Article

Reservoir Dogfight: Control Your Datastream

// June 26, 2024

The most savage corporate war in history is being fought in the shadows, behind our screens, heralded only by the ceaseless choirs of transistors. Data is the rawest commodity humanity has ever extracted from itself, leeched right out of every action we make. Its use-case, eternal. Its utility, endless. It’s the most valuable commodity in the world. The top five most valuable companies in the world are tech companies. Four data companies, and one chip company to mine it and use it. Everyone wants more data, including yours.

The Great Lakes of Data

To service this need there are monstrous data lakes, swilled with the rampant carnival of human digital activity, that let the vultures drink. Beautiful as they are on the outside, tranquil corporate UI and quarterly subscriptions, in reality, they are only letting you use their database tools to service their own needs and stake out a larger piece of the data landscape for themselves. Google Cloud SQL, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse Analytics. These services encourage everyone to deposit their data so it can be structured, semi-structured or simply hoarded for later use. It gives them the tools they need to manage their data, but rips away all authority over it. Leaves it open to corruption. The sanctity of data becomes suspect.

As developers everywhere wake up to the importance of data sanctity, especially that of their organizations, they look to new data management tools. The problem is that many of these tools, which help you perform the rigmarole of essential data management operations like querying, integration, archiving are actually just operating as data lakes or warehouses in disguise. Their real audience is business intelligence, smart contract authors, or data analysts. They are also participating in the data broker game, and the use of their tools is just their offer for your data. Any centralized database service at this point has effectively become, or will become, a data brokerage company. All tooling is only given in exchange for - well - everything. All your data belongs to us. Just so you can build your project.

Manage Your Own Data, Always

We believe this is wrong. Data to the people means giving end users self-sovereignty over their data by giving developers a distributed data management layer that means their user data is unimpeachably compliant and eternally secure. DefraDB offers querying, indexing, schema management, and storage tools in an environment-agnostic database that is flexible, interoperable, and which maintains your user’s privacy and ensures the sanctity of the data held within.

We want to give developers such self-sovereignty and authorship over their user data that, if they choose, they would naturally evolve into a self-managed data lake or warehouse themselves. They could be 100% sure the data they have to offer the market is as unadulterated as it is unique, adding to its value. All of this, of course, would only be at the explicit consent of the end user whose data it is. Yet that’s the thing, if users have this explicit control - they’re far more likely to be happy using a developer’s service and offering up their data in exchange. 

Source Network envisions a more federated micro-economy of data trade, where equal partners share important pieces for consensual utility. Where end users have sovereignty and developers are not reliant on third parties to protect their user data, and having centralized developer tools actually extracting the value from the user data without their consent anyway - while the devs get nothing. It will remake the current savage, blasted landscape where warlords hoard all, and every online tool is actually a trick to rob you of the most important thing that most people - individual or organization - don’t realize they own.

Source’s Sacrosanct Strongholds 

DefraDB ensures data consistency, availability and interoperability, with security enshrined by decentralized access control policies that secure the data in DefraDB, with SourceHub operating as a trustlayer for these operations. Source’s tools are technologically advanced, socially revolutionary, and essential infrastructure, yes - but also simple. 

They reclaim land that developers had lost. Developers, forced by convenience to use MySQL, compelled by ease-of-use to store their user data with AWS, now realize what they have done. They pay extortionate rents, open themselves to attack vectors through hacks, are vendor-locked to closed ecosystems, all to store user data that ends up not being compliant, near-impossible to deploy through edge computer networks, and is ultimately sold by data brokers anyway - betraying their user’s trust.. Why, when DefraDB’s P2P database can manage user data safely through distributed systems protected by trustless cryptographic primitives. It’s not just user data too. Sensitive secrets, application data, custom AI-models - anything can be safely stored in Source without sacrificing sovereignty. 

Many won’t stop - but that’s okay. DefraDB is environment agnostic. The point is that Source Network’s tools, by restoring data self-sovereignty to end users, empower any digital service - travel companies, DEXs, delivery services, social networks, e-commerce, anything - to protect their user data, be compliant, be future-proof, and be decentralized. Even if, in the end, that ultimately just means the ability to sell something unique. Hopefully, in the future, it will lead to a more privacy-focused, locally sustainable, digitally autonomous set of internet services that function not just as a corporate tendril, but as a public good. 

That final future is still a long way off in spirit, but with Source Network it’s closer than ever in tech. We want every single developer to be able to restore privacy and security to their users, and reap the benefits as a result. Giving developers a way to take advantage of edge computing by giving them natively distributed and p2p database tools that are built explicitly for purpose, while using impregnable, trustless, and eternal cryptography to govern and secure it. 

We want every company and individual to become a consensus-driven, interoperable stronghold on the data battlefield, sovereign unto itself. The tech is here. Come use it for yourself.

Dive Deeper

// November 01, 2024

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// October 18, 2024

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