How to avoid CIA’s spying in China and USA to keep privacy and secrets in business? Cointelegraph asked Daniel Dabek, founder and core developer of Safe Exchange.
A lot of crypto-developers write to СoinTelegraph willing to share their amazing stories of meeting and working with cryptocurrencies. Today our guest is Daniel Dabek, Founder and core developer of Safex.
When he first saw the Safe Network in June 2014 upon meeting Paige Peterson, who does work for MaidSafe, he realised that this platform was going to be very important. So he knew that making a start-up would be feasible, and he had initially ignored and steered clear of situations that would lead him into an employment position.
Daniel had a small success in trading CitiBank shares, when he became acquainted with Bitcoin in Mexico. But he applied his expertise only in San Francisco. Shortly after arriving there, he discovered MaidSafe and the Safe Network. Projects that could use his expertise in the needs of Wall Street traders.
Cointelegraph: Former CitiBank shares trader is solving a problem, how to avoid the CIA’s spying in China and USA to keep privacy and secrets in business. How is it possible?
Daniel Dabek: Yes, that is a part of it. With privacy in users’ hands first, and instantaneous transfer of cryptographic payloads (coins) it reduce the threat layer that people are exposed to. Transparency is dependent on the parties involved; and the level of transparency would be well known in advance. If someone wants to know my address for shipping, the only way to get it is to ask for it. In today’s internet system and how things work, The IP address and undisclosed metadata compromises people’s safety, their digital data’s safety and the physical safety of people and their data. This is how people and organizations are exposed, the door in is wide open through purely digital means
“If you give a merchant your physical address, and no one else, and later you are attacked on your home computers it would be reasonable to commit that as investigatory evidence that merchant collected your information.”
Cointelegraph: Tell us a little about your project. What is its purpose?
DD: Certainly, Safe Exchange is a digital contract marketplace that lets people create a cryptographic version of an underlying thing and be able to transfer it by message or through sale. Since it is built using the Safe Network as a backend the whole process takes place without a centralized party handling the clearing of the transaction. People clear their contracts directly with each other. Additionally, since there is no open ledger to the Safe Network people’s transactions are anonymous to outsiders, and only known to the participants involved. In no way can the service or the network determine any level of information that will be compromising by attacking the software itself.
This means that people could offer to sell anything that they choose without having their geographic location disclosed. For example: if you bought something with your credit card, and you ordered to your office but you used the website to make your purchase from home.. well you lost your obfuscation there and now the merchant knows where your home is. By the same token Bitcoin also has a drawback though watch this: if I bought something from amazon and shipped it to my office to protect my home address, and I did it from home. Now the merchant knows where I sent bitcoins from, how many I have, where I live, and where I’m going with the coins in the future.
CT: Do you think that the Internet will gradually be decentralized?
DD: I think that the internet is already decentralized except it has been tailored to aggregate its traffic into central hubs where the majority of the nodes of the internet are owned by controlled entities therefore centralizing the information of the internet;
I think that the internet will need a modification in the way it routes ALL data, and at least when it goes through the centralized hubs the data is not exposed to them (in other words the data is encrypted and the keys are inaccessible to the hub masters). This will protect people, and also I think make internet hub formation less lucrative. I think of 1 trillion dollars asset AT&T - with solutions like bitcoin it introduced that people will run their computer at home and maintain the network. It used to be that people ran ISPs from garages. We need some of that again, and we see that in the decentralized space with mining; but I also think that we need to be agnostic to the data and the purpose of data that is being transmitted.
CT: What if I have a great trade secret? How can I keep it?
DD: If you have some great trade secret, and wanted to preserve that. It is like that you want to keep your information private. Or for example, publicly traded companies and their press releases about earnings etc; Recently 31 million dollars were made in insider trading in the largest hacking case ever (happened in August 2015)
When conducting business intelligence agencies around the world are spying if you’re in China, CIA is spying on you.. if you’re in the USA, everyone is spying on you. People have the right to their privacy and especially when conducting their trade and business unless they choose disclosure like in the case of nonprofits and governments but for everyone else they deserve that level of security.
“I think that to save the ship from sinking and to preserve human rights to privacy, then our software should champion that as well.
So without a ledger-less solution, on the marketplace we can’t really be free. Because all of our life and data is getting sliced through by anyone who can afford to buy it (the information) and anyone who has access like in the case of blockchain ledger systems.”
The issue is in the mechanisms that are available. Bitcoin is a secure public means to trade but it is public 100% same with ethereum. New York Stock Exchange is a public place to list companys’ stocks though it is centralized and vulnerable to unintended disclosure and risks on infrastructure (consider flash crash 2010) On the horizon we need a solution that doesn’t use a system to maintain itself, and one that doesn’t disclose information. There’s nothing out there right now that does that, we’re putting that shot on goal.
CT: How do the existing start-ups provide security for the users?
DD: XOR obfuscated encrypted file chunk mixing storage network. It is bittorrent for any and all data that can only be opened by the person with the key. This means that any activities done will go through the obfuscation and encryption process which will cause the information and actual data to reside in a place where it will not be reconstructed without the creator’s authorization.
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