{"id":15292,"date":"2022-11-24T01:21:29","date_gmt":"2022-11-24T01:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nftandcrypto-news.com\/crypto\/crypto-is-breaking-the-google-amazon-apple-monopoly-on-user-data\/"},"modified":"2022-11-24T01:21:31","modified_gmt":"2022-11-24T01:21:31","slug":"crypto-is-breaking-the-google-amazon-apple-monopoly-on-user-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nftandcrypto-news.com\/crypto\/crypto-is-breaking-the-google-amazon-apple-monopoly-on-user-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Crypto is breaking the Google-Amazon-Apple monopoly on user data"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
For decades, banks and insurance firms employed the same mostly static but highly profitable and centralized business models. Also for decades, Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google have monopolized user data for their profit. However, blockchain projects could significantly challenge Big Tech\u2019s grip on user data.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2015, the future of money was at the forefront of financial experts\u2019 minds at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, they started to seriously focus on the challenges presented by the rise of Bitcoin (BTC), digital assets and fintech. The world of finance began to realize that new technologies were upending everything in the sector, from savings to trading to making payments and cross-border and peer-to-peer transactions.<\/p>\n
Then in the summer of 2020 came the decentralized finance (DeFi) renaissance. After a couple of years of seeing an extraordinary rise in this new concept, the machine economy started to take center stage and concern over who should own the world\u2019s new greatest commodity, data. <\/p>\n
Thanks to blockchain, we have DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi and a new emerging asset category: machine financialization (MachineFi), or the decentralized machine economy. It enables the owners of the billions of internet-connected devices worldwide to monetize them and developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) that draw device data for monetization.<\/p>\n
Related: <\/em><\/strong>Nodes are going to dethrone tech giants \u2014 from Apple to Google<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n One obvious question is: Why?<\/em> Why do devices need financialization or decentralized markets? <\/em>The answer is quite apparent.<\/p>\n Big Tech has built trillion-dollar empires selling user data. Blockchain can change that by democratizing the data and machine economy.<\/p>\n Historically, machine economies have failed to garner traction due to the infrastructure and capital requirements needed to operationalize them. Blockchain changes that by providing users, businesses and developers with an end-to-end solution to distribute, orchestrate and monetize large numbers of smart devices as part of a unified machine network.<\/p>\n There are currently more than 50 blockchain projects related to the Internet of Things (IoT). There are also several traditional tech companies \u2014 such as IBM, Azure, Samsung, Apple, Google and Amazon \u2014 that are combining IoT and blockchain to power the burgeoning machine economy.<\/p>\n So, as we look back at 2021, we see it as the year blockchains became smart. Oracles introduced a new data source that provided facts about the real world to make them more secure and trustworthy. Agreement on the price of Bitcoin and other crypto assets soon followed, creating a \u201csingle version of the truth\u201d that led to the growth of a whole new financial system. DeFi was the foundation for new concepts like peer-to-peer lending and borrowing, and yield farming, which opened new opportunities for investors to earn passive income. Verifiable real-world data became the proof needed for the DeFi revolution.<\/p>\n Everyone in the crypto space knows about proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, evidence provided to the blockchain to receive a reward or permission. If a Bitcoin miner proves they have solved a computationally intensive problem, they become eligible to be the next block producer. For Ethereum, if someone stakes a certain amount of Ether (ETH), they qualify to become an Ethereum validator.<\/p>\n Similarly, a \u201csingle version of the truth\u201d from unbiased, secure machines will be proof-of-work done in the real world, creating limitless opportunities for new business models.<\/p>\n What if \u201cproof\u201d could also be generated from regular activities people perform in their daily lives? <\/strong>IoT devices and machines \u2014<\/em> like those in a smart home, wearables, cameras and autonomous vehicles \u2014 have the potential to become \u201cproof providers\u201d that can use blockchain to capture the utility and value that people generate from everyday activities. <\/p>\n Related: <\/em><\/strong>Facebook and Twitter will soon be obsolete thanks to blockchain technology<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Proof-of-presence could be determined from an asset tracker on a vehicle that feeds real-time GPS location information to a crowdsourced map. <\/em>In the insurance space, proof-of-health can be provided by wellness data from a wearable, or proof-of-safety can be obtained from driving patterns. Proof-of-humanity helps verify people\u2019s identity with biometric information.<\/p>\n Smart devices and machines on the blockchain will provide an opportunity to return data ownership to the people, enabling them to do what they wish with their property \u2014 including monetizing it. Blockchain-based IoT projects offer greater trust, security, interoperability and scalability than their predecessors, and they generate new efficiencies and business value by drawing on the data supplied by IoT devices and sensors.<\/p>\n By 2030, estimates suggest IoT projects will represent more than $12 trillion in value globally. But who will own this value? Will large corporations continue to manage devices on centralized cloud platforms and be the gatekeepers of the new machine economy? We are at a pivotal moment in history. The decisions about how the machine economy evolves will reap consequences \u2014 or benefits \u2014 for decades.<\/p>\n A decentralized backbone, purpose-built to enable billions of machines on the blockchain, is what we need to democratize the machine economy\/IoT industry and remove it from the domain of Big Tech. The IoT machine economy would require a combination of blockchain, secure hardware and confidential computing to empower user-owned devices, apps and services:<\/p>\n By pairing the integrity of secure hardware with the immutability of blockchain, we can create a new paradigm for end-to-end trust to help ensure that the machine economy grows in a way that creates more opportunities for users and curbs the influence of the few large companies that would seek its control.<\/p>\n Raullen Chai<\/strong> is the co-founder and CEO of IoTeX. He previously worked for companies including Google, Uber and Oracle. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo, where his research focused on designing and analyzing lightweight ciphers and IoT authentication protocols. At Google, he led many important security initiatives for its technical infrastructure, including mitigation of SSL attacks, privacy-preserving SSL offloading and enabling certificate transparency for all Google services. He was also the founding engineer of Google Cloud Load Balancer, which now serves thousands of cloud services, with 1 million-plus queries per second.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author\u2019s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For decades, banks and insurance firms employed the same mostly static but highly profitable and centralized business models. Also for decades, Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google have monopolized user data for their profit. However, blockchain projects could significantly challenge Big Tech\u2019s grip on user data.\u00a0 In 2015, the future […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crypto"],"yoast_head":"\nSingle version of the truth<\/h2>\n
Proof-of-anything<\/h2>\n
Smart devices: The new machine economy<\/h2>\n
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