Mainframe’s vision of a truly decentralized communications network is both mind-blowing for its potential and heart-warming for its ideals.
Let me first tell you a personal story to show you why I am emotionally attached to Mainframe’s goal. (I warn you that this is a bit long and childish, but had serious consequences on my life at one point. You can skip the next 3 paragraphs if you want and read the TL;DR). It was 2012, and I was deeply in love. The burning love of teenagers cannot be denied, and with it also comes great pain when something goes wrong, and oh did it go wrong… That day I woke up like every other morning and went to class, only to find prying eyes and silent laughs while I walked across the corridor. It turned out that the biggest secret of my life was now popular knowledge and the hot topic of high school. When my friends told me, I could not believe what I had heard, and immediately asked how they came to know this information. Of course, as with every other rumour, trying to track it down to its origin was kind of pointless, so I blamed the one person who knew my secret: wait for it.. of course, it was my girlfriend!
She denied having spread the rumour, but I didn’t believe her, partly because I knew she enjoyed gossiping a bit too much, and mainly because I could not fathom any other way in which this private info could have been leaked, at least at that time. We inevitably broke each other’s hearts (actually I broke both our hearts myself), and when I was more calmed I realised that we had also been talking about it a little via WhatsApp. I immediately looked up ways of hacking the app and found out that is was possible and not too hard. Connecting some dots here and there, I found the culprit. I knew he had a crush on my girlfriend, but I didn’t think he was capable of something like this (both intellectually and morally). I faced him head on and got a confession surprisingly easily (I thought he was going to deny it to death, but I guess he felt regret). It turns out he had asked (and paid) this hacker friend of his to get to my private data, looking for something that could end our relationship… and he hit the jackpot!
So you see, a little breach on one’s private data can do a lot of harm when used intelligently. I eventually was forgiven by my girlfriend and I also forgave the culprit, but those were certainly the worst days of my life (some could argue that I am pretty lucky if I haven’t suffered more than that, but believe me that the humiliation and betrayal I felt were very very intense). Had this happened 5 or 10 years from now, hopefully I would have been using an app running on Mainframe (Onyx perhaps, or who knows what given its interoperability’s features), and the situation would have been totally avoided.
TL;DR: A breach on my WhatsApp’s conversations data allowed a love rival to figure out the biggest secret of my life as a teenager. He spread the rumour across high school in hopes I would blame my girlfriend, which I did (she was the only one supposed to know) and that led to a breakup. Eventually all turned out fine and everyone was forgiven, but those were the worst days of my life.
This incident made me fully aware of the importance of privacy on communications, which had been lost with the raise of the internet. When I was introduced to blockchain technology, I wondered about potential applications to this area, and I was blown away when I found Mainframe. They were everything I had dreamt of since then, and so much more. Mainframe is not only a solution for keeping your personal data (and institutional data) safe, it goes beyond that and gives back the people the total control and ownership of their communication data. It can even make your conversations not only private (encrypted), but untraceable, through a feature called Dark Routing. No one could know who you talk with or what you talk about without your permission. Blockchain is ultimately about freedom (among other things), and Mainframe can bring us the freedom in communication we lost when the internet took over our lives and the big companies took over the internet.
E-mail, Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram? Who wants centralized platforms when you can own a private key and with it your data (and ONLY you), on a network that is surveillance and censorship resistant? Who wants a few people making ridiculous amounts of money off your personal data and your sitting-idly-by-attitude when you can be part of an ecosystem that rewards the individual for contributing to the network by running a node, thus removing centers of control and single points of failure, and making this a fairer and more equally distributed world. I think it’s time people begin to realize just how important blockchain is in order to achieve the next step on human freedom. The revolution has just started and I am proud of being a part of it. I am eagerly awaiting the day when we will be able to communicate with one another using Mainframe, without any kind of worries and with true freedom of speech. I’m sure many of you are familiar with BitTorrent and it’s decentralized censorship resistant nature. Well, think of this as the BitTorrent of communication, in respect to the underlying p2p technology. What I mean by this is that, as the own team jokes, ‘’with the exception of a catastrophic asteroid event or an aggressive alien invasion, the Mainframe network is simply unstoppable’’. Of course, blockchain is a whole other world compared to BitTorrent in other aspects (such as the double-spending problem and the information loss problem), but when compared with familiar technologies it is easier to understand just how unstoppable blockchains can really be.
So yes, tech giants, you should be worried because the era when you controlled our private data and did what you wanted with it, with no permission nor punishment, will soon be over. I am also talking to you, governments of the world. The right to freedom of communication will come back to us soon enough. You may try to stop it, but it will be meaningless. In the end, you will loose control and will be forced to join us, the revolution, Mainframe. #MainframeForFreedom
Thank you for reading this far, it’s hard to put into words just how big this is and it’s better that you see for yourselves here
https://mainframe.com. Also, every word on the whitepaper is worth the read
https://mainframe.docsend.com/view/j39qpui.
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