uni-social

Inspiration

Harassment has become an increasingly more difficult problem to solve as social media becomes a larger part of our lives. One reason for this is the issue of lack of accountability- if I send someone a private image or intimate moment, the only guarantee I have that someone will not send that image or personal information to someone else is trust. But the idea of trust is completely removed by the idea of a social media app built on a _smart contract _.

What it does

Uni-Social that tries to drop the concept of social media write on top of the Ethereum blockchain. With the use of smart contracts, we can make sure that nobody else's information is shared explicitly without that person's permission. The ethereum platform is a powerful blockchain built on the concept of a _ smart contract _ - code that validates whether or not a transaction has met certain requirements. The Uni-Social platform attempts to take advantage of this by developing a smart contract that uses the idea of transactions as messages.

How I built it

The client was built as a local wallet on android studio. The server was built using nodejs and web3 a client which allows for interactions with a local block chain Solidity was used to build the smart contract.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge I ran into was trying to figure out how to let the client speak to the server. After a while however, I had it functionally working on my both the server and the local client

What I learned

I learned about solidity, and building smart contracts. This means that by the end of the hackathon I was able to build my own special ethereum coin, or ethereum transaction from scratch.

How it works.

Uni-social keeps special meta-data in a private "smart contract" (special rules for two clients to speak to each other) in a way that allows for the platform to permanently keep track of which message is being sent to who. If a personal image, like revenge porn or nudes are released to the public forum on the block chain, the meta data of the smart contract can be used to trace the first person who originally sent that image.

What's next for uni-social

Uni-Social will extend beyond simple smart contracts which protect private messages from being shared. It will eventually extend as a smart contract built on the ethereum block chain that will be able to give new and upcoming social media platforms instant access to the a myriad of users located on the chain.

Built With

• java