Why Is Blockchain Important To You?

In discussing technology and its impact on others it’s rare that we come across something that will affect such a large percentage of people in so many ways. We continue to see headlines of cryptocurrencies rising and crashing in price. The buzzwords of decentralization and tokens start to hurt your head after a while. So many, even the ones who are seemingly insiders, seem to miss the point and fail to help the general public understand its importance. So, here is my take. Let’s discuss why blockchain is important to you.

First, we have to ask, what is it? Don’t worry this will be quick. Blockchain is like an excel file. Let’s say you are planning a birthday party and you want to make a list of attendees and their relative data. You write their names, contact numbers, preference of cake flavor, and whether or not they are bringing a guest. That excel file is like a database. That database is in a single location, but imagine taking that database and distributing it to various places across the world. This creates better security because all the data is not in one single location therefore it has no single point of failure. Then you can put rules on each and every cell block, which is when a row and column meet. This data is immutable meaning it can’t be changed, and it’s transparent because as a public ledger, everyone can see it. But your identity can be kept anonymous because although you are verified your ID can be cryptographically represented by a long list of numbers and letters that only the technology itself can verify. Big breath. We are done here. Why is this important to you?

Big companies move slowly. When you have to set a 3–5 year budget and an emerging technology comes around you don’t have the flexibility and the buy-in to steer the ship around. So it’s a highly entrepreneurial environment right now. So if you are reading this and you know there’s something more for you out there, or maybe you are already an entrepreneur, or maybe you just have been looking for a way to deploy your passions, and you are looking for that get-ahead factor, this is that get-ahead factor.

I don’t have to go into much detail to get you to agree that our world has become increasingly embedded in a culture of chaos. And because of this, we’ve seen the powers-that-be respond as we have moved from a capitalist society to one of Neo-Feudalism. More and more we’ve seen the evidence of big corporations taking control of groups and individuals and practices and policies. And they are practicing what’s called surveillance capitalism. It reminds me of that scene in the movie, ‘Network’. Arthur Jensen played by Ned Beatty, says “There is no America, there is no democracy, there is only IBM, AT&T, and DuPont”. And of course, that film was made in 1976, so you could probably add in the big tech software and social media companies. But one small example of surveillance capitalism is when we mention something in a conversation as generic as coffee, and we get an advertisement for it.

So, for these reasons and more, coming back to the blockchain, you have people yelling freedom when they talk about it. Because what’s happening today is big companies are stealing and selling the human identity in this sort of digital slave trade. But we allow this right? It’s not as bad as it sounds you might say. Yes, we consent, by checking that little box confirming that we read and understood 45 pages of terms and conditions at the bottom of the website. So, let’s skip the hypocritical soap box and get to the point.

When we talk about unlocking opportunity it’s really more about the combination of technologies that can create a new kind of digital platform that people are referring to as “the blockchain”. Those technologies are Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and compaction technologies combined with DLT, or Distributed Ledger Technology (blockchain).

This fusion of technology can create a new kind of sharing economy. One that is based on true capitalism, not the warped kind we are seeing today. What we see today is like the cow analogy. You and your neighbors have a cow. Someone else decides to cut it up into equal parts and give it to someone they choose based on their abilities and their needs. Eventually that ‘someone’ becomes the elite. And that’s what we see today. And then capitalism says let’s all share ownership of the cow, share the responsibility to care for the cow, and we can all get profits from the milk, and then we can partner with other communities with a bull to create a new product that provides meat and that meat gets distributed based on the amount of effort you put in. Sounds fair. Sounds like something that will continue to inspire innovation and a will to try.

So, these technologies are going to bring about radically new business models that lean on technology and not human emotion and ideology. Each technology unlocks a component of this sharing economy. For example, with Big Data you can take massive amounts of data that’s out there about you and forecast what’s interesting about you, and now you can become a non-fungible token. No, not you personally, but in your buying habits become an NFT. That’s pretty powerful because it allows us to organize in a new kind of marketplace where participants can deliver products, but the value of what you might buy can be realized more efficiently which gives you more value in the transaction.

Now, before we describe why your identity can be non-fungible we have to describe what’s fungible. An asset that is alike enough to another that it can be traded for equal value. For example, I can give you a penny and you can give me a penny and neither one of us has lost any value in this transaction. But if I give you a piece of paper that is actually a $1 bill, and you give me a piece of paper that is actually a $100 bill, then that’s not fungible. So, then when we talk about non-fungible tokens, we’re talking about tokens that are unique to one another. And of course, to tokenize something is simply the process of taking sensitive data and protecting it while we give the data a new set of numbers and letters to identify it. The point is your identity is unique. You are a child of God there is no one like you. And that is further proven when we take the four key components of your buying behaviors that help us tokenize this value.

-Semantically: how do you define your decision? The reason you buy a car is not necessarily the same reason I buy one.

-Thematically: the features you want might be different, what sound system and what color interior and so on.

-Temporally: are you ready to buy a car tomorrow? Or in thirty days?

-Spatially: where are you geographically?

To wrap up this segment, Big Data analytics can derive value by tokenizing your buying behaviors and it can be owned by you and it can be sold and you can make money on the fact that someone is buying your lead ahead of time. Because in the current model it happens without you all the time! So, if you take this new model and build an environment that takes out the big corporations and drives that value back to the Micropreneurs then the customer experience is much better.

Now as a business owner, you might say “Well, that’s nice but how do I get customers to come to this new kind of exchange?”. And that’s where Big Data analytics wins again. Big business ecosystems today prefer to extract value out of you. So they have your data, then they keep the data and make you pay an arm and a leg to have access to some of it, and even then it’s not really efficient so you keep paying more and more to find your ideal customers. But in this new kind of marketplace with big data holding billions of customer attributes, commerce can be driven to you. Now, you can have 20,000 customers land on your website, and at even just a 3% conversion rate selling a $5 product with a 30% profit margin, that’s a pretty good day for the business owner.

What if I don’t have a product? What if I just want to help someone else facilitate their transactions and get paid in the hours I want to work? Come back next time and I’ll tell you how you can do exactly this in the new sharing economy.

Stay Tuned and See You Soon...Digital Oil Hunter

Check out the Podcast! The Blockchain Micropreneur