Courtesy of marketoonist.com
Recently, I spent a terrible morning trying to keep up with various upgrades on my browser, on my e-books platform for Apple and for the site where I launch my blogs. “Upgrade” is the most annoying word in the English language, in my opinion. Demands for them never seem to stop. Worse, they pop on to my screen whenever I’m having a rare moment of thought.
Telephones are far less intrusive. If I’m on the line, other messages can’t get through. Not so with emails. They clog my computer 24/7. Most of them are appeals for money. The sky is sure to fall if I don’t write a check immediately.
Ignoring a demand for an upgrade is more difficult than ignoring an appeal for money. Like the local bus system in my city, I can’t get from here to there without first going through the center of town., a hub It’s the same with the internet. I can’t connect to various sites without going through a hub which needs constant upgrading. My browser is only one example.
While I despise these changes, I look forward to one — the coming of blockchain.(Click) Writer Sandra Upson explains: Blockchain is “a way to build data systems and applications that doesn’t create this monster at the center.” (“The Blockchain Will Rebuild the Internet as We Know It,” by Sandra Upson, Wired, June 2018, pg. 62.) It will decentralize the web and free users, like me, from feeling like landed serfs, always forced to comply with someone’s rules before a person can move anywhere. No more hubs with blockchain. No more hub upgrades, either. We’ll be free. Hear that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft?
Don’t ask me how blockchain accomplishes this miracle. I haven’t a clue. Here’s a pretty good explanation for neophytes who might be interested. (Click) If Upson is correct, “Once blockchain technologies are mature, they will recede into the background to become one of the fundamental systems powering the internet.” (Ibid, pg. 62.) There’ll be no more yanking my chain. I’ll have escaped to blockchain.
