There is the question of who will have an incentive to create these things. At present, companies like Facebook and Google get their revenue from owning the data about us. But if companies don’t own data, and can’t aggregate it, then the value for them craters. The only companies that then have an incentive to create platforms are those that sell hardware, like Apple. Thus we see the fundamental and long-lasting flaw in how the Web evolved: that people have not been asked to pay for services, and there is no single sign-on that enables someone to buy services without “having an account”, with the trouble of entering credit card info isolated to the one-time activity of setting up the account. E.g., I buy things from Amazon mostly because it is convenient: they have my credit card info.
Cryptocurrencies might solve the “must have an account” problem. Still, what are companies selling? By taking back our data, we are trying to reverse a decades-long trend and entrenched business models. Can we do it? Perhaps Europe can — I have big doubts that the US can, where the deepest pockets always get their way.
Also, the foundational technologies are so deeply flawed, that I am wondering if it is a Tower of Babel that will collapse. IoT has not taken off because no one trusts all those devices, which have been proven to be insecure. If the use of cryptocurrencies becomes mainstream, I envision that people’s keys will be stolen en-mass by malware. Web technologies are so horribly broken that the Web’s core protocols and browser standards need to be scrapped if we want things to be secure. Browsers and HTTP are not secure enough to support widespread use of active Web content like Javascript, which is where we are now and single page Web apps have made it worse. If we shift data ownership to the user, then we are relying on ourselves to keep things secure, whereas now we rely on Google, Facebook, and Target and so on, and even they have trouble.
