Change can often seem like it comes out of nowhere. Yet, rarely is it really so sudden. Often, change is something that goes on quietly, unnoticed sometimes for years. The explosion of change usually only happens when someone notices what has been going on and tries to stop it. Take the American Revolution. The change in American attitudes towards the British Empire didn’t suddenly start in 1776, it had been slowly going on for decades before the king finally noticed and tried to change something that had already happened.
The data and decentralization movement is like that. Things have been moving in the direction of decentralization for at least a decade now, probably longer. The changes have been happening all around us, yet it doesn’t seem readily apparent to many outside the movement. Decentralization hasn’t burst into the mainstream yet, it’s still waiting for that flurry of opposition that will serve as the galvanizing force that thrusts the movement out into the open.
That also makes it difficult for those already in the movement, both for organizations like TARTLE that try to grow it and the people who sign up for the early services and buy the early projects. The downsides of being at the forefront are easy to see. You are always taking a risk that the organization will never get off the ground, or the product may never materialize. And if it does, you get to have the…experience of helping work out all the kinks that everyone who hops on the bandwagon later on will never even know about. Early adopting is risky and often frustrating. However, the benefits can be far greater than any risk.
How so? Let’s take the more mercenary reason first – return on investment. If you are getting in on the ground floor of a company and it takes off, you get to reap a lot of financial reward for that. Think of the people that first bought Apple stock back in the day. Perhaps the best recent example of this is Bitcoin. Years ago, there were just a few people willing to take a chance on this crazy concept known as cryptocurrency. Almost everyone back then was saying that Bitcoin would never amount to anything and that it was totally worthless. Well, the first people who chose not to listen risked a few dollars and as of this writing, it is currently worth almost $56,000 per coin. At eight cents each back in 2010, if someone spent just $10 then and held onto their bitcoin, that person would now be a multimillionaire. That’s one heck of a return.
Beyond mere financial concerns, the early adopter gets to help drive the change forward, to take an idea and make it a reality. A TARTLE early adopter gets to join us in promoting decentralization and respecting individual data rights. This is a movement that will change the world, in many ways it already has. The more people who follow the lead of the earliest adopters the better able we will be to attract others to the cause, sellers as well as buyers. Yes, it can be a frustrating process in the meantime. We recognize that there will likely be many thousands of sellers before there are more than a handful of buyers. After all, the buyers need to have enough data sets available to buy them in the first place. In the meantime, you get to be part of the community that will shape the data sharing world for the foreseeable future, showing the buyers what kinds of things they should be looking for and helping to entice them to buy data through TARTLE.
The revolution does take time, but take heart in the fact that it is happening, one seller, one buyer at a time.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
