Conclusion
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.1
In one version of the future, networks are owned by a handful of companies that stifle innovation while users, developers, creators, and entrepreneurs compete for leftovers. The internet becomes another mass medium, favoring content and experiences that are broad and shallow. Users become no better than serfs, toiling in the fields for the benefit of a corporate overlord.
This is neither the internet I want to see nor the world I wish to live in. The issue goes beyond “the future of the internet,” which sounds tame and esoteric. The future of the internet is us—you and me. The internet is, increasingly, where we live our lives, and it overlaps more and more with the so-called real world. Think about how much of your life you live online, how much of your identity resides there, how much you interact with friends whom you’ve developed relationships with through the medium of the internet.
Whom do you want in control of that world?
Reinventing the Internet
The way to set the internet back on course is by creating new networks with better architectures. There are only two known network architectures that preserve the democratic and egalitarian spirit of the early internet: protocol networks and blockchain networks. If new protocol networks could succeed, I would be the first to support them. But after decades of disappointment, I’m skeptical. Email and the web developed at a time when there wasn’t serious competition from corporate networks. Since then, protocol networks haven’t been able to compete because of their core architectural limitations.
Blockchains are the only credible, known architecture for building networks with the societal benefits of protocol networks and the competitive advantages of corporate networks.
Google’s motto was once “Don’t be evil.” In corporate networks, you need to trust company management to behave. This works for a while when networks are growing, but it inevitably breaks down. Blockchains offer a much stronger assurance: “Can’t be evil.” The rules are baked into immutable code. Developers and creators get low take rates and predictable incentives. Users get transparent rules and participation in the governance and financial upside of networks. In this way, blockchain networks extend the best features of protocol networks.
At the same time, blockchain networks adopt the best aspects of corporate networks. They can attract and accrue capital to invest in hiring and growth, allowing them to compete on a level playing field with well-financed internet companies. They also enable the development of software experiences that match what users have come to expect from modern internet services. With blockchains, it’s possible to build social networks, video games, marketplaces, and financial services, as covered in part 5, as well as whatever else entrepreneurs dream up next.
If the next wave of networks adopts blockchain architectures, the world can reverse the trend toward internet consolidation and restore communities, rather than a handful of companies, to their rightful place as stewards of the future.
I’m optimistic about this and I hope, after everything I’ve shared, that you are too.
Cause for Optimism
What gives me hope is that the technology is working; it’s attracting users; and it’s getting better all the time. Multiple compounding feedback loops are driving the growth of blockchain networks, and another computing cycle appears to be under way:
- ▪ The platform-app feedback loop. The infrastructure is good enough now to support internet-scale apps. The growth of apps feeds back into investment in infrastructure. The same compounding feedback loop that drove PCs, the internet, and mobile is now driving blockchains.
- ▪ The inherent network effect of social technologies. Blockchain networks are massively multiplayer social technologies, just as protocol and corporate networks were before them. They become more useful as they attract more users, creators, and developers.
- ▪ Composability. Blockchain network code is open source, so it needs to be written only once. Open-source software can combine into bigger constructions, like Lego bricks. This grows the global knowledge store at a compounding rate.
Another tailwind driving blockchain networks forward is a wave of new talent entering the tech industry as the next generation looks to put its mark on the internet. In every generational change, there are people who want to do more than just work on technology for its own sake. They want to set out on their own and shake things up and challenge incumbents. I see this firsthand at my firm. Every year, thousands of students and others early in their careers come to me and my partners to collaborate on blockchain projects. When we ask why, they tell us they don’t want to spend their careers helping Google or Meta sell more ads. They want to work on the frontier.
The opportunity ahead is to build the great networks of the future: the economic, social, and cultural substrate of the digital world. Networks are the internet’s killer app. While protocol networks democratize access to information, their weaknesses limit their viability for the future. Corporate networks improve and extend the internet’s capabilities, but they stifle growth in pursuit of controlled, theme-park-like experiences.
Outside blockchains, all of today’s major technology movements involve sustaining technologies that look set to reinforce existing industry structures. Artificial intelligence favors big companies with stockpiles of capital and data. New devices like virtual reality headsets and self-driving cars require multibillion-dollar capital investments. Blockchains are the only credible counterweight to these centralizing forces.
Blockchain networks are like cities, built from the bottom up by the people who inhabit them. Entrepreneurs build businesses, creators cultivate audiences, and users have meaningful choices, rights, and agency. Networks operate transparently, governed by communities. People who contribute are rewarded financially. It’s an internet built by everybody, for everybody.
The promise of the read-write-own era of the internet is to maintain a healthy civic life in the digital world. Civic life thrives through a balance of private and community ownership. The public sidewalk allows passersby to discover new restaurants, bookstores, and shops. A homeowner spends weekends remodeling, in turn improving a neighborhood. A world without both private and community ownership is a world that stifles creativity and human flourishing.
I have presented what I think are some of the best ideas for developing blockchain networks today, but entrepreneurs are better at building the future than people like me are at predicting it. Most likely, the best ideas either seem strange today or are yet unimagined. If you are used to participating in blockchain networks, you are used to people looking at you funny or thinking what you do is silly or a scam. Often there aren’t names for what you’re working on. Inside-out technologies arrive nicely packaged, ready for the market. Outside-in technologies arrive messy, mysterious, disguised as something else. Grasping their potential takes work.
Blockchains are at the computing frontier, as PCs were in the 1980s, the internet was in the 1990s, and mobile phones were in the 2010s. People look back today on classic moments in computing and wonder what it was like to be there. Noyce and Moore. Jobs and Wozniak. Page and Brin. Hobbyists dabbling, debating, driving forward. Tinkerers hacking away on nights and weekends.
What seems late is actually early. Now is the time to reimagine what networks can be and what they can do. Software is an unbeatable playground for ingenuity. You don’t have to accept the internet as you found it. You can make something better … as a builder, as a creator, as a user, and, most important, as an owner.
You are here now. These are the good old days.