Banyan Network: The 3 Laws of Data Value
From retail, to logistics, finance, heath, and social media, it seems no sector of the economy is safe from the “Big Data” disruption. Big Data has made its way to the whiteboards, meeting rooms, and powerpoint presentations of every corporate offices north of the South Pole. Everybody is talking about those two little words, but whoever said good things comes in pairs didn’t know a basic tenet of data: more is better. What’s better than two? Three. Good things come in three, and in this article, we will dive into the three laws of data value, core principles of the Banyan Network, the solution to do Big Data the right way.
First Law: data in silence accelerates devaluation
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? In a digital world where countless servers collect our digital footprints, what good is that all data if only to be stored, hoarded but never used? It might as well be silent. The corporate world of the past decades has been reshaped by IT, or Information Technology, with the mandate to collect, store and analyze an ever growing amount of data to improve efficiency. But for the most part, most of that data is just sitting inside a server, forever collecting data and dust, never to be used, or worse, left to be hacked and sold to spammers and corporate spies.
For most data living somewhere on the intranet, the first law of data value rings true: never to be used, hence never to amount to anything other than waste. However, for online data, the second law of data value applies.
Second Law: data in circulation produces values
The emerging digital economy has fueled job opportunities, economic growth and improvements in living standards around the globe. Those changes were built on top of a growing telecommunication infrastructure, or information superhighways, including but not limited to the internet.
If the internet was supposed to be decentralized, the omnipresent server-client architecture has made hoarding data the most valuable activity in our current digital economy. The Facebook, Netflix, Uber, and Amazon of the world hold on to their data like Smeagol holds onto his “precious.”
Those platforms have control over a huge ocean of information and data collected on their users. When a user logs in or logs out; clicks on a button, a link, or an ad; likes, upvotes, shares, or retweets; every web search, every url visited; every purchase, every review read or written, etc. Everything a user ever does is recorded somewhere, added to a gigantic and ever growing amount of data (hence the coinage ‘big data’) stored in a dark room with fuzzy lights and blinking LEDs better known as server farms (or server clusters). This data is then organized, cleaned, and processed for its business value.
This processing of data, better known as data analytics, is the life and blood of the digital economy, the source of enormous profits and large revenues. However there’s a limit to this model, and as you probably guessed it, where this business model ends, the Banyan Network begins.
Third Law: integrated data promotes added value
We made it to the promise land! But in order to proceed forward, we must first come back to the beginning, to this basic tenet of data: more is better. What’s better than a server cluster? All the server clusters. What if we could integrate data collected from various server clusters and data sources? What if big data from all over the world could be integrated, consolidated into one data ecosystem? Well, this is Banyan Network’s vision. And in future articles, I will dive into the ecosystem the team at Banyan is building.
This is the beginning of an exciting journey at the intersection of big data and blockchain. Stay tuned. In the meantime, check out the Banyan Network website and you can also follow them on Twitter and Telegram.
