This is Blockchains Killer App
Blockchains killer app is already here
It’s just not very evenly distributed yet
It is individual personal sovereignty over every Bit of our personal data footprint. Which is a fancy way of saying every person in the world will own and decide what happens with all their personally created data. We take back control over everything we contribute to, create or touch online and become the gatekeepers of who we grant access to. Open data becomes closed personal ownership where we are the guardians of our own fate instead of the exploited parties whose privacy is being stolen.
The how is even simpler
Every person becomes their own Blockchain
Access to information is granted to third parties through smart contracts that automatically sever the connection at the expiration of the deal. The data remains on our own blockchain servers meaning the third party never possesses it leaving no potential for the costly leaks that have grown in frequency. We grant them access rights for a limited period of time and control exactly the information we choose to share. It could be access to our driving history to our car insurance provider, our spending to our mortgage lender or education performance to an employer.
The implications of this are huge
Visit the doctor? The records are updated and recorded to your personal blockchain, not kept by the healthcare provider, saved in a format that is universally understood and beneficial. You can choose to share this information anonymously with health researchers trying to find out cures to the hardest medical problems in the world or not. Your payment could be in a tokenized reward which can be redeemed for things and its value is underpinned by the commoditized data. That’s one simple example.
Another could be peer-to-peer platforms without intermediaries where anonymity is maintained. Transactions online, personal transportation, employment contracts, all guaranteed for trust and quality by the history and reputation that you derive from past performance. Think Airbnb and Uber whose ownership isn’t by a few billionaires but instead the drivers and contributors who provide the service on the platforms.
How will it Emerge?
The world will be split into people willing to participate in this ecosystem and those who will not. People will literally make life and death decisions of who their doctor is based on whether they are willing to give users their data in the format that is compatible with their blockchain. You and I will be the ones who drive this adoption when we appreciate and understand the fundamental benefits for us and the world.
Maintaining this is as simple as an internet connection and a piece of hardware in each of our homes or online in the cloud. This acts as a bank of all our data created from birth, maintained and protected by a number of security measures far greater than currently ensures our digitized safety. Think biometric security, 2 Factor authentication and 256-bit private keys.
Eventually, it enables a world of frictionless digital taxation where payments online are no longer necessary for the products, services or content that we consume. The creators of these things stipulate the terms of our access and we pay a % of our graphic processing units power for the duration which we use or consume. Instead of going through the hassle of paying for things in the way we do currently, micropayments are metered without any obstacles. They just happen when we read an article on the New York Times website or watch a video on a decentralized variant of youtube.
Instead of the internet being owned by 4–5 monopolies, it is ensured and maintained by its users who facilitate the infrastructure and services to run from the storage provided by our personal blockchain. We provide a small portion of data storage to the network which allows for a new distributed web infrastructure to emerge — the extranet. The centralized internet of old evolves to become a fluid continually evolving organism alive with each person’s contribution of data, dying and being reborn every nanosecond through severed and created smart contact connections.
The possibilities are endless but not fully imaginable right now. Just now the innovators are focussed on picking the low hanging fruits by recreating what exists in the analog world as a digital product. This leads to iterative development instead of the revolution the world needs. Dreamers willing to imagine what was previously impossible, but is now a possibility due to innovation, must be braver in taking risks to realize this more quickly.
Blockchains contribution to society will be in enabling our digital selves to emerge as sovereign beings. Right now all our data exists in isolation across millions of different servers in thousands of different formats.
For the world to evolve our digital selves must consolidate into a single being created as a digital twin of ourselves which becomes our avatar for participating in a decentralized world.
Everything owned and maintained by the crowd
A hive mind of consciousness emerges instantly for the solution of complex problems as people grant access to their data which becomes the currency of the world.
