Page - 100 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

inakindofadventcalendar. Just aswellknownis theCambridgeAnalyticascandal in 2016, when millions of Facebook data were illegally evaluated for Donald Trump’s election campaign (Gerth andHeim2020). These incidents show thatwe live more in an age of trust than in an information age. While information on electronic news, social media and knowledge platforms is continuously available and is exponentially growing in volume (Demary 2016; Jaekel 2017; de Reuver et al. 2018;Zehir et al. 2020), trust is a commodity that theplayersmust eitherfirst strategically acquire or laboriously recapturewhen they hope to gain the favour of the users for digital services such as digital consulting platforms (DIVSI 2017a, b; Diekhöner 2018). The range of digital services is extremely diverse and extends from the (par- tially) public provision of information or communication options such as chats, e-mail or similar, to online banking, billing and payment systems, for example, in the case of e-commerce solutions, to e-learning and concrete personal advisory services (Hanekop et al. 2001; Bruhn andHadwich 2017; Stich et al. 2019). The borders between services are often blurred, since social media platforms, for example, allow multimedia communication between at least two parties, money transfer, discussions in forums and so on. However, all digital services generally have in common that they are provided by centralised institutions, which them- selves have a high degree of digitisation and are represented via digital platforms (Jaekel2017;Kofler2018).Asa result, thebusinessmodelsarehighlyscalable, and correspondingorganisations can have considerablemarket power (Gundlach 2009; Täuscher et al. 2017). Thus, in this chapter, a digital service is understood to be a service offered on an online platform to solve a socially or individually relevant problem, in the course of the use of which personal data is collected, stored and processedby theoffering institution.Asalready indicated, thecollectionofpersonal data demands a certain level of data security. This iswhere blockchain technology can provide a remedy. There is still disagreement in the scientific literature about a generally valid definition of blockchain, as different scientific directions, such as economics, computer scienceand law,meet anddeal inparallelwith thecommon termsused in the practical application of the technology (Gerth andHeim 2020).1 In a compre- hensive, interdisciplinary analysis,Meijer (2017) summarises all relevant definition components from the scientific, but also from the application-oriented literature. This results in the following definition, which is used in this chapter: ‘Blockchain technology is a distributed, shared, encrypted, chronological, irreversible and incorruptible database and computing system (public/private)with a consensusmechanism (permissioned/permissionless), that adds value by enabling direct interactions between users’ (Meijer 2017, p. 39). 1Blockchain technology is a comparatively young technology, which has been used mainly for onlineor open access publications todate.This is reflected in the consequent selectionof sources. 104 S. Gerth and L. Heim