Possession is nine tenths of the law
This popular adage signals to the common trend that in the eyes of the law it is easier to maintain ownerships of something if you already control it.
Today, it is well known that our data is possessed by large corporations who are free to monetise it. We have heard the titans like Mark Zuckerberg say time and time again how he believes that “everyone owns their own content online”, and yet I am still waiting to receive a paycheck from those using my content to advertise to me. The importance of possession is highlighted in the popular film Vice where Adam Mckay brings to life the story of Vice President Dick Cheney and his rise to power at the Whitehouse. Dick Cheney, portrayed by Christian Bale, highlights that they email services to be run from the Republican Party’s private servers. Hilary Clinton also understood the importance of really having possession over her own data, running all her communications off a private server at home.
Not everyone is expected to carry out this level of diligence on their data. But we should ask ourselves not only, “Who owns my data?” but “Where is it?”. The notion of data being in a single place is laughable in today’s connected world but the question drives at something more fundamental, “Who payed for the hardware that my data is stored in?”. This is the possession element.
So it doesn’t matter if facebook or google or AWS claim that you own your data, it is held in their data centers and helps them generated income. True sovereignty requires that no single institution has it in its possession.
Oddly enough the solution we seem to be converging on is not to isolate yourself from the world and keep it in your own hardware, but to share it with everyone.
Enter decentralized file storage.
Decentralized file storage means that files are not stored in a single server owned by a single entity. Each file is cryptographically hashed and distributed across a network of nodes.
The problem in a distributed system is how to serve the clients requests for data when the data is distributed.
There are 3 really exciting projects solving this problem, Arweave, the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and TRON.
TRON has the strongest pedigree based on the BitTorrent file sharing system. TRON and its token TRX aim to improve the incentive structure for people to host the files in a distributed way.
IPFS is a way for nodes to talk to each other making clients able to download data from multiple nodes optimising bandwidth without duplication.
Finally Arweave is another exciting project that promises to solve this problem, its unique selling point being permanence, they will store your data forever. In this case, the network will pay you to rent out your storage space directly. The primitive for arweave is called the Blockweave. This decentralised hard drive is protected by miners, but in this case miners invest storage space into the network rather than energy like in a Proof of Work protocol.
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