By Nate Van Dore — Content Creator

I’m scrolling my favourite internet page, but this incessant orange panel keeps flashing in my face. Apparently, there’s a five-day sale at the local bottle shop. Now, if there is anything I’ve learnt about alcohol consumption in Australia, it’s that people care very little about the price, spending more on booze than on personal health and education. So then, that begs the question, why is the ad there? Better yet, if I am culturally inclined to buy alcohol anyway, why should I be subject to ads of any sort?

Source: Hackernoon

Now I pitch this to you. Imagine a way we could browse, communicate and transact free from someone forcing-feeding a bank loan or using another supposedly revolutionary dating app. Now let’s say that you may want some similar ads to show up on your feed, but you want them personalised. All the above can be done and the tech is here. It’s called blockchain.

In an interview with Futurism, IT contrarian Andres Antonopoulos defines blockchain as “a distributed database.” This means that you and I have access to this database. Information, be it monetary value or bare data, is stored sequentially — forever. No one can alter it, no one can destroy it and no one can move it. Add multikey encryption and you’ve got a free ad blocker.

But who cares?

You do. As do advertisers. The case against third-party push advertising is strong. For advertisers, there is no way to transparently measure clicks, views per page or time spent on page. While online ads today have greater reach than print-based advertising, there still remains the cost conflation that is costing the advertising industry billions. That same revenue could be poured into harnessing new technology (alas this article) or using niche platforms to improve advertising reach and saturation.

For users like you and I, resonating impressions correlate with whether you buy something. So the 60% of bot-based internet traffic and the ad-fraud techniques serve no other purpose than to waste your time and ruin your online experience. There does remain the correlation between ads and the purchase funnel but this study showed that regardless of the ad, you and I were going to buy said product anyway. And yet we continue to feed these institutions. These very institutions we have become so reliant on, who now not only find fanciful ways to subtly show us how they dominate our lives but they also saturate mediums of communication with advertisement that feed the consumer culture.

What benefit does blockchain, let alone Touch. Social bring?

In essence, the blockchain in general and Touch. in particular have created a mechanism that incentivise advertisers to curate high-quality, informative ads rather than useless posts that pass as laughable entertainment. Blockchain tech, will in effect, challenge user-monopolies, advertising monopolies and general content centralisation. The public ledger will, at the end of the day, enable you to see where that ad came from.

I’ll list them here:

- Ability handle millions of consumer relationships and millions of transactions.

- The ability to track, approve and certify all digital ads circulating on the Touch. platform.

- De-fog multi-party payment systems.

- Evenly distributed and personally catered ads with multi-key encryption.

And herein lies the savviness of Touch.. It’s where a business owner can create an online presence that can compete with major corporations. It is also where you as a user can specialise your feed so don’t have to deal with orange panels that sell you alcohol, but whatever your niche may be.

In Summary

Whatever your opinion of blockchain is, it’s going to make positive technological and societal change. Blockchain technology is still an infant, albeit a talented one. And while Bitcoin popularised the blockchain, its purpose is extending beyond cryptocurrency. A nascent and transparent force for good, blockchain technology is now challenging the very institutions humans built to tackle complex transactions.