Social innovations and secret conversatons on the blockchain.

With trading in Crypto currency currently gaining grounds all over the world, there is need for some form of security measures to be put in place in order to encourage more people to join and trade freely within the community. The blockchain community is one trading platform that has taken several steps in providing these much needed security measures.

The blockchain community, from inception, has consistently set the pace for other similar platforms. The community is at this time, building up its vocabulary of coded words.

The idea of communicating in a strange language only understood by few persons is an exciting thought. It gives the people conversing in that strange language, an air of pride, and a sense of belonging to something unique. This happens even in day to day correspondences between people offline. It is more exiting and even encouraging, knowing that messages exchanged over the web are being encrypted such that third parties cannot easily have access to those messages. The need to constantly develop coding lexicons cannot be overemphasized especially with the surge of internet crimes.

CONVERSATIONS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY – HOW IT WORKS

• Use of Digital Signature: just as the signatures, on paper, of people involved in a physical transaction validated the document evidencing the transaction, digital signatures likewise validates transactions on the block chain. The blockchain has what is known as a public key while individuals transacting on the platform have what is known as a private key. The private key is usually linked to the public key and it serves as a form of validation; that the transaction has not in any way been tampered.
• OP_Return Output: this marked the start of the use of codes on the blockchain. The surprising aspect of this development is that it was developed in error. An error that has now been adapted and adopted for use within the blockchain community. Since the adaptation of this resultant glitch, the OP_Return Output has been used to do several things. These things include:
• Creation of a simple interface known as Bitscribble for writing messages on the blockchain.
• Creation of a mural in January 2019, by a Parisian-based street artist Pascal Boyart, with a hidden bitcoin prize embedded in it.
• Surprise marriage proposals have been done using the OP_Return Output to encrypt clues and messages on the block chain.
• To contact a person on the Bitcoin blockchain provided, their Bitcoun address is known to you. There are some incidents in which this tool has proven very useful for transactors: For example, a person may be contacted if they received stolen funds for some reason or if someone accidentally sent them a transaction that needs to be returned.

MESSAGING ON THE BLOCKCHAIN

Messaging on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain is not something done in secret anymore, either. Memopay, for example, is a service that offers its customers advertising opportunities on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain. Bitcoin Cash has proven to be more popular for messaging services, likely due to lower blockchain transaction fees. There is, in fact, a social network called Memo in which all networking actions are recorded to the BCH blockchain.  

With all these innovations, the sad part remains that inasmuch as conversation have become coded and more secretive, records of those conversations remain imprinted on a public ledger.

The question of whether people want their private (or indeed public) conversations permanently imprinted on a ledger remains to be seen. Transparency is important, but people still want to feel a certain sense of privacy.