I read your post, and am appreciating how you framed out your thinking and these issues. I think you define a number of the issues well, (privacy, power dynamics, efficiencies) give good illustrations and analogies (hub and spoke), and your pragmatic orientation felt very grounding to read.
I hadn’t thought of the consortium approach to private blockchains, and am really glad to for the extra details here after hearing you speak about it at J-Lab. And I agree heartily to guardrails about risks and rights to how subjects’ data is used!

Some thoughts that occurred to me while reading your piece, for what they’re worth:

I agree that selling ones data and being remunerated for it in some way is an improvement over ones data being taken without remuneration — for sure. My concern is that a consequence of this is that for those with a certain level of disposable income, privacy is a choice in the sense that the fallout from choosing not to sell it is nearly nothing. Meanwhile below a certain income, a consequence of not selling one’s data could well mean not being able to feed oneself or worse, one’s children. By contrast, if the lived consequences of a choice are relatively equal for everyone, I would consider that to be more of a true choice. When the same choice results in major hardship for one person, and nearly no difference in life-standard to another person, that feels like it falls short of the ideal of freedom of choice, particularly when the consequences weigh much harder on poorer folk – that raises a flag for me that there’s probably room for deeper design work.

Who is included and excluded in decisions that effect large swaths of humanity, who decides who’s included, are questions I’ve been grappling with lately. My sense is that there is more intelligence in the collective than we mostly know how to access and make coherent sense of, though there is interesting experimentation going on in this area (S-Labs and theory U out of MIT, for eg). I sense one of the challenges of diverse inclusion is making a coherent space out of which collective intelligence might emerge. It is fairly standard that a struggle for dominating the narrative is the result when diverse groups get together without adequate context setting and facilitation that can handle emergence and cohere collective intelligence.

This is a long reply – if you’re still reading, thank you for hanging in!

One more thought ramble in response to the increased efficiencies of private blockchains:

I thought your explanation of how blockchains can serve a consortium by reducing the cost of keeping records up to date, since the record is updated for everyone nearly simultaneously, was really strong. And I appreciate having this spelled out, and the pragmatic efficiency of it feels liberating.
I was thrilled that you also forecast that job-losses for redundant record-keeping labour could also result from this efficiency. It shows a kind of clear-headed systemic thinking and willingness to look for problems that a proposed solution might inadvertently cause – ie, unemployment. The other piece of this from an ethical standpoint is who decides who benefits, and how much, from these cost savings?
These kinds of governance decisions, as well as laws such as fiduciary duty to shareholders, seem to me to be ground zero for whether we interrupt the extract, abstract, accumulate systems that reduce sustainability and anti-fragility, or forge something inconceivably new in the heat of this convergeance. (I’m borrowing from https://civilizationemerging.com/new-economics-series-part-iv/ on this)
And, thank you for pointing out how ransom can be collected from crypto. I know some adherents who praise crypto for it’s safety, and appreciate the ballast your example provided.

I’ll end on what intrigues me about our current moment are the emerging experiments to create environments that allow for de-siloing, and for emergent collective intelligence to become more of a reality. Often the ‘other’ (other sub-cultures, other fields of expertise, other people of whatever stripe) provokes a kind of psychological immune system response. How to lower the psychological immune reaction of a sub-culture enough so it can actually be shaped by a plurality of perspectives – and have coherent, co-ordinated forward motion result — is something that interests me. Experiments like S-Lab (MIT), Robert Kegan’s work (Harvard), and what my own organization is doing with our annual ParTecK, for example, I feel are ripe for growing the new ways of participating in human evolution that current crisis and problems demand of us humans.

Alas, I reckon now I’ve said more than enough – at risk of being thorough I may have over-indulged your listening / receiving generosity! Thank you for receiving my impressions and thoughts to any extent you have, may some being somewhere be served by our exchange : )
Best,
Rochelle