As some of you may know the 9th of April is IoT day, celebrating the strengths and potential of IoT. For this occasion I got the opportunity to attend a meetup in Ghent, Belgium set-up by Rob van Kranenburg, founder of counsil, who held an inspiring welcoming talk. What stuck with me most was his view on the Internet of Things as a set of "building blocks" for people to build their own systems and future,cutting out the governmental and corporate middleman. Which to me seems to be very-much needed with threaths like ISP's fighting net-neutrality and censorship by governments on influential platforms such as Youtube and Facebook.
The relatively small amount of attendants resulted in open-minded discussions about IoT in Blockchain and talks about charity with cautious optimism.
Talks were held by Rob van Kranenburg, Tom Collins, founder of the C4IOT startup, Magomet Tsanajev with Databroker Dao and chairman to BitBelgium, David de Vriesere.
I'll be writing a brief report on the three different talks.
IoT Methodology:
Tom Collins talks about an IoT methodology that hes been working on for the past 5 years, which he wants to be as widely adoptable as possible. Project's utilizing the methodology should pass through the following stages: Brainstorming-Building-Tuning. The brainstorming stage is encouraged through hackathons, competitions and workshops.
Tom sees validation and enthousiasm as a crucial part of building a project.
"Whats pushing me to build this methodology more is, how can we go from these crazy ideas that were built in these brainstorming workshops and so something with them."
You can come up with a great idea but you need to do something with it, that always takes alot of validation and enthousiasm. [...] If we can get these people enthousiatic about it, maybe we should go ahead and build it."
The methodology helps to form a plan to bring structure to the chaos that comes with building a new solution, offering tools to help all the different people comunicate, getting designers, technical people and business people talking the same language.
Databroker DAO:
Magomet Tsanajev, or Mago is representing the Databroker DAO platform, a marketplace for trading big to small amounts of data. The platform is currently in open-BETA as a proof-of-concept.
During his introduction he said something that got me thinking:
"Last year I annoyed everyone with Blockchain and every assignment I did had something to do with Blockchain, then one of my teachers said you're scaring alot of people but that's something you should pursue."
This reminded me of this old trade trick; Buy when people are scared and sell when greed kicks in. Maybe the reason people are scared or skeptical towards blockchain and crypto is because they don't understand a new low, signals an incoming new high. Replacing banking systems and governmental oversight with Blockchains and trustless protocols
will be a set-back at first in terms of productivity but will yield much greater gains in terms of transparency and trustworthyness once everything is up and running.
Anyways, back to the report.
Mago started, joining SettleMint in Leuven, which is the parent-company of Databroker DAO. Databroker DAO is their main project at the moment, the concept is fairly simple. Instead of a sensors' data simply going through a gateway operator (ISP's) and ending up in one of these ISP's data-silos, Databroker DAO deploys a distributed API at the gateway operator to sell this data on the marketplace using their own token (DTX) based on the ethereum-network.
That way there is no need for different companies to deploy the same sensors in a certain area, one company can simply invest in sensors and sell this data to other companies requiring the same information, turning a profit. Raw data can also be bought and turned into specific data sets, which could be sold for a profit, which is reminiscent of sites
like E-bay.
The numbers:
Fun fact: 90% of all data since the dawn of mankind has been produced over the past 2 years.
As you can see from this image these huge amounts of data are being produced by billions of sensors, surprisingly only 10% stems from consumer devices.
Seeing 90% of sensor data is produced by corporations and governments it becomes quite clear how big the demand for data actually is, including our own small 10% that we're giving away in exchange of some quality of life improvements at this very moment.
Are these QoL solutions really worth the trade? Or are we better off gaining control over our own data and selling this goldmine of information on exchanges like Databroker DAO. I would say the latter.
The quality of the DATA is ensured by a form of proof-of-stake, a certain amount of DTX is staked when putting up a sensor on the marketplace. If a buyer ends up with insufficient or faulty data they can file a claim for the sensor owner's stake.
The sensor with the biggest stake will end up on the top of the list since statistically, it's the most trustworthy.
Since this is a privacy focused blog, I asked Mago about accesability of certain data.
Seeing regulations and laws on personal data are still up in the air at this point, privacy surrounding data is still a tricky subject to adress. Luckily, according to Mago, a clearence-type system is in the works. Now it's up to governments to set the perimeters on what data would require clearance.
BitBelgium:
Up next is David de Vriesere, introduced by Rob van Kranenburg for his approach to Bitcoin, how crypto is an attack on money as the sole currency of measuring things. David was an early Bitcoin adopter in 2015 and founded BitBelgium to help people get involved in the shark infested waters that is the cryptocurrency space in a safe way, while also helping people in need through his background at Unicef. So, BitBelgiumstarted organising workshops educating people on Blockchain, setting up Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets where part of the profits went to Gent4Humanity to help stranded refugees in Dunkirk.
Shortly after starting up these workshops David got asked for help setting up miner rigs. Through the help of a friend called Jimmy they started setting up miners, first a few, now hundreds a week. Now he's working on the biggest solar-powered mining facility in Gent and as you might expect, it's not just about money, also charity. It costs €6000 to set up one miner, €90/month for electricity costs and €60/month to ensure the miner at their facility, with a ROI (Return of Investment) of about €450/month, 10% of the ROI is used for charity.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwkdJKyY2yY
The money earned for charity is used for helping refugees in Calais, supplying them of first-aid, food, water. These refugees are a product of exploitation, nations "in need" of recources trading human lives for wealth.
David wants to hit "the heart of evil which is money" and make it open, borderless and leaderless, to stop atrocities like this from happening.
"We're being robbed on a massive scale of immeasurable proportions"
What I think David is trying to say is that we're being robbed through methods that are beyond our controll, our governments and society stand or fall depending on the economy, the economy is based on a system that is out of date, and here's why.
Our markets and therefore our society functions 'well' as long as prices are going up, when this isn't the case governments can't loan and things fall apart.
If stocks keep rising money will keep flowing, if not, we, the people pay for it. Why? Because we need our money to survive, to nurture our kids, to work on our dreams and we can't afford to take certain risks. This isn't the case for big money, like banking institutions and coorperations, they will make money no matter what.
"The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient." - Warren Buffett
That quote might aswell read: "The stock market is a device for transferring money from the poor to the rich.", since 'normal' people can't afford to be patient, in times of crisis the working citizen needs their money to survive, while 'the rich' have an oppurtunity to make millions by buying out all the weak hands and selling them when the market picks up again. These weak hands are not weak, these hands are forced to pull out the hard earned money they invested to care for their families, these hands are tied. And that system is held strong by governments and banks because everything depends on the system carying on, since governments cannot function without loans like we've seen happen in Greece when the government refused to accept new terms set by the European Central bank (this point still stands even if these new terms were somewhat justified).
Now think of what happens when stock markets crash and every 'normal' citizen heads to the bank to retrieve their money. The banks can't pay out, their money is invested elsewhere, and without any reserves the bank goes bankrupt. It becomes clear now this system and these banks can't function without the "impatient" money that belongs to the normal man. So to keep it all from imploding, Central banks get permission to print new money, billions upon billions created out of thin air, this is the inflation that David is talking about. And the inflation hurts only us, not banks or governments. We're the ones that pay.
Cryptocurrencies are a weapon to help us fight this system, if enough people swap their Euros and Dollars to currencies like Bitcoin it might become clear we no longer want to fight this battle that is impossible to win, and want something new, something fair. To have control over our own hard earned cash and not to be at the mercy of a system that is destined to transfer money from the poor to the rich. To be in control through decentralisation, since we're the ones that make it all possible.