This sounds like it could be very important and Im happy to see it happening now before its too late. I can tell you (et-al) have worked very hard to put all of the pieces together. Im not at all tech savvy, but how could you possibly keep bad actors or billionaires out from kickstarter even?
First, if any billionaires want to fund the project via the Kickstarter, that's fine, it gives them no control over the ATS network. I'll gladly take their money given that it comes with 0 compromise. And one of the things I'm implementing is a maximum number of nodes per user (going to be 3 for the time being) to prevent anyone with sufficient resources from controlling a large number of nodes. And the nodes themselves are mostly blind to the information being carried via the network.
For example:
Even with the current feature, location pings — which essentially does what the ICEBlock app does, if you send a ping, the node only gets your userid (not your email or display name or identifiable info), which is essentially a long of string of characters, along with the location you're sending the ping for. It then broadcasts that ping, say #ice_block, to all interested nodes (nodes that have users subscribed to #ice_block in the geohash where you sent it) using some clever math, and those nodes notify the interested users that a ping was sent at a given location. So, in none of that process was any truly identifiable information about you broadcasted. Therefore, even if there was a bad actor who wanted to monetize the ATS network, they'd be left with essentially useless data.
One thing I'm learning working in this project is how much effort it actually takes to build an infrastructure that truly respects user privacy. You still need to be able to have some very minimal data coherence (to be able to prevent/mitigate things like spam), while also making it so that there's no useful data that can be meaningfully collected about any user.
Another thing that is interesting is that even if you connect to the alpha right now, and then disconnect and reconnect, there's a decent chance you'll get connected to different nodes each time (I have 4 nodes currently running). Now imagine that this is a year from now and there are thousands of nodes running. Because there's a high likelihood that you're going to connect to different nodes each time you use ATS, it makes it that much harder for bad actors running nodes to be able to meaningfully collect data about anyone, given that their usage of ATS will be split across many nodes. And on top of it, I've designed ATS to use my main server as little as possible, such that virtually everything that is handled by a relay-node is NOT reported back to the main ATS server. So even I am blind to user activity. So, if you send a ping right now to #ice_block or #awesome_food, my main server will never know that you did that. Granted, because I currently run all nodes, I could track that, though this is only temporary until it is possible for users to start running nodes themselves. The more the network grows, the greater the privacy, the greater the fragmentation of user data across nodes run by different people, and also very importantly, literally every piece of data is encrypted throughout the network.
I hope this gives some insight on what's happening under the hood to mitigate bad actors.
This sounds like it could be very important and Im happy to see it happening now before its too late. I can tell you (et-al) have worked very hard to put all of the pieces together. Im not at all tech savvy, but how could you possibly keep bad actors or billionaires out from kickstarter even?
Thanks for the question, that's very important!
First, if any billionaires want to fund the project via the Kickstarter, that's fine, it gives them no control over the ATS network. I'll gladly take their money given that it comes with 0 compromise. And one of the things I'm implementing is a maximum number of nodes per user (going to be 3 for the time being) to prevent anyone with sufficient resources from controlling a large number of nodes. And the nodes themselves are mostly blind to the information being carried via the network.
For example:
Even with the current feature, location pings — which essentially does what the ICEBlock app does, if you send a ping, the node only gets your userid (not your email or display name or identifiable info), which is essentially a long of string of characters, along with the location you're sending the ping for. It then broadcasts that ping, say #ice_block, to all interested nodes (nodes that have users subscribed to #ice_block in the geohash where you sent it) using some clever math, and those nodes notify the interested users that a ping was sent at a given location. So, in none of that process was any truly identifiable information about you broadcasted. Therefore, even if there was a bad actor who wanted to monetize the ATS network, they'd be left with essentially useless data.
One thing I'm learning working in this project is how much effort it actually takes to build an infrastructure that truly respects user privacy. You still need to be able to have some very minimal data coherence (to be able to prevent/mitigate things like spam), while also making it so that there's no useful data that can be meaningfully collected about any user.
Another thing that is interesting is that even if you connect to the alpha right now, and then disconnect and reconnect, there's a decent chance you'll get connected to different nodes each time (I have 4 nodes currently running). Now imagine that this is a year from now and there are thousands of nodes running. Because there's a high likelihood that you're going to connect to different nodes each time you use ATS, it makes it that much harder for bad actors running nodes to be able to meaningfully collect data about anyone, given that their usage of ATS will be split across many nodes. And on top of it, I've designed ATS to use my main server as little as possible, such that virtually everything that is handled by a relay-node is NOT reported back to the main ATS server. So even I am blind to user activity. So, if you send a ping right now to #ice_block or #awesome_food, my main server will never know that you did that. Granted, because I currently run all nodes, I could track that, though this is only temporary until it is possible for users to start running nodes themselves. The more the network grows, the greater the privacy, the greater the fragmentation of user data across nodes run by different people, and also very importantly, literally every piece of data is encrypted throughout the network.
I hope this gives some insight on what's happening under the hood to mitigate bad actors.