A little over eight years ago I wrote that I was thinking about leaving Tumblr. More interestingly though, the headline of that post went on to say that I was "Looking for a Decentralized Blog Network"! I even explained what I meant by that:In functionality my ideal system would be quite similar to Tumblr + Disqus but would use something like Onename as its identity system. Every post (and comment) would be signed with an identity and it would be possible to follow content based on identity i...

I wrote a post recently as to why web3/crypto matter. A logical follow on question is: why aren’t we further along, given that Bitcoin is over ten years old? Part of the answer is that blockchain technology is complex and there is still a lot to figure out. But another part of the answer is that there is a chicken and egg problem to be solved that has echoes of the historic adoption of the web itself. I remember well discovering the web in a lab at MIT due to the Mosaic web browser showing up...

One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...

There are dozens of credible active layer 1 chains, with more being developed. So declaring victory for any one of them seems wildly premature. But there is another question that one can discuss more readily. When the protocol innovation sprint is over and the dust starts to settle, how many L1s will remain? Will there be one chain to rule them all? I highly doubt that outcome because there are now – and for reasons of mathematics (i.e. not something that can be circumvented by some better id...

There is an interesting objection to crypto that goes something like: crypto is all a rip-off because nobody actually needs decentralization which makes things slow and inefficient (“decentralization is a bug, not a feature”). I was somewhat surprised to see this objection from Michael Seemann, a German author, whose criticism of the power of the big platform companies I respect. In a Twitter exchange (in German) he pointed me to something he wrote a couple of years ago as predictions about t...

I have been asked how I can reconcile my support for crypto/blockchain with my concerns about the climate crisis. So here is a blog post laying this out. Crypto/blockchain is a fundamental innovation that addresses an important problems facing us in the world today: too much power concentrated in the hands of a few corporations and governments. To be clear, this technology is not a panacea and decentralization contains both good and bad use cases. But it is important and foundational, somethi...

Artists and authors are issuing non fungible tokens (NFTs) for their work. The market price of these has exploded and bids are currently at $2 million for Jack Dorsey’s first tweet. A lot of people seem to think that it is completely insane to spend money for something that is freely copyable. Why would anyone pay if you can simply go to Twitter and see the tweet there? Screenshot if you want to? The underlying misconception here is to think that in the digital world copies are indistinguisha...

One key lesson from COVID19 is that we need a lot more decentralization. This is especially true when the center is as inept at managing the crisis as the US federal government has proven to be. For example, the power of agencies such as the CDC and the FDA has turned out to be problematic, e.g. in giving guidance on mask wearing or trying to increase the availability of testing (both central to the road back). This is not just a critique of current leadership but rather of the accretion of e...

Of course Ethereum is not a walled garden the way AOL was. Anyone can write and deploy a smart contract, whereas adding functionality to AOL required a contract and a custom implementation. What I mean instead is that much of AOL’s growth in both revenues and functionality was financed by AOL itself. AOL made a lot of investments in startups which then purchased advertising on AOL, at least in the early days of this, extended AOLs functionality. The decentralized finance (defi) space, which i...

Today we announced that we have joined the Libra Association, the governance for a global stable coin. Nick has written a post on the USV blog explaining our decision. I have argued before that we don’t really know what path will take us to a decentralized future and therefore have to try many things. Some of these paths involve centralized corporations exposing their endusers to crypto. Nobody has more users than Facebook! There is a historic analogy here to when Microsoft released Internet ...