Stop through transparency

Work trips make me feel like I am missing out on all things Steem. So, what has been going on? I have read something about most of the SMT dev being completed, soft consensus and Platform Independent State Files... I have some catch up to do as I have no idea what they are yet.

What I do like is that I turn my back for a moment things change, and I am pretty sure that one day when I turn to face it all again after a few days away, an application will have gained viral notoriety and Steem will be heading up the news charts.

I think that when SMTs are introduced, they are likely going to fail at first, even though people seem to think that they are going to make Steem go moon. But as the developers come to terms with them and begin to develop compelling usecases, they will start making inroads all over the internet to bring easy tokenization to a whole range of platforms and communities.

Each instance they are applied is going to create a little window and funnel onto the Steem Blockchain and values are going to be trickling in from all four billion corners of the internet. In time, not only will the range grow, but with it will come the ease at which they are able to be utilized as more and more tools arrive to lower the bar for application development.

I see this process akin to what happened during the 90s with website development that at one point was a technical field and then it degraded to be much more end user friendly with online drag and drop website builders now the norm. How cool would it be that with a few clicks a website builder like WIX could add a Steem plugin to tokenize any website, or for a forum setup could monetize their reward points near instantly without having to alter the experience greatly.

If this kind of thing starts to happen and picks up momentum, there won't just be the funnels of users coming on, there will be all kinds of data pouring in through the tokens in much the same way that an API sucks in information. Does this mean that Steem becomes a mass data collector with the difference that much of the information is transparent and freely available?

I am not sure how it will work, but I figure that with uptake there will eventually be a point that the range of data points being collected through the SMT empowered applications is going to be a valuable source of information and, it will be more valuable as it will be immutable, it will stand. While this might scare many people, I figure that this is already happening behind the curtains through Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple anyway, we just don't have access to the same information they do, which means that the playing field can never be level.

Knowledge is power and information is the source of knowledge, it just needs to be converted into something that makes sense. The mass collectors are very, very good at making sense of all of this data through cross-referencing it against all the points collected through ways that we are unable to either leverage ourselves, or avoid. Even if you use nothing Google, avoiding the gateways they funnel data through is near impossible.

Perhaps the only way to disenfranchise the poor behaviors of the knowledge gatekeepers is to take ownership of our data and, make large amounts of it freely available for anyone to access. radical honesty? Perhaps not, but over time it will slowly chip away at the value of information as it takes away the factor of scarcity. Data isn't scarce, but the small number of organizations that control it make it like the diamond industry, a near monopoly.

Many people think diamonds are scarce and therefore valuable but there are vast numbers already dug out of the ground and in the hands of a a couple companies, the largest of which is De Beers, a complete monopoly until a couple decades ago. Just think, while the buyers of diamonds believe they are rare, they actually have no idea how many are in circulation and those who control release can literally flood the market with diamonds across the globe and no one can actually know the actual numbers in circulation. They still sell at a premium based on market sentiment - of the end buyer.

I wonder if De Beers would want to have each diamond registered on a blockchain, the serial number they have added for theft tracking listed, and every new release onto the market, added on as the diamond inflation rate. I have a feeling that diamond circulation transparency would put a stop to the belief of diamond scarcity.

While I don't think it would happen anytime soon, it is interesting to think what a resource transparent world might look like where every item and service of any value is tracked and the entire supply chain movement of every component used is scrapable. I would say that the middlemen extractors wouldn't want their world made transparent as it destroys their value proposition, it destroys their competitive advantage of opaqueness and secrecy of value flows.

I sometimes wonder if our desire for data privacy is actually a Trojan horse driven in so that we won't be able to demand transparency from those who collect the data and benefit from capitalizing on the two most valuable resources on this planet, us and our attention.

While we worry about hiding from each other, they never have to show their face as they pick our data pockets.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]