As a professional team that has been deeply involved in the social field for nearly 7 years, Skype has tried 206 mainstream social products in the world and found that there are still a lot of pain points that cannot be avoided and solved structurally by the current centralized social products. We have summarized three major aspects: security and privacy, transaction experience, and credit system. From these three aspects, we have analyzed 6 core’pain points: core privacy is not protected | cannot make real claims | user communication information is arbitrarily intercepted, stored, and analyzed | it is difficult to make a reasonable match to real needs | transaction time cost Great, the process is not protected|a virtual evaluation/score/endorsement system.
We conducted an in-depth analysis and deconstruction of the above pain points, and provided solutions from the perspective of Skype, combined with the technical characteristics of the blockchain. We believe that this is not only a technological innovation for social products, but also a disruptive business model innovation for the social ecology.
Core privacy is not protected: In the Internet era, as the value of users’ personal information becomes higher and higher, everyone’s willingness to protect personal privacy is also getting stronger. However, traditional centralized platforms and various O2O intermediaries are based on users’ true identities. The need for authentication often requires users to provide core privacy information for identification: mobile phone numbers, ID card information, home address, bank card information, etc. are all collected and entered.Regarding the protection of privacy and security, all users can do is to increase their security awareness on the Internet, but they have no alternative to the centralized and structured privacy collection method. Users’ core privacy and transaction information are sold and stolen wantonly, frequently harassed by advertisements such as buying houses, decorations, loan sharks, shopping refund information, ticket changes and other scams are endless…If it is the core privacy information of a dating platform, it can be Read it at will, the adverse effect on users is even worse. With the gradual increase of network activities, users will inevitably leave more and more social traces. Strangers can easily obtain the user’s core privacy information through these traces. Once online or offline disputes, they can easily be “human flesh” and cause “cyber violence”. Ashley Madison, a famous Canadian dating site for extramarital affairs, promises to delete all credit card accounts and transaction information after users pay. When the website is hacked, people discover that they have never been deleted as promised. Instead, the hackers will gradually publish user information. Pressing it to close has caused irreparable losses to the user’s personal and family.
[Skype Solution]
Skype provides users with core privacy and confidentiality mechanisms. The whole process is similar to participating in a fancy dress party. Skype is responsible for carefully identifying the participants and entering the venue after passing. However, after entering the venue, all of them wore masks and irreversibly severed their relationship with their original identities. Skype will use multi-level valid KYC and Bitcoin-like user addresses as unique IDs.
Unable to make real demands: The core privacy of users is not effectively protected, causing users to dare not make real and personalized social demands. But even if privacy is protected, if it is a strong relationship social network (ie, an acquaintance social platform closely integrated with offline identities), users will not have the desire to express their personal needs freely and comfortably. This phenomenon is quite obvious in the current mainstream social platforms. For example, compared to Weibo and WeChat, due to the decline in the social functions of Weibo acquaintances, users are more active in expressing increasingly personalized opinions, with almost no scruples. After Facebook was accepted by the mainstream, young people gradually turned to Instagram and Snapchat with better privacy. We have not found any social platform that can fully and freely express their personal demands and at the same time confirm their true identities. This is not only the reason for the positioning of social software, but also the reason why traditional centralized architecture can only provide such limited infrastructure support.
Official website：http://skypecoin.org