Blockchain Projects Securing Individual Rights
The world of tomorrow's liberties is currently in beta testing mode
I am a huge fan of Liberty and Cryptocurrencies, in that order: I am not interested in Cryptos because they’re faddish, techy, novel or exploding in value.
My interest lies in the fact that the invention of the Blockchain and its application in Cryptocurrencies and Crypto markets has introduced an entirely new way for humans to interact in permissionless, trustless and frictionless ways using distributed services, which pay huge respect to the very real and valuable human values of autonomy, equality, initiative and personal investment, reward and responsibility.
There is a lot of jargon in the previous paragraph, about which a separate article could be written. I’ll sum up:
Permissionless: freedom of association
Trustless: security of transaction with no direct knowledge of the reliability of the other individual or intermediaries required
Frictionless: reduction of arbitrary difficulties in executing any particular transaction to near zero
Distributed: widely dispersed nodes/owners, each with a small but meaningful stake in the success of operations
If you’re mystified how some digital abstraction created entirely by algorithms could ever have any real-world value, you need to understand that what people are buying isn’t the current digital token; what they’re buying into (if they’re knowledgeable, which many crypto groupies are not) is the possibilities of the tech being developed and its real-world returns of value to millions around the world in the next few years.
These crypto projects have revolutionized Venture Capital (VC) by going straight to the public and crowdsourcing their interest in participating in the economy of the future in a way that static investments in gofundme and other Web2.0 crowdfunding relics could never do.
Dynamite Use Cases
Digital Cash
When bitcoin first came out, it was billed as digital cash. People mined or bought thousands of them for pennies and used them to pay for pizza and online purchases in niche markets. It’s not that way anymore, as the use case for bitcoin has transitioned to be a store of value similar to gold, silver or the Yap islanders’ Rai stones. The question is, how much gold do you own? How often do you use it in any sort of transaction? How useful is it to you on a daily basis (beyond wedding ring symbolism, which I grant is very real in a marriage!)?
Ethereum, the #2 cryptocurrency today, was never supposed to be “digital cash”; it’s a “smart contract” network which makes it a marketplace and building block for other projects, notably what’s known as DeFi (decentralized finance), within which dozens of other projects launch and trade their own tokens without requiring the building of their own physical network or blockchains.
Digital cash was the first promise of Cryptocurrency—as yet unfulfilled in a meaningful way for ‘normies’—but it is on the horizon.
Imagine walking into any shop worldwide, reviewing products and prices denominated in any real-world fiat or crypto currency, and paying in seconds at the cost of fractions of pennies using your phone with any of your own assets from fiat, to any crypto, to even some of your stocks?
It’s already happening in Korea, where millions use a wallet powered by Terra Networks’ Luna project, which has developed a way to algorithmically and reliably derive digital versions of any fiat currency that track with their fiat value, while maintaining liquidity sufficient for everyday digital cash transactions for billions of people. Recently, Terra has produced an equivalent product for mirroring stocks and other assets (called Mirror protocol), so conceivably, Grandma could pay for pizza with the grandkids using a just-in-time withdrawal from her retirement account for near zero transaction cost, with a press of her thumb. These transactions and technologies are secured by dozens of networked, distributed validators and thousands of stakers of the Luna crypto coin who risk today’s capital to deliver the frictionless transactions of tomorrow. Their reward beyond the tiny transaction fees denominated in Luna is the growth of their investment: Luna is up over 1000% this year.* Yeah, since Christmas.
Adoption is expanding worldwide. Keep an eye out for it. VISA and AMEX are giants for their gatekeeping in this space. That will change.
Digital Ownership
Real-world ownership of items of value is determined by accumulation of deeds and purchase records. Once sold, the item moves permanently beyond the creator’s reach without some costly court proceedings. If an item is stolen, it takes shoe leather on the part of detectives to track further transfers of the item, and many items may end up in dispute as to who owns them.
Introducing NFT’s: non-fungible tokens. While so far, NFT’s have been limited to some digital art productions of varying artistic value, there’s every reason to believe the real-world physical transfer of almost any valuable item that can be identified will be tracked with its own digital code in its own NFT. Think your house, car, diamonds that have serial numbers, physical artworks, organizational memberships, sports tickets, books published.
Uniquely, NFT’s provide the option for an artist to release an album online, and get paid a couple of cents every time it gets played on the radio, with exactly zero contracts between the artist, the radio station, and certainly no record labels. Imagine a photographer who gets paid when a website uses their stock photography? Imagine immutable land records wherein a village in Africa could stake a claim to their village’s land area, as determined by GPS and an associated NFT, resisting some corporation dumping unwanted slag on their territory on the veracity of that claim?
There are a plethora of NFT projects out there right now, but the ones most interesting to me are:
Unstoppable Internet
The Internet versions 1.0 and 2.0 promised to open the world to freedom of information, and it started out like that.
Today, the costs and economic efficiencies of providing datacenters full of servers to service the public’s Internet demands have created gigantic corporations who have centralized much of the Internet. These corporations are constantly consolidating control along the lines of their own vision of what the Internet and the World at large should be; but only according to them. With the supreme priority of their own profit and power.
We are now at the mercy of their convoluted, ever changing and beyond-the-law Terms of Service, and anything we do or say might be arbitrarily wiped from the Internet tomorrow.
Any lover of Liberty will recognize this is a huge threat, even if their own opinions are not currently disfavored.
Introducing Web 3.0: not only are the services distributed, as in Web 1 & 2, in Web 3 the service providers are distributed as well. Each of us can participate with minor capital and/or skills investments, in delivering tomorrow’s unstoppable apps. Website creators can make use of an atomized network of systems delivering their app trustlessly, frictionlessly and with near-zero capital investment in servers and service accounts, with high reliability and scalability, as the worldwide network of service providers each deliver fractions of the overall processing capacity and throughput. Any one provider going offline means nothing to the network. A citywide network goes down, no issue. All this is transacted in the network coin, with the value of that coin being determined by the value of the network as determined by the marketplace.
On this front, Akash network’s Mainnet v2 goes live in March. Validators/providers with the skills can participate with almost any modern server hardware or cloud account, those without the skills can purchase and use a made-for-purpose Akash Supermini node starting in Q3 2021.
Akash is up 390% this month.*
Self-Sovereign ID
This is the big daddy of them all. This use case ties together the possibilities of all the other use cases, and others yet to be discovered.
This use case asks and provides an answer to the question: Who am I?
Today, who you are is mostly a function of your community and esoteric trusts:
Who is my family?
What is my nation, and who does my government say I am?
What associations am I a member of?
What are the accounts I have, and how are those accounts secured?
In the pre-web days, these were secured mostly by papers, government ID’s and someone recognizing you as you walked in the door. Web 2 introduced passwords and online accounts tied to email addresses. It’s standard Web 2 practice to verify a user with a closed-loop email submission, trusting that Gmail or whomever manages that email account has done the work to reasonably determine individuality and validity of participation.
This has been problematic as bots, charlatans and anonymous s***posters have made Web 2 applications a hazardous place, and have fueled calls for autocratic crackdowns on misbehavior, crushing the concept of dissent along the way. Lovers of Liberty are greatly concerned about this, especially in conjunction with the Web 2 service provider conglomerates’ rise to unprecedented power.
Accounts have been problems as well, as the proliferation of a huge variety of account security schemes and practices has created a massive threat profile that is highly profitable for dark web identity traders and hackers to constantly test and threaten online security.
In the midst of it all, I am surely me, and have been my entire life. I know this, and everyone I trust knows who I am. How can I take my Personhood online and use my unique identity to trustlessly, securely and “self-sovereignly” participate in the future world of transactions and ownership?
Self-sovereignty is hugely important to this concept; after all, governments shift, laws fail, migrations happen, and more often than we’d like, events precipitate a rush to the nearest border and a refugee camp becomes home. Through all this, my record of who I am needs to remain secure. My ownership records, my ability to spend cash, my access to the unstoppable apps is tied to this question: Who am I?
In June, a blockchain-based self-sovereign identity network goes live. Uniris makes use of finger scans to isolate the absolutely unique pattern of veins in your fingers to tie your identity to its validation algorithms. Their motto is Be The Only Key, and their tech, if it delivers what it promises, will do just that for anyone with fingers. Anyone without fingers, I’m sure we will find ways to identify them as well. This is only the beginning of Self-Sovereign ID, and it will not stop at the edges of the Internet; after all, blockchains are tolerant of disconnection; if someone registers Himalayan villagers, their ID’s will be included in the latest block upon the agent returning to networked civilization. Whenever these folks emerge to participate online (or the networks arrive to their vicinity), they are registered and already may have received payments from remittances or hiking guide clients.
Your medical records will be locked securely within encrypted & distributed Web 3 apps, accessible only to you and the people you give permissions to, secured by your unique personhood without permissions of anyone else. Your ability to opine in front of your county board on municipal water projects may be tied to your digital ID and NFT ownership of your house in the jurisdiction. You can participate on social media knowing that everyone you’re talking to is a real person, not a bot or a person with 50 logins in the application.
At what cost to anonymity? There will be solutions for that as well. 2nd-layer applications will create “realms” within which you get to determine who you are in a social media or gaming app, what your handle is and how much you reveal about yourself to the other participants in that realm. Care to disappear from a realm? Delete it. Re-sign up pretending to be someone else? The app still knows who you are, as you are tied to your digital ID. The app makers can determine what flexibility they’re willing to extend to participants. Either way, 1 user = 1 actual person.
Voting? That’s already a key part of digital governance of dozens of Crypto projects as determined by their ownership of the token. Governments will one day embrace the assurance that everyone who voted has been identified and has voted at max once in the jurisdictions they are valid to vote in, tied to their unique personhood, citizenship status and voting jurisdictional registration.
100% secure online voting? Government services by subscription? Digital nationhood? Imagine the possibilities.
Wen Lambo?
A common joke in Crypto trading forums as people jostle for participation in the latest rocket ship making a bid for the moon, waiting for it to take off.
I’ve laid out some dynamite use cases of the new tech, and the rockets are fueling. While the solutions on the horizon are prospective at the moment, it is worth it for ‘normies’ to start understanding that there is real value hidden in the hype, and consider increasing their knowledge of the Crypto space and respecting it beyond the quick cash scheme many people think it is.
If you are technically inclined or want to be, get informed, educated and trained in the new protocols being developed even as you read this.
The world of tomorrow’s disruptive tech is here already, and is in its beta tests; the media will not inform you of much of it until it’s mainstream, and even then they’ll barely grasp the implications.
DYOR: do your own research.
Imagine being a VC funding Dell in 1990, or for Amazon in 1999?
Imagine building them?