Midnight Network Is Trying to Solve a Strange Blockchain Problem: Everything Is Too Visible

Public blockchains were proved to be something. Transparency works. It is open to anyone to see what is going on and to establish that the system is working in honest conditions. However, the success in question introduced a new issue unobtrusively. So what will become of it when it is all seen? Full transparency was viewed as a strength in crypto. Bitcoin demonstrated that money could be transferred without the assistance of banks yet it could still be verified by anyone. Subsequently, intelligent contract systems elaborated on that concept. Code and balances, as well as transactions, were permanently visible on-chain. In the case of open financial systems, that is effective. However, as soon as you attempt to transfer real businesses, identities, or sensitive data to a public blockchain, you get complicated. Firms are not able to showcase the internal financial performance to their rivals. People are not interested in the possibility of their transaction history being publicly tracked. They can not place confidential information on a ledger that any member of the world can read by governments and institutions. And hence the industry is now confronted with an odd contradiction. The technology that is created to bring trust is even too transparent to be applied. This is the issue that @MidnightNetwork is attempting to solve. Midnight is a privacy-driven blockchain. It does not aim at eliminating transparency, rather it lets systems demonstrate things without disclosing the data behind it. Rather than compelling users to reveal the information to the whole network, Midnight allows users to maintain sensitive information private and at the same time verify it using cryptography. The core of this concept is the zero knowledge proof technology. These cryptography techniques enable one to demonstrate that something is true without telling us what is underlying it. Suppose you had to show that you are more than 18. That would usually involve providing a government ID which would disclose your date of birth, name and personal information. Using zero knowledge proofs, the system is able to merely check that the statement is correct. You meet the requirement. But no inner self is exposed. This notion is not complex but the connotation is enormous. It implies that compliance, identity, or transaction validity might be identified in the applications without making sensitive information available to the public ledger. That opens the possibility of numerous systems that simply cannot be run on public blockchains. Companies would be able to execute business contracts without strategic information being exposed. Account verification could be done in financial platforms without account information disclosure. The credentials could be checked by identity systems without any personal records being stored in public sight. The coming of midnights can also be referred to as rational privacy. Information remains confidential in nature, yet can be demonstrated valid when required. Only the necessary information is disseminated and even that only the bound minimum. This establishes a compromise between confidentiality and transparency. The network can be checked, yet nothing sensitive will be revealed permanently. It is possible that that balance is perhaps more significant than some might think. Over the years, blockchains have been concerned with speed, scaling and cost of transactions. However, when the focus is on the purpose of exceeding speculation and developing actual infrastructure, privacy becomes a far greater concern. The real world systems work with identities, financial records, personal information and contracts. All these cannot just be put on a transparent ledger. Midnight is attempting to construct the absent layer on which those systems can be constructed. A blockchain with verification being transparent and information being confidential. In case such a model is successful, it might influence the way in which individuals consider blockchain transparency. The following stage of the technology may not involve exposing all things on-chain. It may be concerning demonstration of things without disclosing them at all. $NIGHT #night