And it has zero privacy: everybody can see everybody's transactions.
One could equally make the point that Facebook is secure because no one has hacked their servers, and that it is open because it is free to join. That's a pointless thing to say though.
But in any case: yes, there is an inherent tension between privacy and openness.
How do I openly share social information with some people without sharing it with everyone? These principles are in conflict.
I did some work way back when FB got popular on the idea of using probabilistic data structures (ie, Bloom filters) to store contact lists, which could then be shared so that (in theory) only people who knew the same people would also know that they knew them. I built a FB app proving this could work technically.
But there are clear security issues with it - it gives a veneer of apparent privacy but doesn't stand up to attacks.
This is what everyone is talking about and the point you seem to be missing: you can't have this both ways. There is a conflict between privacy and openness.
Since you seem fixated on the crypto-payment thing: Monero mostly solves anonymous payments, but then what? Say I want to buy a pair of shoes with it - how do I stop someone knowing where to deliver it? Any attempt at solving this runs into the same problem: you have to tell someone the same thing you are trying to keep secret, and if that person is the attacker then the system falls to pieces.
That's the real trade-off: we reclaim ownership of our data with knowledge of where it goes and who's using it for what, but that means a full embrace of DRM (something our community has typically been against.)
I agree that could work though.
Well actually that’s very much still in dispute:
That's in direct opposition to security. When you grant people you don't even know much less trust access to your system, all bets are off. There's just no way to predict what is going to happen. You've lost the fundamental protection afforded by trust.
Today, computers are expected to be able to talk to and serve hundreds of thousands of random users. What if one of them has access to a 0day? They could own the machine. The world would be a lot more secure if servers dropped all incoming packets by default and talked to trusted users only.
Bitcoin is open to everyone and that's great, but it doesn't change the fact people managed to sneak a bunch of illegal pictures into its blockchain.
The problem is we can't try anything new - since it's all stored in FB's servers, we have to wait for them to build new granular capabilities.
The thought that they can't "do better" than dialogs / strings identifying each permission is laughable.
It's not rocket science.
As platforms, blockchain is more open than facebook and for access control it's less open. GP was referring to security being at odds with openness in the sense of access control.
Who has a financial incentive to build and maintain that system?