in their mind if a high salary could make them work in this field).
But for me? I regularly use crypto to make purchases and I kind of support crypto. As a person who firmly believes that we need a more transparent Internet and more privacy, crypto provides a way to make sensitive purchases more secure. For example, as a Chinese citizen, I don't want to purchase a VPN using my credit card, because it will just say xxxxVPN on the bill for the credit card. You could argue the Chinese government doesn't really care about this but in reality, I don't want to show any of my purchases on my credit card to anyone, even a Bank in countries like Iceland(famous for their privacy policies). The reason is that I don't particularly appreciate how companies these days collect every single bit of user data and build profiles for each customer. And the most disgusting thing is when you use their services, you have to accept this kind of terms of service to be able to use their services, in my opinion, they should at least provide an opt-out option for customers.
I truly understand why some people don't use crypto because of the complicity of obtaining crypto. I think I have a solution for that but that's a business idea and can't be discussed here.
Another reason I support crypto is because imagine you are in a country like China where sending money to overseas bank accounts is strictly controlled. Being able to buy crypto using domestic currency and then sell it off in exchange for the foreign currency you are looking for is just crazily convenient, but sadly, most Chinese are not exposed to technologies like this. Even more unfortunate, now this method is being exploited by corrupted Chinese officials/Black market businesses to funnel money to outside of China.
NFT
I don't like how some people advertise what NFT is. In my eyes, those people are trying to make NFTs artificially scarce to get some easy money from them. I do believe NFT has a huge potential. I don't know why people are so against them, but the great thing about NFT is it's like "a universal language." Imagine you are playing Rainbow Six Siege, a video game from Ubisoft. You have those charms on your weapon, then you make that an NFT, now you could use it in another game that also uses NFT, and you could also put that on your weapon to use your charm. The greatest thing about this is every game has a life span, what happens if one day Ubisoft decides it's no longer profitable to maintain those servers, hence they are shutting them down? That means you will lose everything you have earned in the game, NFT basically makes it transferable to another game, so the property you have earned in a game could potentially last for a much longer time. Through that process, it will be creating its TRUE value because it is now becoming more and more unique as time passes, not artificially unique.
Net Neutrality
A few days ago, the FCC voted to restore Net Neutrality, which is a W for the year. I see Net Neutrality as the Internet's version of freedom of speech. We knew that ISPs would throttle your Torrent download/upload speed if Net Neutrality is not there, because Comcast literally did this even when Net Neutrality was right there... Having Net Neutrality repealed means that if the ISP wants, they can deliberately worsen your connection to certain IPs or protocols, for exmaple, Clouflare's privacy oriented DNS 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. Then hope for you to change to a DNS that has a better connection so they can better monitor you. Hmmmm. I wonder why that sounds familiar, isn't that Ch....?
Decentralization
Yes, we are still having this issue in 2024. To be honest, this is just a simple question, but some governments (US and its rivalries) just won't let people have some privacies, we can literally use similar concepts to Torrent, for example, embed a system in the app so when the user is using the app at night while charging, let the user take over some of the load (so we can achieve partly decentralization). Just remember to provide an opt-out option. Yeah, but things like this are not possible due to some people over there in the FBI who constantly think the Pentagon and the president of the US is in Afghanistan. I think that was the reason why Web3 back then was so popular, because everyone was clinging onto it as it was the solution for decentralization and privacy. It's sad to see in 2024, we are still struggling with how to solve this problem. And many people don't understand the importance of making our Internet more privacy-focused, in my mind, making it decentralized will also make it more secure.
As always, some people ask why you want privacy, "I have nothing to hide".
Privacy is not something to hide, it's something to protect.
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