Much is being made about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. Certainly it is news here on Hive, for obvious reasons. In these articles, we opined how the "everything app" is putting him squarely in the realm of Hive. We are a decentralized database that already has some decentralized finance built in. At the same time, the blockchain has a native payment system, something Musk is going to have to incorporate.
Many have stated the $40+ billion he (and his investors) paid is ridiculous. From the standpoint of a social media application, this is correct. However, when we look at Musk's belief from 22 years ago that the X-App could have become the largest financial institution in the world, we see a different outlook.
There is something else that could be factoring into this equation: data.
Elon Musk just acquired a database that started 15 years ago. Each day, there are more than 500 million Tweets sent out. This is a lot of data being regularly added.
Tesla's foray into self driving is heavily dependent upon its ability to accumulate targeted data and properly label it. Cleaning up all that is provided is vital for any AI system. It is safe to assume that Musk, and his team, are experts at this by now.
While Musk has not achieved fully autonomy when it comes to cars, many feel is he is far ahead of everyone else. Time will tell if this is the case but it is hard to debate the success they had so far.
Now he has access to the Twitter database. How much data is just sitting there waiting to be parsed? This could be much bigger than just selling it to advertisers. He could be embarking upon a situation whereby he uses Twitter to train AI systems.
He is very open about his desire to create a humanoid bot. To achieve this end, he is going to have to have a great deal of data for training. It appears he just acquired a few Gigabytes of that.
Perhaps this might explains the 50 or so Tesla engineers who are reportedly involved with Twitter at the moment.
Either way, we can expect Musk and his team to start using all the data that was freely provided by the userbase for purposes other than just selling some advertising.
It appears this deal was not as bad as many are making it out to be.
One of the reasons for this viewpoint is there are discussions about doing something like this on Hive. Hopefully in the next couple weeks there will be an announcement of a new project that uses Hive data to train some AI systems. This will evolve into a useful application for people to use.
Thus, the worthwhile data placed into the database, the better this system will operate.
Over the last few months we discussed how crucial it is to look at Hive as a decentralized, permission-less database. As we can see, these have tremendous value. Is Twitter's worth $44 billion? It is hard to put a price tag on things like that. However, it is possible to see how Musk could create something worth a lot more than that.
It is the same for Hive. All the data on the blockchain is part of the value. Now it is a matter of putting some of it to use. So far, the applications doing this have been relatively rudimentary.
Hopefully, we can see this taken to another level.
There is also a larger lesson in this. Whatever we put online is going to be training data. Each Tweet, post, comment, or upvote ends up as categorized. When humans talk about AI taking control, remember we are the ones who trained them. Also, as evidenced here, we are also the ones who offer up the training material.
We often write how "Hive solves this". Here is another example of where we see Hive having value that is overlooked by most in the marketplace. Can Bitcoin do this? It is a distributed ledger but only offers up financial transactions, more like a bank. Ethereum does contain a bit more yet that did not really evolved into the realm Hive did.
Immutable data is something people talk about on Hive. The key to this, from the perspective of this article, is the data part. Hive has it. We are dealing with a database of hundreds of GB (50% of the size pre-hard fork due to compression changes) worth of real world information. This is not just a recording of coins moving among the different wallets.
As we analyze the different aspects to what is taking place around us, we see how much Hive is emerging as a centerpiece. How many other blockchains can you find that offer the same kind of data as Hive?
Is this something that can be leveraged for massive value?
If you believe that bots, AI, and machine learning are the future, then it is easy to see how our expanding database is making Hive more valuable by the day. While it might not rival Twitter, it can be a centerpiece for development that surpass most of what is involved in cryptocurrency.
Suddenly, the discussion switches from how much is stored on Hive to what is being posted there. When we compare to the rest of the blockchain world, we see something completely different unfolding.
This is one of the paths of Hive. Things are evolving right before our eyes.
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