Blockchain Revolution

Problem to Be Solved: Privacy is a basic human right and the foundation of free

societies. In the last twenty years of the Internet, central databases in both public and private sectors have accumulated all sorts of confidential information about individuals and institutions, sometimes without their knowledge. Everywhere people worry that corporations are creating what we could call cyberclones of them by fracking the digital world for their data. Even democratic governments are creating surveillance nations, evidenced by the recent U.S. National Security Agency’s overextending its surveillance rights by conducting warrantless spying over the Internet. These are double privacy offenses, first collecting and using our data without our understanding or our permission, then not protecting the honeypot from hackers. “It’s all about abandoning zero-sum pursuits, either-or propositions, win-lose, you can have one interest or the other. That, to me, is so dated, so yesterday, and so counterproductive,” said Cavoukian. “We substitute a positive-sum model which is, essentially, you can have privacy and—fill in the blank.”³⁴