Data is leverage and this is why Ledger is after yours

Shit, I cannot begin to imagine how many articles on the Internet previously tagging "ledger" as the best crypto wallet now have to change their recommendations because wtf?

But you see, the bottom line is that ignorance is a bliss and chaos is often caused by exposure to new knowledge, which in this case, many now understand that getting fucked even whilst using a hardware wallet is still pretty easy.

There's no such thing as a hardware wallet in the first place, few people understand this.

Sorry Dan, you can never be truly free, own and control all you work for, there will always be a third party with some amount of leverage, it is the reality and I'll explain how literally everything is subject to this, even on Hive.

First, what is Data? You see, there are two most valuable things in life and that is time and knowledge(information), utilising both effectively leads to a widely successful enterprise.

Data is basically information, the knowledge of certain data plays a crucial role in growth, generally. Look at the world today, the most valuable sectors deal with a large amount of data. The health sector, the media, the law institutions, AI, mobile, tablet and desktop manufacturers, just to name a few, the companies within the listed sectors are widely successful because of "data", as little as it may seem, every new product or structure built within them are often simply to collect more data because this is how they can expand, by analysing this data and either discovering opportunities to leverage or vulnerabilities to exploit.

Now, when it comes to crypto, people have the idea that there is no way to gather relevant information about individuals but the truth is, there are a million ways to actually get relevant information about people even by merely looking at social interactions, data will always connect.

This data is important for most of these companies to expand, this is why crypto project frontends will still track you whilst promising some sort of anonymity on the backend, but really the most valuable set of data are those performed on the first layer. Notwithstanding, all data is leverage and all companies want that leverage in order to expand.

Here's where ledger comes in.

The business model ledger is attempting to deploy here is what I would call a "portable bank".

A bank that could easily be moved around without being noticed because the moment ledger begins to store your keys, it becomes a "trusted party"(of which it already is) holding custody of your wealth. So now, in addition to being able to track activities users perform on the first layer, ledger can now tie this to the second layer which is the blockchain and that just opens up infinite business possibilities.

With the ability to match data, ledger is given a competitive advantage to discover certain money management patterns which enables the company to build products tailored to exploit these accumulated data. That said, this wasn't all for ledger as there was an interesting comment that was made on twitter that made crypto twitter go wild and that was this:

“Technically speaking it is and always has been possible to write firmware that facilitates key extraction. You have always trusted us not to deploy such firmware whether you knew or not”

See why I said ledger was always a trusted third party?

What is this all about? Well, due to the reaction of the crypto community, a ledger staff thought it would be fun to tell you all that yeah, fuck you, we could have easily stolen your private keys if we wanted and your dumb ass wouldn't realize it. Lol, talk about some Oscar moves right there.

As reported by Coindesk, this discovery has thrown the industry off balance and that's only understandable because majority of the people using any product or service will also not have the full knowledge on how everything works.

This is where Hive comes in too, you see, very little number of hive users know that signing transactions like posting to the chain via all these frontends requires us to give them permissions to use our keys on our behalf. So, in reality, we are trusting that they don't actually somehow store these keys or won't at least leverage this permission to perform transactions not initiated by us.

So you see, regardless of how crypto attempts to grow to be decentralized, void of censorship or third party control, it will always still be vastly controlled but the idea is ultimately to spread the risks across because centralized services will always emerge and not a lot of people want to learn all about how a system works, they just want to know that it works.