Big Data, Blockchain, and the Decentralized Energy Grid

A new technology has turned the corner and gained widespread adoption that will once again alter how humans interact with data, not by allowing us to store more of it, but by allowing us to more easily determine the value of the data and to transact in it, like a commodity. Blockchain technology is a breakthrough made possible by decades of progress in cryptography and mathematics, with a little inspiration from game theory. This system of asymetric crypto signatures and hashes can allow data to be timestamped, stored, and notarized in an immutable, unforgeable fashion. We deal in "heartbeat data", and everything gives off a heartbeat these days. In our path, we discovered literal heart-beat charts on angiocardiogram machines that simple scroll data out of memory, and lose it. The tick of an electrical meter, minute by minute, at every house, on every appliance, can be optimized in a verifiable way using intelligent agents in the grid. Ownership models of renewable energy sources are being made decentralized right now, with payment and pricing layers for automated power exchange being implemented in systems with data security and access authorization schemes that make our current tech look like child's play. We're learning how to make blockchain systems "rent" and forget data once it's no longer needed, and how to price that data properly. Big data connections and pattern-finding, correlations reaching across industries only make our data more valuable and worth holding onto for longer in these schemes. So for those data archivists out there, and for all those evil "deletionists", blockchain is a self-pruning by value mechanism for all data that exists.