Equifax to Coinbase: Has Crypto Changed Anything?

One of the main reasons I left my tech job in 2017 was waking up to the real value of Bitcoin. I’d spent years watching the internet shift from shared ownership - people powered - into something far more centralised. By the mid-2000s, it was clear: Google, Facebook, Amazon weren’t just platforms — they were gatekeepers.

Those who controlled the past flow data control the present.. and the future?

This is beyond capitalism — it’s hyper-centralisation. A handful of companies now own the datasets that map our movements, preferences, and private lives. The algorithms they create, to drive advertising revenues, shape what we see, what we buy, and increasingly, what we believe.

Division is profitable. Outrage drives engagement. And now, in the age of AI, the very content we’ve created is being used to train systems we have no stake in. The tech is impressive — but the ownership model is broken.

They could build platforms that reward contributors. They could share profits with the people who make the data valuable.
But they don’t.
Because they don’t have to.

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Security, Compliance and Convenience

Under this paradigm centralised online services scrambled to collect as much customer data as possible. Combined with weak regulatory regimes and hidden third party players these companies require us to routinely push everything from government IDs and facial scans to every click we make online into huge data honey pots.

But centralised services are guaranteed targets for hackers. In 2017, the credit records of 147 million citizens were stolen from Equifax. More recently, Coinbase was breached via a sophisticated social engineering attack targeting employees. The attackers gained access to internal systems using fake SMS alerts and legitimate login portals. Even crypto-native firms — supposed to understand decentralisation — still centralise risk (under duress of government regulations) — where it hurts most: identity and access. For others instances of advanced cyber attacks on corporate customer data see Marks and Spencers and the Coop in the UK or equivalent attacks that hit British Airways, Boots, and the UK’s NHS.

All these attacks have one thing in common:

The data was all stored in centralised silos. Honey pots with no real accountability or recourse for the individuals affected.

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Whats the Alternative?

My epiphany in 2017 was finally grasping what Bitcoin actually is. Not just digital money, but a new kind of infrastructure: a read-only, censorship-resistant database secured by a decentralised network using a consensus mechanism called proof of work. Until then, that had all sounded abstract. But suddenly I understood — this wasn’t just about finance. It was a trust machine.

Bitcoin lets us make statements about the world — and prove them mathematically. That kind of certainty doesn’t just matter for money. It matters for the internet itself. Bitcoin offers the foundation for a decentralised web, where the application layer is no longer fused to the data layer — where users can interact, transact, and build without handing over their data to central authorities.

Satoshi knew this. So did the researchers, developers, and computer scientists who have spent the last 15 years turning that vision into the foundations of a new kind of internet.

One of Bitcoin’s most powerful properties is that it’s permissionless. Anyone can use it. That means social platforms built on Bitcoin inherit this openness — no gatekeepers, no shadow bans.

And when we say Bitcoin is censorship-resistant, we mean seriously resistant. Imagine Donald Trump and Xi Jinping teaming up to rewrite a Bitcoin transaction (yeah, I know…). Even if they managed to seize control of the global mining hash power — an unlikely feat — the Bitcoin community could simply fork away from their version of history. Consensus belongs to the people running nodes, not to those holding power

Beyond KYC: Who Am I?

Bitcoin — and blockchains more broadly — don’t store personal data. What they do store is proof: that something happened, and when it happened. This alone opens up a radically different approach to identity and verification online.

But here’s the key question:
How does a service know who you are, in just enough detail to serve you — and nothing more?

Today, we live in a world of over-disclosure. To buy shoes online, you hand over your name, address, email, maybe even a phone number — all to fulfil a transaction that really only requires your shoe size and a delivery point.

This is the flaw of the KYC era: every platform collects more data than it needs. That data gets sold, surveilled, or stolen. And the worst part? It’s not even necessary.

Enter zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) — a major breakthrough in cryptography and a natural outgrowth of the decentralisation movement.

ZKPs let you prove that something is true without revealing the underlying data. For example:

• You can prove you’re over 18 without disclosing your date of birth.

• You can prove your passport is valid without uploading a scan.

• You can prove your address is within a delivery zone — without telling Amazon where you live.

This turns the current identity model on its head. You don’t share data — you share proof.
It’s privacy-preserving, verifiable, and resistant to exploitation.

Now imagine this at scale:

• Marketplaces where the store and the advertiser aren’t the same entity.

• Social platforms where your personal data is yours alone.

• Services that operate on trustless verification, not centralised profiling.

ZKPs and blockchain together offer a future beyond KYC — where identity is contextual, minimal, and yours to control.

The DAO: Community in Action

One of the most tangible examples of Bitcoin’s principles in motion is a project my friend and I launched this year: BigMarket — a new kind of prediction market governed not by a corporation, but by a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation).

DAOs are a radical rethinking of how people collaborate online. Rather than relying on corporate boards, middle managers, or opaque decision-making, DAOs distribute ownership and control to the community. It’s governance by code and consent — not hierarchy.

In BigMarket, the platform isn’t owned by shareholders. It’s owned by the DAO.
All platform fees flow into a shared treasury, and the only way that treasury can be spent is through community proposals and on-chain voting.

Where traditional platforms harvest your data and lock you into their ecosystem, DAOs offer an alternative: coordination without coercion, value without extraction.

This is still a young field — DAOs are an ongoing experiment. But they point to a future where the services we use online are built and owned by the people who use them. A future beyond the extractive monopolies and algorithmic echo chambers that define what Yanis Varoufakis calls our age of techno-feudalism.

Bitcoin gave us the blueprint. Now we’re building on it.

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Thanks for reading.
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