Data is money
“Data is money” is one of my most common slogans, but it expresses a deeper axiom: money is the most useful dataset ever created. Every transaction is a claim about who did what, when, and with whom, and ledgers matter because they attach those claims to identities and timestamps.
In the digital era, the dataset itself, behavioral data, becomes a medium of exchange. Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey have proven this by turning our clicks and logins into advertising cash flows through OAuth flows, such as “Login with Facebook” or “Login with Twitter.”
Studies of those systems, and later FTC penalties against Twitter for misusing phone numbers and email addresses collected for security purposes, showed how profile data was leaked to third parties and sold repeatedly. Data became money precisely because it was bound to specific people over time and packaged as a product.
Identity, time, and price signals
Value is a relational and temporal phenomenon. A barrel of oil only gains price when buyers trust that the seller owns it and that delivery will occur at a specific future date. Advertising markets, credit scoring, and creator monetization all rely on durable identity. Advertisers pay more for targeted impressions because linking an ad to a specific demographic increases the expected conversion rate.
Credit bureaus assign interest rates based on an individual’s repayment history; the score has no meaning without identity and time.
Musicians and writers can only monetize their work when they can prove authorship and track consumption. Anonymous impressions and streams are almost worthless because they cannot be reconciled with real customers.
At the macro level, currency stability depends on credible information about supply and demand. In the digital age, our transaction records are the source of data from which companies derive price signals. Attaching those records to individuals, ideally ethically and transparently, is the only way to preserve the signal instead of the noise.
This is why the emerging Web3 movement views identity as a crucial layer for the internet’s economic infrastructure.
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The behavioral playbook
Edward Bernays, the father of modern advertising, demonstrated how targeting identity over time influences market trends. He coined the term “public relations” to rebrand propaganda and (among many other successful campaigns) staged events such as the 1929 “Torches of Freedom,” arranging for models to smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes during the Easter parade so that female smoking looked like liberation.
His work made clear that if you can target a group, repeat a message, and measure responses, you can steer behavior.
Modern digital advertising, A/B testing, and recommender systems simply run that playbook with real-time data at a population scale.
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How platforms minted fortunes from identity
Facebook’s (NASDAQ: META) growth strategy illustrates the power of identity-anchored data. By offering a convenient OAuth flow, “Login with Facebook,” the company harvested personal information across millions of websites.
Princeton researchers showed that when users clicked the button, third-party scripts embedded on those sites could retrieve email addresses, gender, and other profile details.
This data fed Facebook’s ad graph, allowing advertisers to target specific demographics and track users across the web. Twitter’s incentives were similar; the platform was fined after using phone numbers and emails provided for security to match users with advertisers.
These examples underscore that identity tokens are the currency of the internet. When a company owns the login mechanism, it holds the keys to global microdata markets.
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Web3 identity, briefly explained
Web3 attempts to redesign identity and data sharing. Instead of relying on centralized logins that siphon personal data into corporate silos, users control private keys that sign transactions and claims. Self-sovereign identity models allow individuals to generate wallets, hold verifiable credentials, and selectively disclose attributes.
A verifiable credential is a cryptographic proof that some issuer, a university, employer, or government, attests to a fact about you, such as a degree or citizenship, without revealing anything extra. Because ownership is expressed by signatures on a blockchain, identity is defined by the breadth of attestation of what one controls rather than by an account on a single server.
Data sharing becomes consent-driven; you can reveal just enough to complete a trade, join a community, or unlock content.
Yet this vision requires scalable infrastructure. Most blockchains struggle with high fees and low throughput, which makes on-chain identity impractical for many mainstream applications.
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Two modern SDKs: Privy vs Clerk
Into this landscape step developer tools like Privy and Clerk. Both sell authentication as a service with Web3 support, but they come at the problem from opposite ends of the stack. Privy is essentially a Web3 wallet engine that also handles sign-in, combining progressive authentication with embedded self-custodial wallets across EVM, Solana, BTC, and more, plus fleets of programmatically controlled wallets for treasuries and high-volume apps.
Clerk begins as a full-stack identity and user management platform, then adds Web3 capabilities on top. It excels at pre-built signup flows, session handling, organizations, roles, and billing across common web and mobile frameworks, and it seamlessly integrates with chains like BASE and other Web3 tooling as needed.
Both exist so that developers do not have to reinvent login and account management. They support familiar authentication flows like email, SMS, or passkeys, plus social and OAuth logins. Both can work with secure enclaves and key sharding, so neither the app nor the vendor sees users’ private keys, which can be exported.
Pricing reflects the philosophy. Privy optimizes around transaction volume with generous free tiers and very low per-transaction costs. Clerk optimizes around monthly active users and organizations, with a free tier that suits many SaaS apps and a simple per-user Pro model.
The result is that Privy tends to appeal to teams who care deeply about wallets and on-chain behavior and want cross-chain plumbing abstracted away, while Clerk is often the safer choice when your primary problem is managing people, teams and sessions, and you want Web3 available as a feature, not the foundation of your product.
Both, however, typically sit on top of general-purpose chains that have significant fee volatility and throughput constraints, which is why they often need “gasless” experiences with sponsors to smooth over costs for users. (Yikes!)
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Why Sigma Identity on BSV
Sigma Identity, also marketed as Sigma Auth, is built on BSV to address the same identity and login issues, but with a significantly different economic and scalability profile. BSV’s network regularly processes multi-gigabyte blocks and has seen 4GB blocks on mainnet by both TAAL and GorillaPool. Tests by the BSV Teranode Team have achieved a throughput of one million transactions per second using Teranode on the testnet and Teratestnet networks, with similar numbers expected on mainnet in 2026.
Source: https://sigmaidentity.com/Transaction fees are tiny, often less than a thousandth of a cent per transaction, which enables microtransactions and identity attestations without financial friction and makes BSV an attractive data ledger for many small OAuth-style events.
Sigma Auth leverages this by deriving user identities from Bitcoin keys, producing zero server secrets and self-hosted OAuth 2.0 flows. Users create a cryptographic identity in their browser, sign a challenge, and receive a token; no password database exists. Access control can be gated by on-chain proofs of asset ownership, such as requiring an NFT or DAO token to access content. Multi-chain support enables verifying ownership across BTC, Ethereum, and EVM chains for compatibility. However, the system can derive BSV addresses from EVM wallets due to the shared secp256k1 curve.
Source: https://sigmaidentity.com/When a user links MetaMask, their ETH private key simultaneously controls a BSV address, enabling cross-chain identity, fund recovery, and attestation of validity in activities such as token issuance and swaps.
Because identity assertions are written to BSV’s ledger, they are timestamped and immutable, which satisfies my axiom that true value requires both identity and time.
Developers can self-host Sigma Auth, deploy it on modern runtimes, and integrate with any OAuth client. BSV’s microfee model allows millions of login events or attestations at a trivial cost, preserving a sustainable price signal without sponsors who hide high fees from users.
Combined with simplified payment verification and proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, this eliminates the need for trusted setup, corporate servers, second-layer rollups, or sidechains. Identity records remain secure and publicly verifiable, while selective disclosure still protects privacy.
Sigma’s access control module can enforce token thresholds, membership, and time-based subscriptions, which enable dynamic pricing and new business models, such as login-as-a-contract, where signing in constitutes acceptance of terms and can trigger payment.
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Designing markets where people get paid for their data
Now imagine logging into a news site and choosing whether to pay a micro fee, share a proof of membership token, or sell anonymized attention data. Sigma Auth could issue a credential attesting that you watched 30 minutes of video; advertisers might pay you directly for that proof instead of paying a platform to infer it.
Even credit scoring could evolve. Rather than sharing your entire transaction history, you could provide a zero-knowledge-style proof that your payment punctuality exceeds a certain threshold.
In each case, data is tied to an identity, stamped in time, and used with explicit consent. Businesses get reliable signals. Users get paid for what they share. Developers pay negligible fees to anchor proofs on BSV.
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Call to action
The era of “free” social networks monetizing our identities without consent is closing. Builders have a narrow window to design systems where value flows back to users and where data remains meaningful because it is anchored to identity and time. Privy and Clerk solve essential parts of the onboarding and wallet problem, and for many teams, they are the right tools today.
Their tradeoff is that they still tend to rely on trusted server models or are on chains with highly variable, and often high, fees.
Sigma Identity on BSV focuses on the same class of problems, but it anchors identity and login on a chain that is designed for data at scale and microfee economics.
If you are a builder, start treating login as the foundational contract of your application. Utilize tools like Privy, Clerk, and Sigma with clear intent, and where high-frequency attestations or micropayments are involved, favor settlement layers that have demonstrated scalability and sub-cent fees, such as BSV.
If you run a company, implement selective disclosure with verifiable credentials, so you only request the attributes necessary for a transaction and allow users to revoke their consent. Enable cross-chain interoperability, support multiple wallet types, and derive BSV addresses from EVM keys, allowing users to leverage the wallets they already have.
Plan for self-custody, allowing users to export their keys and leave your platform on their own terms.
If you participate in standards bodies or technical communities, advocate for open working groups focused on identity protocols and verifiable credentials, as open standards mitigate the risk of new monopolies over identity and maintain a contestable playing field.
Data is money because it measures value over time for real people. If Web3 is going to improve upon Web2, it must embed identity and time as first-class citizens and ensure that users, not just platforms, reap the benefits.
Systems like Privy and Clerk show that richer identity and wallet flows are technically feasible, and Sigma Identity on BSV shows that they can also be economically sustainable at scale. The next generation of online businesses can, and should, build fair markets where data is priced and owned at the edges and where the people who create value finally participate in the upside.
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Watch | Bitcoin and Sound Money: Why Stability Matters
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Source: https://coingeek.com/data-is-money-on-privy-clerk-and-sigma-identity/
