Ontology: a Defined distributed trust network

Ontology had made a huge wave since their presentation at Neo Dev Con this January in San Francisco. This week, they also announced that there is gonna be an ONT token airdrop for all the NEO holders, which more or less contributes to the NEO price rise these days(in my opinion).

If you visit their website and take a look at the white paper, I'm pretty sure you will get kind of confused. The whole project is just so huge for you to have a big picture of what's going on. Today I will try to explain what the whole 'Ontology' project is, and how I believe it's gonna be the next milestone in the crypto world.

What is Ontology?

According to their white paper, Ontology is "A Public Platform for Building a Decentralized Trust Ecosystem".And according to their Founder, it is "a Defined distributed trust network".

In my words, it's a network that creates TRUST.

Ontology helps you "trust" someone else from a different platform, a different community, a different blockchain, or a different world.

Why is Trust so important?

"Trust" is one of the hardest things to get.

According to psychologists, human only trust 100 or less people through their lives. It's naturally hard for us to trust people, and this situation occurs not only between individuals but also between corporations and communities.

And now, trust becomes a big obstacle in the real world. We already have multiple verification systems, but it's difficult for 2 different systems to reach consensus or to compile comprehensive identity portfolios; we already have different authentication methods, but they have poor cross-region compatibility.

This kind of trust issues bring lots of pain. Let's say you're in a hospital, and you want a transfer to another hospital maybe to go find another doctor. It's a pain because you may need a lot of paperwork or verification from the current hospital and your current doctor, but you don't want to offend them by telling them: "Hey I'm going for a better doctor." The same thing happens when you want to apply for a different job or so.

That's just one of the reasons that we need an "integrated protocol system that incorporates multiple trust types". With Ontology, all platforms and systems trust each other easily.

Scenarios

Another easy way to understand Ontology is that, by creating Multi-Source digital Identities to everything, we can just look at data on Ontology as a trust-worthy database.

Ontology will take care of all the protocols and communication, integration stuff, so we can all use it in our own applications.

The following are some main scenarios listed on their white paper.

1.Multi-Source Identity System for People

Users can collect and manage their own identity data from various sources including public institutions, banks, businesses, family, colleagues, and friends.

2. Multi-Source Identity System for Objects

Digital identities of physical objects can be registered into the distributed network under the supervision of the product owners and/or producers.

3. Distributed Data Exchange

Ontology Network provides a data exchange system in which all data can be discovered and traded to the owner's benefit whilst meeting individual privacy requirements.

With all your data and assets on the blockchain, it becomes possible to really trade your data and information, it also give people the power to control their own data.

4. Distributed Collaborative Systems

Distributed collaborative systems in Ontology Network help build up the trust network.

As mentioned before, with Ontology, it becomes easier for systems to trust each other, and using Ontology also bring transparency and security.

Small conclusion

Trust is always a problem in our society, and Ontology could be a great solution for this. I won't say Ontology will solve the whole issue but in many scenarios, it will be so much easier because it can help us get rid of complex verification processes.

The project is run by a company in China called onChain. The team is very strong and they've already implemented a lot and launched their internal test net. The main-net is scheduled to be launched in Q2, 2018, which is just a few months from now. This gives me more faith in the project, and makes me believe that it's gonna be the next big thing in the crypto world.

More Information

Check out their Website & their White Paper (they have 5 white papers)

How to get ONT Tokens?

Ontology is not having an ICO, and they haven't announced how all their tokens will be given out to the community, so make sure you follow them on Telegram or Twitter.

They're having an airdrop to all the NEO holders, it will happen around March 1, 2018. You can see more detail here

Follow @antonsteemit for more ... thoughts!