Crypto is upending the Google-Amazon-Apple monopoly on user data.
In particular when it comes to the Internet of Things, blockchain is undermining Big Tech companies and cloud providers.
For many years, banks and insurance companies used the same centralized, largely static, and extremely profitable business models. Big Tech companies have monopolized user data to make money for years. Blockchain projects may undermine Big Tech’s user data control.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2015, the future of money was on the minds of many financial experts. There, they began to seriously concentrate on the difficulties brought on by the rise of Bitcoin BTC.
New technologies revolutionized peer-to-peer and cross-border transactions, savings, trading, and payment methods.
Then, in the summer of 2020, the decentralized finance (DeFi) renaissance began. After a couple of years of witnessing an extraordinary rise in this new idea, the machine economy began to take center stage and concerns over who should own the world’s newest greatest commodity, data, began to surface.
Blockchain has created DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi, and MachineFi, the decentralized machine economy. Developers can create decentralized applications (DApps) that monetize device data, and device owners can monetize them.
One obvious query is: Why? Why do devices require financialization or decentralized markets? The solution is quite clear.
Selling user data has allowed Big Tech to create trillion dollar empires. By democratizing the data and machine economies, blockchain can change that.
Due to the infrastructure and funding requirements needed to operationalize them, machine economies have historically struggled to gain traction. Blockchain alters this by offering consumers, companies, and developers a complete solution for distributing, managing, and making money off of a large number of smart devices as part of a single machine network.
More than 50 IoT blockchain initiatives exist (IoT). IBM, Azure, Samsung, Apple, Google, and Amazon are combining IoT and blockchain to fuel the machine economy.
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There is only one version of the truth.
Therefore, 2021 will be remembered as the year that blockchain technology truly advanced. Oracles introduced a real-world data source to improve security and credibility. Bitcoin and other crypto assets were priced after a “single truth” sparked a new financial system. Real-world, independently verifiable data became the DeFi revolution’s required proof.
Proof-of-work and proof-of-stake must be submitted to the blockchain for permission or a reward. Bitcoin miners can become block producers if they solveFor Ethereum, if someone stakes a certain amount of Ether ETH.
They are eligible to become an Ethereum validator.
A “single version of the truth” from impartial, secure machines will prove real-world work, opening up new business models.
Proof-of-anything
What if “proof” came from daily tasks? IoT devices and machines, such as those in a smart home, wearables, cameras, and autonomous vehicles, can use blockchain to capture utility and value generated by daily activities.
Proof of presence could be established using a vehicle’s asset tracker that transmits real-time GPS data to a crowdsourced map. In insurance, driving habits or wearable health data can prove safety. Proof-of-humanity uses biometrics to verify identities.
Smart machines and devices on the blockchain will let people regain control of their data and make money from it. Blockchain-based IoT projects outperform their predecessors in terms of trust, security, interoperability, and scalability. Additionally, they create new efficiencies and economic value.
Smart devices: The new machine economy
IoT projects are predicted to have a global value of more than $12 trillion by 2030. But who will be the owner of this value? Will big businesses keep controlling the new machine economy and operating devices on centralized cloud platforms? We are living in a crucial period of history. The choices made regarding the development of the machine economy will have long-term effects — or benefits.
To democratize the machine economy and IoT sector and free it from Big Tech’s control, we need a decentralized blockchain backbone to supportTo enable user-owned devices, apps, and services, the IoT machine economy would need a combination of blockchain, secure hardware, and confidential computing:
Everyone trusts real-world data captured and signed by secure hardware.
Then, in a secure manner, real-world data oracles transfer this verifiable data to the blockchain.
Humans and machines can now own their data as digital assets that they can trade and earn using DApps thanks to decentralized identity.
We can develop a new paradigm for end-to-end trust by combining the immutability of blockchain with the integrity of secure hardware to make sure that the machine economy expands in a way that gives users more opportunities and limits the influence of the few powerful companies that would like to control it.
This article is for general informational purposes only. The author’s views, ideas, and opinions are his or her own and do not necessarily reflect or represent those of Cointelegraph.
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