I had previously believed that I was knowledgeable about the privacy issue in crypto. Not deeply, not technically but to be able to keep up with the discussions. Transparency is good. Public ledgers create trust. Each and every one can confirm it. That was the gist and long had it been sound. Up to a certain point of small, personal incident it was complete.
This occurred as I was browsing my bank application on one of the evenings. Nothing out of the ordinary, just counting the money, glancing at the balances, the sort of thing you not only do but you don’t even think about it. However, as I thought to myself. What if all of this was public?
Not only visible to me, but also to anyone. Every payment I made. Every transfer. All trends in my spending or saving. It was not some melodramatic thought, it was a silent perception. That sort of exposure would not be empowering. It would feel invasive. And that’s when it clicked. We have been describing transparency as an aspect in crypto but in the real world, it would be a weakness.
It was that realization that put me back again to reading about Midnight Network but in a different perspective. Not as a technological work, but as a reaction to something all too human. It is necessary to disclose the information without revealing everything.
The concept of rational privacy on part of Midnight began to gain grounds. It does not involve secrecy of data. It has to do with the regulation of the revelation. Zero knowledge proofs can be used by the system to verify that something is true without revealing the underlying information on it. It is technical in sound and also the concept is simple. You prove what matters. You keep the rest to yourself.
As you consider it, that is the way most of our daily interactions already operate. You do not use your complete identity with each time you are registering on something over the internet. You do not give up your whole financial past in order to buy one thing. We will never receive information without it being filtered even without our noticing.That was transformed by blockchain that made everything transparent by default.
This had worked in the initial stages. It built trust in a new system. It enabled individuals to check transactions by themselves. But it also established a system which does not come easily to much of the real life. Since real life is on limits.
Companies do not show their inner functioning. People do not broadcast their personal information. In every deal, institutions do not act in a transparent manner. We always have some sort of control that determines what is to be viewed and what is to remain confidential. Midnight attempts to introduce that layer into blockchain.
This is one specific detail that caught my attention as to the way in which the network divides the structure. NIGHT is the primary token and it is visible and functional in an open manner. However, its ownership earns DUST, personal smart contract execution. The privacy layer does not supersede the public system. It works alongside it. There is an artificiality to that balance.
It does not go to extremes as they have been problematic in the past. It does not concern itself with either full transparency or full privacy it instead provides a system where either can be in place depending on the circumstances. The latter is more reminiscent of how the actual systems are already operating. The more I reasoned on this, the more I came to understand that this is not only about technology. It’s about comfort.
Users will be ready to utilize systems which are safe. Not only safe technically, but safe in the manner of their managing personal and sensitive data. When it means that you will be opening the door to more than you find comfortable; then it is hard to adopt a system regardless of how cutting edge the technology is. It is one of the silent crypto challenges.
It designed great instruments, but occasionally forgot what they are like to the individuals who are using them. It appears that Midnight is trying to seal that divide. Naturally, it is not the same thing to try and succeed. This is a place where ideas that were theoretically good failed miserably in practice. Midnight must yet demonstrate that its model scales and developers can use it and that users are getting value out of it.
But the direction is somehow significant. This is because, you are unlikely to see the future of blockchain being making everything visible. It is about letting people have control over what they want to give out. That little experience with my banking app did not alter everything but it altered my perception of the issue. Privacy does not mean privacy being the antithesis of transparency. It is the capability to determine the place of transparency.
@MidnightNetwork #night $NIGHT
