Ruby Protocol & Dataism
The conception of Ruby Protocol starts from a conviction that data is bound to take the center of our future world. The phrase ‘digital transformation and ‘digitization’ are already overused at this point. Organizations around the world have figured out that they need to play by the rules to stay in the game, which is to digitally transform their businesses — this is the starting point.
However, the real challenge and opportunity center around data.
The Internet Today
A total of 5.03 billion people around the world use the internet today — equivalent to 63.1 percent of the world’s total population.
Internet users continue to grow, with the latest data indicating that the world’s connected population grew by almost 180 million in the 12 months to July 2022.
Internet users continue to increase at an annual rate of close to 4 percent, and current trends suggest that two-thirds of the world’s population should be online sometime in the second half of 2023. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic continues to have a meaningful impact on internet user research, so actual user figures and growth rates may be higher than current data suggests.
With this comes an unfathomable wave of data generated daily. The amount of data we produce every day is truly mind-boggling. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the connection methods. Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated. It’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around these numbers.
A New Form of Values — Dataism
Dataism was only coined years ago. This relatively young concept was first mentioned by David Brooks in his 2013 New York Times article “The Philosophy of Data”.
Dataism is described as an ethical system that has been most heavily explored and popularized by renowned historian, Yuval Noah Harari. In his 2016 book Homo Deus, Harari described dataism as a new form of religion that celebrates the growing importance of big data.
Its core belief centers around the idea that the universe, for lack of a better word, gives greater value and support to systems, individuals, and societies that contribute most heavily and efficiently to data processing. Harari stated, “Humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer the case.”
Now, big data and machine learning are proving themselves more sophisticated. And dataists believe we should hand over as much information and power to these algorithms as possible, allowing the free flow of data to unlock innovation and progress, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
It might be true that we are already a believer in Dataism. It might be true too that we are willingly contributing to this unstoppable data flow even though it means forfeiting privacy, personal sovereignty, and personality. With the increasing power of this collective data processing machine, some venture to say staying connected to this system gives us meaning. It makes us and our data a part of this grand plan.
But the alarm bell must ring. That is the point of Ruby Protocol and Web3.
Ruby Protocol & Dataism
Even though the advocates of Dataism only urge people, in goodwill, to hand over information and power to these algorithms to unlock human innovation and progress, we must know and fear the possible future, in which once Big Data and the systems driven by Dataism know us better than we know ourselves, the authority will shift from humans to algorithms.
Big Data could empower Big Brother. And humans can be rendered valueless.
Despite the remarkable benefits that may result for our species by freely giving away our information, do we run the risk of that data being used to exploit and manipulate the masses towards a future without free will, where our daily lives are puppeteered by those who own our data?
It’s extremely possible.
Ruby protocol wants to ring the alarm bell. It is a private data management framework for Web 3.0. It proposes and implements a privacy middle-layer interacting with multi-chain.
It is a fine-grained private data access-control gateway across different entities and organizations both in the decentralized and traditional financial world. Built on functional encryption, the Ruby protocol will be the true embodiment of the decentralization spirit of the cryptocurrency movement.
All the encrypted data will be stored in a decentralized cloud such as IPFS. Decentralized functional encryption will be adopted to satisfy the users’ privacy needs. Moreover, our policy management layer will make sure the design of the underlying attribute and policy universe is well-tuned to the regulatory compliance requirement.
About Us
Ruby Protocol is a cross-chain, privacy-first infrastructure, powered by Polkadot. Our layer-1 protocol utilizes Functional Encryption (FE) cryptography, which allows users to adopt a modular approach to data privacy and ownership. This novel solution will allow users to encrypt sensitive information on-chain, which can only be decrypted by holders of an approved private key.
Ruby’s FE Substrate-pallet will serve as the building blocks for privacy-first smart contract DApps building on the native Ruby Chain, while also acting as a privacy layer for Parachains and Web3 DApps across the Polkadot ecosystem.
