In our day-to-day lives, we so often assume that everything follows conventions of correctness or properness; that everything that is going on, is exactly how it should be. Like privacy and managing sensitive data in digital platforms. Or securitising data in the cloud.
There is so much “insert fancy tech word” encryption, lots of “insert fancy tech word” security firewalls. What could possibly go wrong?
But what if the very design of managing data was just inherently wrong from the very beginning? Storing data in databases, the cloud, other people’s systems: what if all of it was designed in such a way as to imply that we must give away control and that we must trust someone to manage it all for us. And of course, that doing so was completely “okay”?
Until… of course, it slowly started to feel obvious that it wasn’t.
The current paradigm of data management is analogous to seeing data storage as the same as putting money into a bank vault. Grab data, open vault, lock data in. But we somehow lost track of the fact that data (just like money) has intrinsic value. And banks have long since realised that rather than simply storing the cash of their clients, they could use the reserve of money within it to find new opportunities to generate even more money i.e. loans, shares, mortgages… And similarly, custodians of data are constantly using the data they hold to find new sources of revenue.
So, who are these modern day “data financiers”, who promise to be safe custodians of our data, but who also leverage it for the purpose of generating money. The short answer is they are everywhere: from Cloud providers, promising to keep data safe in the cloud, to e-commerce platforms or in some cases even our government health and electronic portals for managing everyday administration. What started as innovation towards digital ease, quickly pivoted to digital data banking.
Of course, we knew something was amiss and had gotten out of control whilst many an internet firm was not only leveraging the data being deposited with it, but progressively moving towards data scavenging. Hence the emergence of regulatory initiatives such as GDPR, which tried to throw in some hand brakes to data economies (also analogous to regulatory bodies in banking). Many would joke that GDPR is nothing short of an inconvenience to the user experience as we click away to accept or decline annoying pop ups that we barely have time to fully read. Maybe it is time to go back to the drawing board and pose the question… is there a better way to manage data altogether?
Going Trustless is such a paradigm shift… What if you always remain the custodian of your own data? What if you are free to pick and choose the means which you use to look to generate revenue from your own data (if that is of interest to you).
Going Trustless applies to individuals, organisations and even governments or any agency that generates and creates data. Having a system whereby they will always remain their own “bank” for their data and thereby always in control.
Setting the scene, in the subsequent posts we will take a deeper dive into the mechanics of how Trustless systems work and are implemented and explore their true potential for “changing the game”.
