If you know anything about the crypto industry at all, you may have heard of this phrase before; not your keys, not your coins. If you haven’t heard of it, let me explain it to you. Crypto assets are stored in digital wallets that can be accessed via private keys (a long alphanumeric string). If you lose the key, you lose your coins.
Some people prefer storing their crypto-assets with exchanges for the ease of doing so. But when you store your assets with an exchange and access them using an email address and password, technically you don’t own the private keys to your wallet. The private keys are known only to the exchange and if they have the keys, they own the coins.
There are pros and cons of this design but it ensures that your money is yours. That you can’t be denied or questioned on your right to withdraw or transfer your funds which does happen all the time with traditional financial institutions.
This is a parallel internet that is being built and it isn’t just limited to finance. You could build any kind of app using the same design where there is no central authority dictating what can and can not be done.
The internet that we’re accustomed to was beautiful but I no longer feel that it still is. The power is getting concentrated in the hands of few mega trillion dollar companies and they set the rules for what can and can not be done.
In the good old days of the internet you could host content on your own sites. Now for better deliverability, it is preferred that you serve this content via instant articles on Facebook & AMP on Google. By not doing so, you may be ranked lower or get reduced visibility.
If you want to own an e-commerce store, you could create your own store using woo-commerce (self-hosted) or Shopify (hosted by Shopify). If you’re looking for visibility or discovery, it’s better that you go with Amazon.
However, if you go with Amazon you can only sell what they allow you to sell. There are many things that are legal to sell but can not be sold on Amazon. They will also use your data in knowing what sells best and then launch their own private label brands to beat you at their own game, which by the way they do all the time.
If you decide to setup your own store, as long as it’s on Shopify, they can suspend your store for whatever reason e.g one of our stores was suspended for listing face masks although we hadn’t listed any. This resulted in monetary losses that shouldn’t have happened. But even if we did list the face masks, our store shouldn’t have been suspended as long as we were not doing anything illegal.
The problem with the internet in its present state is that in order for your business to work, you rely on these mega trillion dollar companies despite knowing that they will practice more control than they should be allowed to. You will be stopped and banned from doing activities that are legal to conduct.
As long as your business is on Amazon, Facebook Shop or Shopify, your business’s fate depends on them. It’s not really your business in the true sense. This isn’t any different than “not your keys, not your coins”.
On the contrary, the parallel internet in its present form is slow, expensive and even allows illicit activities, so at the moment it’s much worse than the internet that we’re accustomed to.
These mega corporations including Facebook are already trying to maintain their control on the parallel internet e.g Libra by Facebook.
The parallel internet can solve everything that’s wrong with the present internet but comes with its own set of problems.
One is too centralized that it even prevents legal activities for private gains, the other one is too decentralized to even allow illicit activities.
