Thread by @wretchardthecat

So what's the solution? The current data architecture is clearly defective.

theguardian.com/technology/201…

The way I like to describe decentralized distributed databases is to imagine that you have a billion individually locked safes in your house, to which you have the key to only one: your own. The magic is that if you go next door those billion locked safes are also there.

So if your neighbor is your doctor and he wants to see your X-ray you hand him a key and he opens your safe, which is there also in his clinic. Now if you want to see his medical credentials he can also open his safe and show you a digitally signed version of his quals.

You want to see if his credentials are genuine, so you take the signature and apply it to the Board's safe, which beeps back: license current. The same deal for his bank. His firearms permit, etc. Cause everyone's safe is everywhere.

The even bigger magic is that if you put something in your safe anywhere, it is everywhere replicated. So the doctor runs a test and you put it in your safe and voila, it appears in every copy of your safe at all places.

If I were a hacker I would have to break into a million individual safes to steal a million secrets. Right now you only have to break into the one centralized database to steal 770 millon secrets.

But there's more. We can make a market anywhere because everyone's credentials, stock ownership, deeds & money are also available anywhere. The world of centralized servers is already being challenged and they are all getting into decentralized distributed databases in a big way.

How do we know that the array of safes are identical? Because the hash of the entire chain of safes is identical. Since the chain is always evolving, the reference hash is the latest consensus value, ie the most current copy.

The reason why the world of big, centralized institutions are trembling is because the technological foundations of the world, AI, distributed databases, universal connectivity etc are causing disruptive innovation.

Not all the innovation is going in a single direction. It is pulling and pushing in various ways. We don't know what the future holds. But we'll find out.