I think the most accurate way to speculate on this one would be to look at the penetration of mobile devices, then add a sprinkle of how most homes are becoming smart hubs.
These growing norms will be instrumental to how most of the world detaches from centralized systems to peer-to-peer solutions.
But before I say any more on that, it's crucial to understand what the world runs on and how those things are changing in how they are being created and managed as that directly influences whatever shifts that come for the greater population.
Two things have always controlled the world, data and money. Of course, traditionally, it hasn't always been called data but “information.”
Data to most is a tech-term and as such is often understood to mean things related to computer systems, but information, well, that's a more common way to put it.
Access to the right information and the subsequent use of that information plays a critical role in who controls what and how. This is why the government runs the media, you simply have to control the stream of information to control the narratives that keep you in power.
Money on the other hand has just always been a path to the acquisition of everything necessary to get by. Certainly, that's an over-simplification but it's nonetheless a necessary simplification for the context here.
Whether it's about climbing the ladder of political power or simply just surviving, money has always just been a means to an end, where the end varies.
This reality remains true even in the age where cryptocurrency comes into the picture. When you think about how blockchain transactions work, you figure that what most people see, which is the tokens or coins that move, are really just a product and sometimes a tool in a process of data transfer.
This certainly blurs the lines between data and money since on the blockchain, it's hard to tell the difference and that completely changes how the future would look as blockchains become the default channels for passing data — essentially value — around.
Data as the unit of account
This is something that's still pretty rough in my head but I perceive a shift in how we value things around us. Certainly, most people in this space have come across others using phrases like “data is the new oil” or “data is the new currency” but it would be no surprise that most don't really grasp how any of this would be the case.
Technology has always been about offering “ease” where there was rigidity or cost intensivity.
TradeFi guys will talk about making money transfers as fast as information transfer and with crypto, we've achieved this by simply making both dependent on each other, accidentally creating what I imagine becomes an underlying value defining system.
With blockchain in the picture, we are moving closer to an easing that creates never seen before abundance. Of course, this completely explodes with the involvement of artificial intelligence but even that relies on data, something that only blockchain can help scale, efficiency.
When we talk about data as a unit of account, certainly we don't mean it in the traditional sense of how money is a unit of account but more of a case of a system of defining the value of a unit of account because even though data becomes the value rating system, all of said value will be pushed towards the creation of money, still.
This means that data becomes the virtual backing for the future of money, something that fiat lacked.
I imagine a world where every device becomes a channel of passing valuable data around, hence why I started this article talking about mobile device penetration. This is sort of already the case, only that much of this data is passed onto centralized company servers and none of it directly defines the value of money. This changes with blockchain.
The future will be more about peer-to-peer flow of data and said data essentially becomes a public good, making it effectively fit to define the value of our economies.
Think about Bitcoin mining for a second, technically each bitcoin mined is a product of a bunch of computers passing data around and agreeing on its validity. This essentially means that each BTC in circulation was created by x value of data.
In a world where we are not completely blinded by greed, Bitcoin's pricing should be something based on on-chain operations and everything else would be a premium.
But people aren't really looking at any of these from this perspective because at the end of the day, they are mostly just USD bulls overly concerned with external market forces.
The grand paradox of this ecosystem one would say.
Moving on, most of these rough concepts just lead to something I intend to gather my thoughts and sleep on a bit more. But to give a hint, it has something to do with something I'd call “Dynamic Inflation” where money is created against data value generated and consensus is required to determine what passes as good data and what doesn't.
Imagine if block rewards were based on the value of the data contained in the block.
I'm mostly keeping an open mind because I fully expect that what's to come far exceeds what most people speculate currently when it comes to convergence of crypto, blockchain and artificial intelligence.
“Data is the new currency” can frankly move from being a marketing phrase for AI companies to actually meaning something and peer-to-peer solutions will be central to its materialization.