To be honest, those inexplicable friend requests on your WeChat, are they getting more and more? A couple of days ago, I looked through and found that in six months I added more than twenty "investment advisors" and "blockchain mentors", none of whom I know. Later I realized—some time ago I carelessly logged into a mining mini-game with WeChat.
Data is like air in the Web2 world, everyone is consuming it, and you don't even have a mask.
Old Cha mentioned something at the Hong Kong Consensus Conference, which was quite to the point: the current internet forces you to choose between "naked" and "get lost". You go into a store to buy a bottle of water, and the owner says to place your ID here—absurd, right? But you do this kind of thing every day.
The dual ledger that Midnight created essentially separates "who you are" from "what you can do".
Let me tell you a scenario: you go to rent a house, and the agent wants to see your credit report, but you don't need to let them know what strange content you've liked on Douyin. You go on a blind date, and the other party only needs to confirm that you are single, without needing to dig through your Taobao shopping history.
I've pondered Fahmi's words for a long time: "The most valuable thing is not the data itself, but proving the data's validity without exposing privacy." This is not a problem that code can solve; it's a rewriting of the game rules.
The old-timers at MoneyGram have laid down a payment network in over 200 countries, and now they are coming to be Midnight's federal nodes. Do you think they are just idling? They are actually very focused—whoever can make users feel that "sharing data isn't painful" will be the boss.
That brother of yours who made a few bucks with NIGHT and ran away probably regrets it now. What he sold was not the position, but that opportunity of "being able to use it without bowing and scraping".