Hacker News Reader

Comment by scyclow | Hacker News Reader

I think the best examples of Decentralized Woo Hoo is the phrase "ownership over your data". When most people hear this they think of facebook selling their data to third parties, using it for targeted advertising, etc. But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source. I have sole discretion to send you an NFT, but facebook is still free to use that sale data to sell me things.

This distinction appears to be lost on a lot of people who are new to the space, and leads to a lot of marketing fluff around projects that make no sense.

View on HN

> But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data.

I disagree in parts. In e.g. an app on Ethereum you own your and the app's data more than e.g. you do on Facebook. It's because there are no gatekeepers that'd stop you from creating an interoperable app using the original data or straight up downloading the data. There's sufficient historical precedence of FAANG platform risk.

But then also "just owning the right to writes" may sell the concept cheap considering that in the realm of "owning data," there isn't many concepts besides "reading", "writing" and "accessing". "Owning the write" may be as good as it gets?

We tend to look at data from a materialistic view and represent it in our heads as .zip files or csvs. But data really isn't that. Data is continuous and owning "the right to write" is pretty cool IMO.

I think we're on the same page. That's kind of what I was saying about how you're essentially open sourcing the "read" on data.

Also, I'm not trying to sell the write side short! Owning writes is the major value proposition of a blockchain. I just feel like people conflate the two when talking about on chain ownership

ok fair enough. I'm glad we hashed it out and arrived on the same page :)

> From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source

Unless you encrypt things you put on blockchain. Or use clever ways to hide information from others. There are cryptocurrencies like Monero.

This is true! But it's also hard to think of a situation in which you would need to store that encrypted data on chain. Why not store it on a central server? Or, encrypted on a p2p network? And if order of events is important, you could just store a hash of the data on chain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com