During our blockchain ID innovation night, it's Christopher span of T-Mobile USA. And he will talk about blockchain and the business of identity, because at the end, if you don't have a business model, we definitely will fail. So Christopher, it's your turn.
Thank you.
So my name is Chris Benson and I'm a senior architect at T-Mobile USA. I'm here today to talk to you guys about blockchain and the business of identity, as we've just discussed it's as we have seen in this conference, blockchain is a hugely emerging space in the last presentation.
He did a great job of highlighting the exponential curve and, and how we're seeing that over the coming years, there may be a massive uptake in, in the production of this technology, but what does that mean for businesses? We don't see again to the point, a lot of production implementations today of blockchain solutions. So how do we bridge that gap?
How do we go from where we are in our businesses to a position of being able to deploy and produce blockchain applications really quickly, D telecom here in, in Germany is the leading telco, the largest telco in the European telecommunication sector.
Now, as that relates to us in the United States, we have been the leader in the United States for the last four years. And as far as wireless speed customer service and a number of other categories, and we're really excited about the work that we've been doing.
One of the key things that I wanna highlight about T-Mobile is that we're transforming wireless through technology innovation. And that's a really big point for me. It's something that we're really excited about. Something that we've drastically shifted our business in the last few years to really be today a te technology company, rather than a telecom company and one that's making our progress through the development and sharing of technologies.
So to that point, I work on a team called the cloud center of excellence at T-Mobile we're about producing open source solutions solutions that make our business better, that we can then share with the world and make it a better place for everyone.
And blockchain is a really key technology in that space.
When we talk about producing technologies that are gonna make the world better for everyone around us, I think blockchain is a real leader, and we've seen a lot of the conversation in this conference around self-sovereign identity and how that's gonna play a part in that now from our jazz serverless platform, tot vault, other applications you see here open source is an important part of that journey.
And I think the opportunity to share the solutions that we build not only gives us an opp opportunity for broad audience to review and critique and improve the solutions, but also helps bring everybody up, you know, at risk of being cliche, that rising tide does lift all ships. And it's something that blockchain I think is a good demonstration of.
Now, next directory is something that I've spoken about here at this conference.
And, and it's a blockchain based digital identity solution. You've probably heard about a lot of those, but it's a little bit different than the traditional self sovereign. And we'll get to that a little bit later and talk about why that's, what we've chosen to be our entry point into the conversation around blockchain. Let's take a step back first though, and let's look at identity. What is identity stop and think for a minute, maybe even talk to your neighbor. How would you define this term?
We're all here to talk about this, but I think it's a little bit difficult to abstract yourself from the ongoing dialogue around how we manage identity, how we define identity is a very different space. So I looked up a definition and it says that identity is defined as being the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.
Now that didn't really help me any, I don't know about you guys, but when I read that it left me scratching my head. So we'll get back to that a little bit later, but keep that in mind. So is identity then your passport, right?
We've heard a lot about talk about that in our last conversation, there was a dialogue around how passports might shape the future of your identity. Is it this passport? Is it these passports is, is identity something you have one of, or do you have many identities? Is identity something that your bank defines for you? Is it your name and account balance and deposit history that makes you who you are? Or is it the characteristics that when somebody looks at me, they see my height and the color of my hair are those, the things that define my identity.
And I think the answer lies somewhere across all of those.
They're, they're all our identity. And that's a key point that again, we'll get back to and touch on later, or is this identity, is it a public key and a corresponding private key? Does identity have to be about a person?
No, we saw in that initial description, that identity can be about a thing as well, whether it's a device in your hand or even a bit of code, I think that's a really important differentiation. That identity is something that we are beginning to abstract from the individuals we see around us and the characteristics that define them. And we're allowing with self-sovereign identity solutions, the ability to use unique sets of characteristics to define an individual or an identity.
So trust what is trust you, trust that guy right there. He didn't seem really trustworthy to me.
I think trust is another word that we've heard. A lot of. I heard this in the last two or three keynotes that have been on this stage before me. It's something that's really important and fundamental to the discussion around blockchain and how we're gonna see the world as blockchain emerges underneath us. Trust is defined as the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something, again, that differentiator between someone and something. Let's keep that in mind.
So when we look at trust and where we are in a world today, and how that fits into the conversation of blockchain, as it's emerging around us, we look at this scale of how we trust each other here in Europe. Now I'm from the United States, but I'm confident that the graph would not be any more exciting than what we see here. What we do see is that the average trust is a 5.9 between trusting others in Europe.
Now, when I was in grade school, if I scored a 5.9 on my exams, I would've failed. So I'm not sure we're doing as well as we want to be doing when it comes to trust. And that's why I think blockchain and the conversations around trust and identity on blockchain are emerging today. Let's look at another measure of trust. How about trust in the public government in the United States? Do we think that that's gonna be any better than the last slide we saw?
That's not necessarily a trend that I think is compelling from a belief in how the internet is emerging to bring people together, right?
We're hearing a story from the likes of Facebook and others that they're building connectivity and relationships. But when we start to look at the connectivity and relationships between one another, how we trust one another and how we trust our governments and institutions, those are on a dramatic declining curve.
So that's, that's a conversation that has been all around us as blockchain as a technology has emerged. And I don't think it's a coincidence. There are obviously technical hurdles, but there's a lot of the world around us. That's driving this now in his 2008 white paper, Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Satoshi Nakamoto, or there, or her, or whoever that may have been. They highlighted a couple of things that we've talked about here, right?
Trust an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, right?
It was in that space where trust has been declining for decades, that we started to look at other ways of defining trust. Then the relationships we have between one another can cryptographic proof replace that. Now let's really quick. Take a step back. You've all heard. I think a lot about blockchain. You may know well about it, but you know, what is it really? It's a chain of blocks you hash one and add that as an input into the next. It allows you to decentralize the traditional database network.
It's opportunity to transition a network of nodes and use consensus to make that decentralized trust fully distributed as a result of leader election processes. Now the consensus algorithms that we use have changed a lot. And we'll talk a little bit about some of those, but the short of it is that traditional databases transactions are recorded by a trusted system, containing a single source of truth.
And in a blockchain database transaction processes, and verification is decentralized with many distributed source of truth nodes.
We're taking away from individual governments, corporations, and people around us. So consensus is that cryptographic proof that Satoshi Nakamoto talks about in that 2008 white paper consensus as a replacement of trust needs to be a couple of things. It needs to be easy to prove, but difficult to fake. And that really is a something that can be said of trust at large, right?
It's, it's easy to break trust, but it's difficult to gain it. That may have been something your parents told you when you were a teenager and, and you were caught out late at night, but this is something that remains true. As we have explore the world of how blockchain is engaging in, in handling identity. Now let's go back to that conversation of identity, the facts of being who or what a person or thing is.
So breaking that down a little bit, getting past some of that confusion, I thought about the individuals that, or the individual components that made up that statement.
The fact of being who a person is, and the fact of being what a thing is, those are identities. Now that thing, again, as I mentioned, could be a device in your hand, it could be a line of code. It could be your car that you're driving, but identity is going to be important to all of those things. It's gonna be a part of 5g. That's emerging around UST and the internet of things and e-voting passports.
So how does that relate to business? What is the business of identity? It's about how we implement identity within our businesses, but it's also about the business ecosystem that surrounds us.
The market for digital advertising in 2017 was $204 billion, roughly speaking. Now that is a number that's been growing rapidly. You can see here that exponential curve that was reflected in the previous dialogue. It's only in 2017 that spending on digital advertising, eclipse, that of traditional advertising mechanisms like television. It's something that we're in the midst of a change.
Now, digital advertising is the business of identity, right? It's your identities being sold and shared and used for the benefit of certain large businesses, nearly two thirds of all digital advertising revenue in 2017 came through two companies. Any guesses, well I've revealed it there, but Google was responsible for nearly 96 billion of that 200, four or billion worth of advertising and Facebook, another $40 billion.
Now we look that makes up about, like I said, two thirds of the total pie of digital advertising income.
And do we trust in the age of Cambridge Analytica and data breach after data breach, after data breach from large companies, these big corporations to own our identity, to be good custodians of our identity. I think the answer that we all know is no. Now let me take a quick sidebar to say at T-Mobile we're customer obsessed. This is something that drives everything we do every day. And we receive the highest cores for our customer satisfaction.
Well, for the last 15 years, it's been something or for the last 15 quarters as this has gone through, it's something that we've been highlighted as leading. And so this is a recent stat from 2018, but that aside, when we look at digital identity, there are two sides of that coin.
It's who you are, who or what you are as a thing, but it's also what you can do.
Now, we talked a little bit about who you are, what is the, what you can do now, starting with who you are. We have self sovereign identity. That's removes the control from those governments and corporations, right? It puts it in the hands of the individual. It allows you to foster variety. You might have many IDs per individual, many identification networks sovereign of is just one of those and many ID providers per network or, or verifiers. The sovereign network of course, has been leading that dialogue.
And, and Deutsche telecom is by the way, a founding identity, a founding steward and identity provider verifier for the sovereign network is something that we're committed to, but what you can do takes a different type of solution. Once you've identified yourself, how do we improve the conversation using blockchain technologies around what you can do?
How does it improve the identity dialogue? So we've built the next identity platform. It's that's right where IAM identity and access management comes into play. It's about entitlement control. It's about auditing. It's about change management.
Now it's maybe not as exciting of a topic as self-sovereign identity, but it's one, that's no less important. It's one that allows us to make sure that as we interact with the businesses around us, as the business of identity grows around the world, that we have an opportunity for those businesses to do a better job of, of handling what information they do have about us.
Now, we all believe, or I believe, and I think there's a conversation emerging and a growing consensus that self sovereign identity is gonna be the solution to take the control of who you are outta the hands of, of other people. But we need to do make sure that the information that we, that they have, they're able to do a better job of handling proving to their auditors. So I'm not gonna take too long talking about next. We're excited that this is a solution that's open source per that early dialogue that I had.
It's something that allows us to interact with our identity platforms in a better way. Open source at the uncarrier is how I'm inviting you again, to think a little bit differently about what we do, not just a technology consumer, but a technology provider and somebody who's committed to sharing the work that we do with the world around us. Thank you.
So thank you, Chris. I think it's a, again, on an interesting view on this big topic, which is a little bit the main theme of the afternoon. Maybe I also leaving in yesterday.
I think it'll be interesting to see where all these things move while it's next in that what is the future? But I think there are so many interesting things going on with a lot of big players involved, which definitely helps driving things ahead. I'm not sure whether we had have questions when I looked just a minute ago, there weren't questions, but anyway, let's have a look at the questions who technic, oh, here we go. No questions submitted submitted yet.
So anyway, I have one. So do you believe so? So when we look at, at business models for identity, so obviously Facebook has sort of an indirect business model earn money by advertising and does identity, do you think that around blockchain idea will be sort of a direct business model at some point, or will it remain indirect?
That's a great question.
You know, I think one of the things that we're realizing is that as blockchain ID emerges, it needs to really be a consumer centric, right? We're building it often in the open source space with Hyperledger indie and similar projects.
And, and, and the focus has been making sure that we solve some of the consumer interfacing challenges. I think down the road, we can expect that certainly businesses will try to build a model around that and have a primary business model that's focused on leveraging the technologies that have emerged in the coming years.
You know, I foresee that being kind of for stalled and for all, all of us, myself included, I hope that's for stalled as long as it can be.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you for your keynote
Pleasure. Thank you.
