Ontology: a Defined distributed trust network
Ontology had made a huge wave since their presentation at Neo Dev Con this January in San Francisco. This week, they also announced that there is gonna be an ONT token airdrop for all the NEO holders, which more or less contributes to the NEO price rise these days(in my opinion).
If you visit their website and take a look at the white paper, I'm pretty sure you will get kind of confused. The whole project is just so huge for you to have a big picture of what's going on. Today I will try to explain what the whole 'Ontology' project is, and how I believe it's gonna be the next milestone in the crypto world.
According to their white paper, Ontology is "A Public Platform for Building a Decentralized Trust Ecosystem".And according to their Founder, it is "a Defined distributed trust network".
Ontology helps you "trust" someone else from a different platform, a different community, a different blockchain, or a different world.
"Trust" is one of the hardest things to get.
According to psychologists, human only trust 100 or less people through their lives. It's naturally hard for us to trust people, and this situation occurs not only between individuals but also between corporations and communities.
And now, trust becomes a big obstacle in the real world. We already have multiple verification systems, but it's difficult for 2 different systems to reach consensus or to compile comprehensive identity portfolios; we already have different authentication methods, but they have poor cross-region compatibility.
This kind of trust issues bring lots of pain. Let's say you're in a hospital, and you want a transfer to another hospital maybe to go find another doctor. It's a pain because you may need a lot of paperwork or verification from the current hospital and your current doctor, but you don't want to offend them by telling them: "Hey I'm going for a better doctor." The same thing happens when you want to apply for a different job or so.
The following are some main scenarios listed on their white paper.
Users can collect and manage their own identity data from various sources including public institutions, banks, businesses, family, colleagues, and friends.
Digital identities of physical objects can be registered into the distributed network under the supervision of the product owners and/or producers.
Ontology Network provides a data exchange system in which all data can be discovered and traded to the owner's benefit whilst meeting individual privacy requirements.
With all your data and assets on the blockchain, it becomes possible to really trade your data and information, it also give people the power to control their own data.
Distributed collaborative systems in Ontology Network help build up the trust network.
As mentioned before, with Ontology, it becomes easier for systems to trust each other, and using Ontology also bring transparency and security.
Trust is always a problem in our society, and Ontology could be a great solution for this. I won't say Ontology will solve the whole issue but in many scenarios, it will be so much easier because it can help us get rid of complex verification processes.
The project is run by a company in China called onChain. The team is very strong and they've already implemented a lot and launched their internal test net. The main-net is scheduled to be launched in Q2, 2018, which is just a few months from now. This gives me more faith in the project, and makes me believe that it's gonna be the next big thing in the crypto world.
@antonsteemit for more ... thoughts!