The Problem of Ownership in the Digital Era —and How Crypto May Help

We often feel like everything is within reach in the digital world, but how much of it is truly ours? We pay for streaming services, yet the songs and shows live somewhere else, ready to vanish at the flick of a licensing deal. Our money, too, sits in systems that can block, freeze, or dilute it without asking us.

Ownership has become less about possession and more about access. That shift from real property to (likely temporary) access shapes what we watch, what we save, and even how we move wealth. Let’s explore how this erosion of control affects us, how censorship hits both media and money, and how crypto is creating new paths to take ownership back.

The Illusion of Ownership: Media, Subscriptions, and Fiat Money

Streaming services made it easy to fill our evenings with endless catalogs. Yet the digital collections we build can vanish overnight. Movies get pulled from Netflix, old works are censored on Disney+, songs are removed from Spotify, and entire shows disappear because a platform no longer wants to pay for hosting them. People are starting to notice, and some are returning to vinyl, CDs, and Blu-rays for the comfort of something that stays put. The sales of physical media seem to be increasing more and more.

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Money in its traditional form works in a similar way. We assume our savings are secure in the bank, yet their value erodes with inflation, and access can be restricted by decisions outside our control. Sanctions, freezes, and strict regulations make “our” funds feel more like a rented service than a personal asset. The convenience is there, but the permanence and control are not. That fragile feeling has pushed many to look for alternatives where their money or their media cannot just vanish with a policy update.

Why Fiat Doesn’t Mean Full Ownership

Fiat currency is shaped by centralized decision-making. That means governments issue more when they need to stimulate an economy or manage debt, and that extra supply chips away at our savings’ power. They can also decide to handle a financial crisis by freezing everyone’s funds —it already happened in Lebanon.

Transfers across borders depend on intermediaries, who can delay or block them for compliance or political reasons, not to mention their high fees. There are also stories of citizens in high-inflation economies watching their life savings lose almost all their worth in a few weeks because policies shifted without their input.

Cryptocurrencies are designed to cut out much of that fragility. When we own the private keys to our wallets, if we’re holding a decentralized asset, there’s usually no one else to grant or deny access. Transactions are validated by a distributed network and recorded on a ledger that anyone can inspect (if the chain is public). There’s no hotline that pauses our transfer until a manager clears it, and no central authority should be able to manipulate supply.

Bitcoin and GBYTE, for example, have fixed supplies of 21 million coins and one million coins, respectively (forever). Because of that, no central bank or company can create more tokens to dilute holders’ wealth. This isn’t about speculation; it’s about the structure of control. Ownership in crypto is immediate, direct, and independent.

Censorship and Crypto’s Role in Preservation

Censorship is another big foe we have to face out there in our media and money. And it doesn’t always arrive with a bold announcement. More often, it slips in quietly. Streaming platforms remove shows, episodes get edited to meet “new standards”, and sometimes cultural works are altered without the audience even knowing. On the financial side, censorship takes the form of blocked remittances, frozen accounts, or restrictions on donations to certain causes. Access to both culture and capital can be rewritten overnight.

Decentralized tools aim to prevent that quiet erasure. One example is the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized network that stores content across many nodes rather than one central location. In Turkey, when Wikipedia was blocked between 2017 and 2020, mirrors of the site hosted on IPFS remained available because the network retrieves files by their cryptographic hash, not by a single centralized URL. Anyone with the hash could access the same version, even if the official domain was inaccessible.

In the same way, digital artists and musicians have started issuing their creations as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that carry proof of authenticity and ownership, rather than subscriptions tied to a platform’s changing catalog. It’s not a perfect system yet —NFT markets have had their share of speculation— but it demonstrates how ownership can move back into the hands of users.

As for financial transactions, truly decentralized networks allow funds to move without needing an intermediary to greenlight them. The core of crypto ownership is simple: control the private keys, and you control the asset. There is no central office to revoke your access, no customer service desk that can reset your funds. Together, these tools make it harder for authorities or companies to silently rewrite what we see or how we spend.

A Glimpse of a More Sovereign Future

The shift toward genuine ownership is still taking shape, but we’re already seeing examples. Decentralized networks allow us to send money without asking for clearance, and distributed storage ensures culture doesn’t vanish at the whim of a license. Some ecosystems, like Obyte, take this further by removing all middlemen, like miners and “validators”, entirely.

On its Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), users themselves anchor transactions and data, leaving no single gatekeeper to block them. It even supports creating customized and private tokens, storing data verifications, writing smart contracts without coding, and managing attestations, where you keep your personal data in your own wallet and only share what is necessary.

This isn’t the only route forward. Other initiatives explore cryptocurrencies for everyday payments or use decentralized file systems to make media libraries that don’t disappear with corporate strategy shifts. The common thread is a move away from the rented model of ownership that dominates both entertainment and finance today.

As these tools mature, we may find ourselves once again able to buy a song and keep it, or save our earnings without wondering if tomorrow’s policy will drain them. The technology is here; now it’s a matter of how widely we choose to use it.

Featured Vector Image by Kampus / Freepik