Trending
Written by: Ethan Hunt
Have you ever wondered who else owns your data? Well, the whole internet is still a centralized place dominated by some big companies. Nowadays, in the social world, with many scams, identity, and data thefts, nobody knows for sure who has access to your personal information. As a possible solution, there are decentralized platforms to solve the data ownership problem. First of all, let us clarify this term of decentralization:
Decentralized Platforms
Having a decentralized platform means that there is no central authority that has access to your personal information. In this context, it's necessary to mention blockchain technology. You have probably heard about it, and it's a system of recording information and packing data into the structures called blocks. This technology is distributed across the entire computer network. After all, it's incredibly safe and almost impossible to hack. Some decentralized platforms are Blockstack, EOS, and Tron. These platforms are usually used for developing blockchain-based applications.
These apps are just like the ordinary ones on your phone, and their function is to store data on the device's hard drive. When you decide, for example, to play a downloaded song, your device reaches for files stored locally. The main benefit of these apps are tokens, or better say, digital coins for tracking users. Some of them are explicitly replacements for currency, like Bitcoin. If you want to know something more, check out this article about decentralized cryptocurrencies.
Benefits of Decentralized Platforms
- In this type of network, you don't have to know or trust anyone else. Like the other members, you have a copy of the exact same data in a distributed ledger. If someone's ledger is corrupted or altered, it will be rejected by other members of the network.
- Decentralization can bring you a reduction of weakness points. This is a significant factor. These points can lead to systemic failures, the impossibility of providing promised services, or maybe worse, like giving inefficient services due to the exhaustion of resources.
- Companies can always offer data exchange to their partners. During that process, the data is transformed and stored into each party's data silos. This is also called data migration. Every time your data migrates, there is a high possibility of mistakes in the mapping. The result can be duplicated or missing records. By having a decentralized data store, every entity has access to a real-time shared view of data.
- Fraud prevention and high security are also some of the benefits. Thanks to the blockchain, every transaction is recorded and followed, so it's easy to say if the fraud is taking place. Because there is not just one person who manages, but the data is distributed all over the computer network, hacking and fraud are almost impossible.
Conclusion
In this article, we tried to tell you the main benefits of decentralized platforms. As technology advances, more people decide on this type of platform primarily because of a great security system and other conveniences. If you are asking us whether to choose a decentralized platform, our answer is always yes.
Related: What To Expect With Machine Learning and Innovation