All Things Techie With Huge, Unstructured, Intuitive Leaps

My Eureka Moment - You're Using Blockchain Wrong

You have to excuse the typos and grammar in this post, but I am pumped about the creative ideas just pumping through my head about blockchain and the future.

I just finished an actual working proof of concept with a web interface that uses blockchain for its true-ledger qualities as an enterprise application. It is immutable, autonomous, outage resistant (when you have the gateways configured :-) ) and the acme of trusted data. I'd give you the URL, but our potential customers are looking at it, and they deserve first crack.

It's Only Money

Yeah, I know about Bitcoin, Eth and ICOs. I missed out on the Bitcoin value rocketing to the stratosphere because I was too busy figuring out blockchain, and learning how to code it myself. At that point I could feel the heat, but not see the flames yet. Cryptocurrency and digital currency is a major user of blockchain, but the tokenization of the world will very quickly eclipse it. I get queries regularly as to how blockchain can fit into various business spheres, and almost always, tokenization could be a part of the conversation. But this morning, I saw the future of blockchain while I was in the shower - (I get my best creative ideas in the shower), and I am typing like a madman to capture the vision. Blockchain will be the Mother of Web 3 and the penultimate internet that we will ever need. (If you want to know the ultimate in Internet as I see it, you will have to journey to the Abu Dhabi Formula One Grand Prix in November to attend my winning presentation to Formula One engineering, the Mercedes Petronas AMG Formula 1 engineers and Tata Communications).

Eureka

So what was this vision that emulated the Archimedes "Eureka" moment from my morning ablutions? I was cogitating on smart contracts in blockchain. They are little bits of code executed in blockchain once certain conditions are met. They are the key to massive internet disruption.

A block in a blockchain can have its own URL. It can have its own IP address. In the most scalable blockchain engine ever made (BigchainDB), you can simply query the block by sending an HTTPS request like this: https:myblockchainserver.com/blocks/<block_id> (left out the "//" so it won't be seen as a valid URL) and you get the contents of the block. It doesn't matter if you see the guts of the block -- its made to be transparent and it is immutable. But suppose you had a smart contract that delivered up the data in the block formatted in HTML whenever you queried the block. What you have effectively done is created a mind meld of the data layer and presentation layer. AND you have eliminated the need for a webserver (I like Tomcat, Apache and Jetty myself). Every single block in the blockchain has the ability to be its own, or several web pages. The smart contract can be a bot as well. That puts real horsepower into the blockchain, because if you have an array of bots, you can take over the functions of web apps, mobile apps, and even bespoke enterprise applications. You can call a single block, or call a smart contract bot to traverse the nodes of the blockchain. You have just created Web3.0. And since you need public and private keys to interact, you have just securitized the whole shebang. You have total distributed architecture with every web page served up.

Advertising Disruption

But wait, don't send money yet, there is more. I use adblockers. I hate web advertising. I hate navigating to a page and having a video with sound blaring start unannounced. Putting up advertising to the masses and hoping that someone will bite is so retrogressive in terms of the Internet. It is the Dark Ages of Advertising. It is like throwing mud at a wall and hoping that some sticks.

But advertisers have moved on to be voyeurs and pantie-snatchers. They glean, scrape, phish, infer and cajole our personal information all in the name of analytics so they can sell us shit. What they have done is eroded our privacy. When their analytics are coupled to AI, stupid spyware like Alexa and IoT snoop appliances, you get instant mobile notification of hemmorhoid salves for sale the minute that you step into the bathroom.

Tokenization

Web 3.0 will cure that, and this is where tokenization comes in. Suppose that the newspaper is hosted on the mind-melding blockchain and each news item has its own block. First and foremost that solves the problem of dead links. They will always be around for posterity. But when I navigate to the site, if I have a wallet registered, it deposits a few tokens or fractions thereof into my wallet. These will be say, Ad Tokes. You get a "Toke" for looking at the news. You get a "Toke" for checking the weather. Essentially, any site that hosts advertising can now dispense Tokes.

You as the consumer can go to your wallet dashboard and see how many Tokes you have. Companies who normally advertise with a manure spreader on the conventional internet, will now redeem your Tokes for goods, services, information or goodwill. All of the advertising takes place on your dashboard where you have a smorgasbord of where you can spend the efforts of time wasted on the internet. In this fashion, your privacy is preserved because the blockchain host preserves anonymity of the person using it (other than knowing the address of the public wallet).

So there you have it -- Web3.0 - an internet hosted on blockchain that melds the data and presentation layer in an intelligent fashion, while preserving privacy and disrupting advertising.
The only thing left after that is to teach the SOB how to swim.

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