The internet has matured vastly over the past five years, yet it has retained some of it’s fundamental flaws. One of these flaws is the notorious elephant in the room: web advertisements. It is now commonly accepted that nobody likes adverts, so website visitors suffer from their intrusion and annoyance.
Websites also suffer because of their financial dependence to monolithic advertisement platforms like Google and Facebook, not to mention that their clean and efficient website designs get ruined. Finally, fake robotic clicks and impressions have reached epidemic proportions.
This means that advertisement publishers aren’t having fun either, as they are paying more for less. This means that the internet’s economy has been backed into a corner, and it’s about time that it finds a way out.
A different elephant in a different room is internet privacy. Ever since the Edward Snowden incident in 2013, internet users have become increasingly cautious and skeptical of service providers. This is most particularly relevant with cloud storage, where someone’s sensitive information is retained.
Privacy focused cloud solutions have emerged in response, but are half-baked propositions because they run proprietary closed-source software. Even if privacy solutions were to open-source their code, it is anyone’s guess as to what is actually running on their servers.
A potential solution to the storage privacy problem is a decentralized storage ledger, such as Filecoin and Siacoin. The major issue, however, is that they don’t offer the same accessibility and portability as simply dragging and dropping files into a browser window (like with Dropbox). Heavy custom software must be installed natively in the operating system, which yet again limits the capacity to audit such software.