The future will be all about trust.

In the past months, I have been a little scared of where we are headed. I love the Internet, but it sometimes scare me. Psychological warfare using Big Data and highly targeted ads to influence elections. A global digital identity crisis. An increasing dependence on third parties. An unsustainable dominance of a few massive organisations.

The Internet is hands down the most important invention of our time, but you could argue that it was launched with a missing feature.

The Trust Protocol

I think it was Don Tapscott that coined the term “trust protocol” for blockchain. If you never heard about blockchain and have no idea how it works, this article is probably not the best place to start. IBM explains it pretty well here.

Let’s sum up some the most important benefits of global blockchains:

Trustless

Transparent

Immutable

Decentralized

Let’s talk trust. A lot of people still think that Bitcoin & friends are not to be trusted, that they are made up internet money and that it will never be a thing. It’s a little ironic since blockchain and cryptocurrencies are at a fundamental level, synonymous with trust. It’s one of the very few things in existence that has trust programmatically built into it.

How? Why do people trust this Satoshi Nakamoto guy more than the U.S Fed? Well, the whole point is that we don’t need to trust him. The code is open-source. Everyone can go and see for themselves that Bitcoin is working and functioning as it should be.

And what about transparency? In the current financial system, can you go see every transaction that has ever happened? Nope, you can probably only see your own. With Decentralized-Ledger-Technology, everything that is uploaded to a blockchain (list of transactions or data) is visible for anyone to see and verify. The data can not be changed in any way after it has been uploaded, at least not without it being recorded. Sunny Lu from VeChain has one of the best, if not most adorable, analogy for how blockchain work.

At last, but not least, a public blockchain is decentralized. This basically means that no one is in control. One party cannot change, tamper or shut down the system. It cannot be hacked by malicious actors. It is not controlled by one single corporation or entity.

Smart-Contracts will change how we trust

An Angel Investor once told me that the most important aspect of business was trust. If you cannot trust a corporation or person, you don’t do business with them.

Well, what if you don’t have to trust them? The Trust Protocol is really the trustless protocol. With smart-contracts, you can take trust out of the equation. This is why utility tokens like Ethereum, NEO and Cardano will change the way we interact on the Internet.

Let’s say that you want to give a homeless crack-addict 50 bucks for food and shelter. You want to help him, but you are also certain that your money will go to buying more crack. We can now program that those 50 bucks can only be spent at verified shelters and food courts.

I don’t really donate much to charity. This has to do with the fact that I am poor as fuck, but also “Is my money sent to the recipient, or is it used to fund the charity’s marketing efforts?”. Charities almost have scandals on a yearly basis. Unaccounted funds, suspicious spending etc. It is extremely hard to track how funds are used inside of a charity. With cryptocurrencies, this process can be completely transparent. A smart-contract can specify that all donated funds can only be spent on certain categories or perhaps distributed directly to people in poverty.

Privacy Enabled Browsers

I’m a big fan of the Brave project. It is a free and open-source web browser that automatically blocks ads and intrusive website trackers. It is an absolutely fantastic project, started by the Mozilla co-founder and creator of the JavaScript language, Brendan Eich. It has a unique take on how Internet advertisements should work. Brave has its own token BAT (Basic-Attention-Token) that creates an ocean of opportunities for a new system of advertising and donations. Think about it, instead of advertisers paying Google for forcefully showing ads in your face, you can now state that you are “open for seeing ads” and the advertisers will pay you directly for seeing them.

Instead of creators putting ads in their YouTube-videos, you can decide to pay a minuscule amount for every second you watch of their video. Instead of watching a 30-second ad to see a 60-second long video, I can donate 0.3 cents directly to the creator instead. I can pay per second, so if I don’t watch the whole thing, I automatically donate 0.00001 cents per second watched instead. This system is already being used by popular YouTubers like Phillip DeFranco and nearly 6000 others. Creators have regularly faced issues where YouTube is not monetizing their content.

I have tested Brave now for several months on mobile now, and I am absolutely loving it. The desktop browser is switching to Chromium soon, which I believe will be the best time to make the switch.

Decentralized Social Media

If you have not heard about the latest Facebook scandal, you must have been living under a rock. The hashtag #deletefacebook av been circulating and with good reason. If you have not read about it yet, go do that right now. This scandal needs to get the same recognition as the Snowden leaks.

I have never been more disgusted in my life. It literally made me fear for humanity after reading the articles. Just to summarize:

Cambridge Analytica acquires data from 87 million users from Facebook.

Uses the data to make specialized ads by using techniques based on military psychology warfare.

Targets users on Facebook with these ads to influence voting behavior.

Brexit happens.

Trump happens.

Mass scale psychological warfare of this magnitude should not be possible. It is time to migrate to a new social media. We did it with Instagram. We did it with Snapchat. We can do it again, because right now we really, really need to.

A decentralized social media might ensure that this never happens again. A social media where user data is protected by the immutability of a blockchain where economic incentives are not driven by user data and advertising.

Decentralized social platforms are coming. Here are 7 of them.

Digital Identity

Digital identity is another area that blockchain can improve. Today, we have very poor systems for storing, sharing and verifying identity. One horrifying example was the Equifax hack, where the identity of more than 145.5 million Americans was compromised.

The concept of digital identity can be a little hard to wrap one’s head around. In its simplest form, it is to prove that you are you and that a digital representation of a person has an IRL counter-part. KYC (Know-Your-Customer) is a global, multi-billion problem for companies and individuals. In 2017, 16.7 million people reported having their identity stolen, and the total amount of stolen funds was reported to 16.8 billion dollars.

The most common way of identity verification today is by uploading a picture of a Government issued id-card ie. your passport or drivers license. You also have soft verification, like connecting a Facebook, Github or LinkedIn account.

Part of the issue comes from two factors; centralized servers and multiple identities. IBM cites that the average person has over 27 digital identities. This is both unnecessary, and potentially a huge security issue. If just one of those servers gets hacked, it can result in a stolen identity. Not fun at all, according to some people.

Another criticism of the current system is; do you really own your identity? Facebook, Google and the other data-hoarding giants have a pretty good idea of who you are by now. They know my behavior, digital mannerisms and interests better than most of my friends at this point. As AI technology keeps improving, I have no doubt that each of these conglomerates could impersonate me online better than myself, if they wanted to. Couple that with an image of my passport that went through their system at some point, you can argue that I am not longer me anymore. This is me theorizing sleep-deprived with a tin-foil hat on, and (I hope) I’m not one of the conspiracy theorists in daylight, but the Cambridge Analytica & Facebook scandal sure as hell didn’t reduce my weekly budget for fin-foil related purchases.

Identity should be undeniable and unalterable. You should not need more than a single source of digital identity, that can be securely shared and used to verify that you are in fact, an actual person. Blockchain is the best-suited technology for digital identity, and projects like Ontology, Civic or THEKEY will have a huge impact on the future as adoption grows.