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Whitepaper
Our philosophy on trust, security, privacy and the challenges of a decentralized digital future.
Developing A Decentralized Digital Future
ABSTRACT
Kelvin Zero’s white paper, “Developing A Decentralized Digital Future,” explains the concept of decentralization and its potential to revolutionize industries like cybersecurity. The paper covers the history of the internet and how it demonstrates both centralization and decentralization. It also discusses the importance of self-sovereign networks and hybrid systems.
Kelvin Zero’s vision is to create a secure digital ecosystem where everyone’s data and privacy are protected through the use of decentralized technology. However, implementing this kind of systematic change requires massive resources and careful thought, planning, and partnerships in the private sector. Kelvin Zero’s white paper lays the foundation for a decentralized digital future and calls for collaboration to make it a reality.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITION NOTES
Published August 9, 2022
KELVIN ZERO WHITEPAPER
Developing A Decentralized Digital Future
August 9, 2022
Introduction
What is decentralization?
Decentralization has been making waves around the world with the potential to revolutionize different industries, but what is decentralization? This white paper will answer that question and investigate how decentralized technology can help us rethink security, trust, and privacy in our digital world. Let’s set the stage by talking about the first real modern decentralized network, the Internet.
The Internet Era
The Internet's origins and the beginnings of a decentralized digital future.
The first origin of the Internet goes back to the United States in the 1950s. The Cold War was in full swing, and the US decided it needed to build a communications system that could withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. This led to the formation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), now known as DARPA, which brought together the brightest minds in the country tasked with that goal.
By 1969, ARPA had already connected two computers and developed a centralized network that could send messages between different sites, thus forming ARPANET and one of the first networks. It wasn’t long before the TCP/IP transmission protocol was created next in 1974, and ARPANET quickly expanded with academic, military, and research institutions joining the network, eventually becoming a global interconnected network of networks, or the “Internet.”.n
Decentralization vs Centralization
So, what is decentralization? The history of the Internet is one of the first practical examples of large-scale decentralization, as well as its opposite – centralization, but decentralized spans beyond the internet. Simply put, decentralization is a process of organizing different types of objects, like raw data or planning and decision-making, into an open and interoperable network. Put into practice we have decentralization all around us, from democratic government systems to new and exciting technology like blockchain.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have centralization, with ARPA creating one of the first centralized systems when they connected two computers together and sent information between them. That’s what centralization is, a simpler process that uses closed and controlled networks to organize data objects. We can observe centralization everywhere, just think of the centralized government systems and corporate hierarchies operating today.
Self-Sovereign & Hybrid System
Another popular concept that has come to light recently is self-sovereign networks, a system in which everyone determines the parameters of the network. These networks are often referred to as “DAOs” or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations in the blockchain space. This leads us right into hybrid systems, a concept where both centralized and decentralized systems can mix self-sovereign, decentralized, and centralized concepts. In fact, most of the structures we see today are hybrid systems – just think of the different and complex government systems that different countries around the world have adopted.
Now that we have covered the basics, let’s get into why decentralization is so important and how we imagine a decentralized digital future world built on this structure.
Creating Society 2.0
Data is the new oil
The internet changed the world we live in during the late 1990s, and technology has been constantly evolving since then. Everything is happening digitally now, from social media to online commerce, business, and operations. The information age has changed our lives with amazing new capabilities, but it comes with the price, namely our privacy and security.
Our personal and sensitive information now live in our digital world, with one big problem – the systems we have in place to protect that data have not adapted at the same pace of new technology. In consequence, our sensitive data is consistently shared between the organizations we interact with, from financial institutions to governments, large medical organizations and corporations, and more.
Unfortunately, this data model multiplies the points of attack that a malicious actor can use to intercept that information. This means organizations like the hotels and car dealerships we use have to protect our data and defend against the same attackers that our governments and large corporations deal with.
The bottom line is that in the world of cybersecurity, defenders must be right 100% of the time, while an attacker only needs to be right once. In our current state it is simply impossible for all of our organizations to be right, everytime, against attackers who are multiplying in size and capability. That is why we need to change the way we all interact with data, from the ground up in a decentralized digital future.
This is not the only issue. Large organizations are also exploiting our personal information by leveraging a controlling interest on large data pools and internet traffic. This, in turn, has created a centralization of power between the large corporations of the world. That is why we at Kelvin Zero want to rethink the way our systems and technology handle data, and we want to use decentralized technology to do just that.
Developing a secure decentralized ecosystem
Kelvin Zero’s vision is to create an ecosystem where everyone’s data and privacy is integrally protected. This means fundamentally changing the way we use data, and decentralized technology has given us the means to accomplish it. By using open and decentralized networks, we can connect organizations with each other and their users so they can interoperate and validate our data instead of sharing and duplicating it. However, implementing such a big change comes with a few potential hitches.
There are two big problems when it comes to implementing this kind of systematic change. Firstly, large-scale technology change and adoption requires massive resources to adapt core legacy systems that are hard to displace in critical infrastructures, such as banks and governments. Secondly, modern decentralized network technology is still in its infancy, so it is difficult to trust and transfer essential systems over to it without careful thought, planning, and partnerships in the private sector.
There are, however, many benefits to adopting such a big change. For one, security and privacy can be drastically increased by eliminating data duplication and tethering sensitive data to as few centralized and offline databases as possible. Secondly, massive global interoperability would also allow for a better digital ecosystem, leading to a society with more knowledge and equity. Lastly, the immutability and secure accessibility of records over decentralized networks could drastically improve transparency, trust, and safety across digital interactions and operations.
Changing today’s data model for a decentralized digital future
So, how do we get there in view of the problems ahead? Our solution is a new data model that makes it easy for our critical organizations to adapt their technology instead of changing it. That’s why we patented a system that allows organizations to alias any data object and tie it to multiple-party digital signatures that can be validated across decentralized technology, what we call our SoLIDTM platform.
With SoLID, organizations can validate any type of data or insight, across any decentralized network, with each other and their users. This clears the way for organizations to create new and secure ways to identify individuals, log auditable data, process financial transactions, implement privacy, and collaborate within a connected digital ecosystem.
Bitcoin, Blockchain & Decentralized Networks
The vision for SoLID is for organisations to be able to use the platform to operate on any blockchain or decentralized network structure, but we have to start somewhere. Today we are working with a new class of decentralized ledger technology to make that vision a reality as we develop exciting use cases with our partners. But why decentralized ledgers? We see open and decentralized networks as the perfect system to leverage SoLID and connect different organizations and their users around the world. The fact that anyone can access these networks allows for endless possibilities, and as we develop DLT technology further, different industries can decide which network makes sense for them and easily switch and interoperate with other networks in the decentralized digital future.
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