Humans are data-savers
Throughout history, we have always felt the need to store the data we acquire. And the reason is simple: Data allows you to make informed decisions based on previous intel you got from the past… on top of keeping a record of each move you make throughout the way.
Think of a business setting for instance. How can a company’s accounting department keep track of all the transactions made over the span of a year… if all the data gets lost or modified in the way?
Or at the most basic of levels, imagine if you suddenly lost track of every single item you own — from your home to your car to your social security number, and you had no reliable way to vouch for your possessions. No certificate. No record available. No nothing. You would quickly find yourself in a situation where you wouldn’t be able to claim back what’s yours by right.
Lack of data would not only lead to chaos — but utter jeopardy.
The matter is clear. In order to vouch for your moves, you need a record that confirms them. And that can only be accomplished with years of data at your disposal. Making it an invaluable asset to possess. But most importantly, preserve.
A Lesson In History
Since the dawn of time — humans have always found new, compelling ways to store the data we’ve created. From punch cards to cassettes. From magnetic tape to floppy disks. From CDs to now the Internet. And it’s safe to say we have reached our peak as far data creation is concerned.
Close to 1.145 trillion MB of data are generated per day — which includes 306.4 billion emails, 500 million Tweets, and more than 100 billion WhatsApp messages. And according to future estimates, these numbers don’t seem to go down anytime soon. Preservation of data is what allows society to function as a whole — making it imperative to maintain its reliability long-term.
A task that unfortunately, has proven to be easier said… than done.
60% of digital data goes missing just a year after creation. And this comes with its set of drowning repercussions. Studies show 60% of companies that lose their data close down within six months of the disaster — 72% of which disappear altogether within a 24-month window.
Just imagine if you lost over half of the entire storage in your computer or phone — wouldn’t you fly off the handle too?
That may sound like an impossibility. But frankly, this is far from new. Humans have struggled mightily to maintain data integrity throughout time. Treating data protection as an afterthought — simply making the occasional copy of the respective family photos every once in a blue moon. This is due to the size of storage required to preserve all your information in the first place.
Naturally, if there are droves of storage to maintain users would fall in the need to rely on a middleman to store this information for them. You know, just to remove this gigantic, 800-pound gorilla out of their back.
Yet as history has shown, these measures come at a cost.
Third-party surveillance always lends itself to be subject to tampering, manipulation & misuse of intel. A great power does come with a great responsibility. Even with the advent of the Internet — which is the largest data storage system to date — information is not safe. The web is mostly regulated by privately-owned government servers and it could easily get revoked or squandered at any given moment. Which ironically, does end up happening more times than not.
Nowadays data is stored redundantly — which does help to reduce the risk of its permanent loss. But as there’s no true way to ensure data copies are valid (and not just a modified version of the original…). We are only left adrift in a sea of useless redundancy.
Servers can get hacked. Timestamps can get altered. Records can vanish in a split of a second. So who can you really trust?
Ultimately, it’s not that data isn’t permanent — because it can very well be.
The real issue at hand is that data gets corrupted.
Integrity gets tossed to the side. Forgotten. Ditched & thrown out the window. And as these two principles go hand by hand — you get the expected result. People now believe data permanence is nothing more than a myth.
A sweet fantasy never to truly get carried out before, and with zero to no probability to ever happen in the near future.
And judging by current history, how could one dispute it?
Not that long ago Facebook got involved in one of the biggest scandals recorded in recent times — selling off harvested data of 87 million users for their own self-interest. Which only goes to prove the point:
Whenever data is stored & dependent on middle men, users are bound to fall victim to fraudulent misuse of the former.
Or worse still — become practically unable to vouch for the own legitimacy of their data. People are losing their unequivocal right to demand authenticity over their information. A dilemma that’s bound to repeat itself for as long as third parties are around.
Or at least… for as long as we allow them to stay around.
NFTs: A Compelling Answer To The Data Permanence Dilemma
Remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when Willy Wonka took you on a tour of his factory if you found one of his golden tickets?
In case you don’t… I’ll give you a quick rundown:
Secretive Willy Wonka was head of the baddest chocolate factory in the whole world. Only the most delicious sweets & chocolates were made in this place.
Kids couldn’t help but drool at the prospect of discovering what amazing things happened inside the gigantic branch. Thing is… after one fall off Willy had with his employees a couple of years back — no one had ever been seen entering or leaving the factory since. Not even Willy Wonka himself.
Until one day, when out of the blue Wonka decides to hide 5 special golden tickets inside of five separate chocolate bars. Promising an exquisite tour of the factory and a lifetime supply of Wonka products for each child who finds a ticket.
Suddenly, the entire world enters into a frenzy — in the quest to get their hands on one of these precious tickets. After all, there are only five in circulation and there will never be more.
The Wonka tickets were non-fungible. They couldn’t be replaced — and no amount of fortune would allow you to buy ownership of one. You either found one — or you didn’t.
Non-Fungible = Non-Replaceable
Now, this is a pretty simple concept to wrap your head around. But once you take it into the digital sphere — it starts to get tricky.
Physically, you can claim legitimacy over the ticket. It’s there… you have it.
But imagine if Wonka had decided to digitize the tickets. It wouldn’t be as straightforward now. Anyone could come, make an identical copy of the original ticket, go over to the factory and claim it’s his. Wonka would never be able to tell if it’s fake.
Unless… he leveraged the power of NFTs in his favor.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are simply a digital representation of ownership and authenticity of an asset — in this case, the ticket. But it can also apply to a piece of digital artwork, a song, a video, a GIF, or anything that qualifies as ‘unique’.
Yet unlike its physical parallel, an NFT is stored using blockchain technology. Which comes with two major trump cards:
- Immutability. It can’t possibly be rigged because once stored in the blockchain — it is publicly recorded as such. In order to alter it… the perpetrator would need to forge the record in every single block in the chain at the same time. Which is arguably impossible as there are millions upon millions of blocks in the chain.
- Decentralization. The blockchain isn’t controlled by any one entity in particular. It’s a long network of computer systems that work hand by hand to maintain a public record of your data. Which not only ensures your NFT is fraud-proof, but also guarantees the ownership of your asset.
So going back to our Wonka example…
If he decided to make a NFT out of each of his tickets with blockchain, he would instantly be able to verify which one is which, preventing potential fraud from occurring. Winners would be able to step into the factory & prove once and for all that they are the original owner of the ticket.
Which is great. But it does come with a downside.
See… the ticket itself isn’t actually the NFT.
Technical limitations prevent the digital ticket to be stored along with the token on the blockchain. Instead… it has to be stored elsewhere on the Internet and link to it using the NFT’s ‘metadata’. For instance… Imagine you ran out of storage in your laptop, and you resort to storing your files in Google Drive.
When you do this, your documents are not stored in Google Drive per se — but in the ‘cloud’, the web. Using metadata, a link is created between your file & the cloud so you can view your document. But if for one reason or another Google Drive decided to close its doors today then your files would probably vanish and be lost forever.
NFTs work the same way.
If suddenly, the blockchain ceased to exist so would your data. And this is the main setback NFTs face at the moment.
Right now, the world finds itself in a massive ‘NFT hype bubble’ — just like with the golden tickets in the Wonka chocolate bars. And it’s a challenge to predict what this will all lead to in the near future. So for now we only know one thing:
Data integrity is no longer a ‘premium’… it’s a necessity.
And blockchain poses the single most definite answer to keep that problem at bay — at least for the moment.
Let that sink in!
