Continuing from my last post talking about the tools we will need to carry on our usual activities in an extreme case of clamp down on cryptocurrency. We’ve identified the role of Mobile Phone’s and how important they are to us. However, most mobile operating systems are centralized which makes them susceptible to manipulation, censorship and surveillance by the powers that be and thereby detrimental to the future of most people’s crypto related activities.
After writing the post, I went further to do some research and I discovered that while we may not presently have mobile operating systems powered by blockchain technology, we do have operating systems that are extremely privacy centric and run on Android O.S. CalyxOS and GrapheneOS are the closest we can get to what a blockchain powered mobile OS will offer.
CalyxOS
CalyxOS minimizes the tracking, surveillance, and spying done by phone manufacturers, mobile phone service providers, internet service providers, advertising companies, data miners, and malicious hackers. The operating system is designed to ensure maximum usability and flexibility, so that you have an array of choices available to ensure your privacy and security.
CalyxOS is designed with the needs of human rights frontline defenders, journalists, lawyers, and political and social activist groups in mind.
This totally describes everything I had in mind that a blockchain powered mobile os will offer. It goes on to state that it comes with a free VPN service from trusted organizations, Tor browser for anonimized web browsing and your data is backed up with strong encryption to your personal cloud server or to USB storage. The most Interesting thing about it is that it does not put your data in google’s cloud or constantly report your location to google.
CalyxOS is developed by community of free software developers working to build tools that enable us to take back our privacy. Click this link to read more about CalyxOS and for installation process
GrapheneOS
GrapheneOS is a private and secure mobile operating system with great functionality and usability. It starts from the strong baseline of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and takes great care to avoid increasing attack surface or hurting the strong security model. GrapheneOS makes substantial improvements to both privacy and security through many carefully designed features built to function against real adversaries. The project cares a lot about usability and app compatibility so those are taken into account for all of our features.
If you were ever looking for a mobile operating system that is totally secure and immune to surveillance, these are the best two option I’ve discovered so far. Unfortunately non of them have support for iPhones.
In the event of a full clamp down on crypto operations, I believe these tools will come in handy especially for mobile users who will want to keep their business away from prying eyes of regulators. But as I’ve mentioned, there might never be the need for such as we don’t expect that regulators will ever go that far. It is our hope that crypto will be embraced with little push back but nothing as drastic as blocking crypto related applications or services offered on mobile operating systems such as Google and iOS.
Thanks for reading.
How can blockchain powered mobile operating systems save users from surveillance by Big Tech?