Midnight Network is Concerned with the Problems Crypto Continues to Turn a Blind Eye

You have a point where you become no longer new in crypto. Initially, all that appears to be innovation. New chains, new stories, new innovations. However, the more time you spend there the more you begin to know it. Not that nothing is happening, but that most of it is directed the same way. It is development, but in an extremely limited scope. And the things that cannot fit in that frame? They tend to get ignored. One of them is the actual behavior of data in real-world systems. Crypto has years of optimization of speed, reduction of fees and throughput. Important work, no doubt. But all that was going on, even as it was, a more toned down problem had been lurking in the background. How information is shared. Even now, majority of the systems continue to compel an uncomplicated decision. Bring out all to the open. Or cover it up to keep secret. That would be theory but hardly ever reality. Since the real life interactions do not work in that way. There is hardly ever all public and all private information. It’s conditional. Contextual. Accessible to those who ought to look at it and why. That is what @MidnightNetwork appears to be listening to. It does not treat privacy as a bonus or a feature. Rather it considers it as structural. Something that influences the way the system is constructed at the very beginning. The concept of selective disclosure, which operates on the power of zero-knowledge technology, is the core of this approach. It enables proving something without telling what the data is. Therefore, rather than making a decision about transparency and confidentiality, the system allows you to decide what is disclosed in which case. That change is slight, but it has an impact on the behavior of the whole network. Technically Midnight is used to distinguish between public and private operations. Validation and consensus are done in the public layers. Sensitive data are carried out in private layers. This division does not put all the details in one model but rather is much more consistent with the way information moves beyond blockchain systems. To the developers, this would provide another environment to develop. Privacy is no longer an attempt to join on later. It is a component of the design itself. The developers can dictate which components of an application will be displayed, which will be hidden and which may be exposed in certain circumstances. That flexibility has made it easy to open up use cases which have been hard to support to date. There may be systems that would need both verification and confidentiality though not necessarily at the expense of the other. On the user side, it becomes less strict. You are not compelled to go all the way to actually communicate with a network. Meanwhile, you are not working in an entirely opaque system in which trust is hard. It has a balance that is more in line with the natural approach to information management. This thinking is even reflected upon the token structure. Midnight separates value and usage as opposed to tying everything to a single asset that is used over time. The primary token is valuable whereas the secondary resource is utilized during transactions and regenerates. That lessens the incessant tension between being a part of the network and maintaining your status. All this is not a guarantee of success. And it can not be put in that light. The fact is that, due to a plethora of projects that have presented powerful ideas that have never been endorsed to any significant adoption. Midnight yet needs to demonstrate that developers will code with this model, that users will in fact require this degree of control and that the system can scale reliably. What it is doing differently is however difficult to overlook. It is not attempting to answer the most evident issues. It is targeting the ones that have been shied away. And as you zoom out, then that is where the larger picture begins to establish itself. It has taken years to enhance the speed of the movement of data within the industry. Midnight is questioning the manner in which data is dealt with. And not only movement, but exposure. Not just access, but control. That is another strata of the problem. And perhaps that is why it does not seem to fit in with everything. In a marketplace that enjoys seeing visible good things, Midnight is engaged in having something less visible, yet possibly more fundamental. The question of whether or not that direction becomes fundamental or remains a niche remains unanswered. At present, however, it is one of the few projects not to be merely doing an improvement job on what is already there. It is listening to what all the other people chose not to listen to. $NIGHT #night