United States President Donald Trump had said that he may ban Chinese apps including TikTok or might do something about it. Weeks after making the statement in media, Trump’s executive order banning WeChat could result into many different consequences in America. The order, which also bans such transactions with social media app TikTok will come into effect on September 20.
The ban could directly mean that the Chinese residing in America will be cut-off from their relatives, families and friends. It could also mean that citizens of China, who are having small business, could see immediate impact.
The talks about banning these Chinese apps were at place for a long time. And while the talks were on many in the United States resorted to the Signal app. Unlike other messaging apps—Telegram, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp—Signal isn’t banned in China.
So the Chinese people in the United States have took to the high privacy app in the super power.
Need for blockchain-based chat apps
It can be the case that Signal could technically be banned by the Chinese—or US—government tomorrow. And in that case, decentralized chat apps or messaging systems are a must.
“Decentralized chat would completely solve this problem [of government bans and snooping],” said Brad Kam, the co-founder of Dapp Unstoppable Domains, a decentralized domain name registrar that has built an Ethereum-based decentralized chat app, Unstoppable Chat.
“The issue is that user data is sitting on Tencent’s [WeChat’s owner] servers and gets passed directly to the Chinese government. If WeChat were a decentralized chat app, then users would control their own messages stored on P2P storage networks. Not even WeChat would be able to read the messages,” he said.
Kam also mentioned that Signal can still shut off users and any messaging app can be “hacked or shut down.”
Chris Troutner, a Bitcoin Cash developer, also told Decrypt that decentralized messaging systems are the way forward.
“Decentralized, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted,” he added. “You really need all three [with a messaging app].”
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