by Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb, Unlimited Hangout:

The patent hoarding developers and investors associated with PayPal and Google who built the first iteration of e-commerce and digital advertising have turned to the blockchain to fulfill their vision of total financial surveillance and the circumnavigation of government-issued money.

Data is the most liquid commodity market on the planet. In the modern computer and smartphone era, everywhere you go, everything you say, and everything you consume is quantifiable among the nearly infinite spectrum of the digital information market. The internet today, along with other digital technologies for computation and communication, serves as comprehensive e-commerce infrastructure, facilitating the entire life cycle of designing, producing, distributing, and consuming a wide array of data. Due to expansive growth in both the hardware and software sectors, the seamless transition of existing data, or information goods, from traditional analog formats to digital formats is easily achievable, not to mention the collecting, storing, querying, and distributing of data formats in ways otherwise infeasible in the analog world.