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...

“Two out of three ain’t bad” is the title of a Meat Loaf song but is also the idea behind triangles: situations in which you can achieve only two of three objectives. The classic example is the idea that in manufacturing you can have any two, but not all three from fast, cheap, good. (*) Much of the current debate about social media and how to regulate it is people shouting loudly past each other because they are pursuing different objectives in what I believe is a social media triangle: Free...

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...

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 ...

There is a healthy debate going on now about the role of Twitter, Facebook, and others (Google, Apple, …) with regard to moderating speech on their platforms. Rather than writing something entirely new, I decided to go back and look at what I have written and whether my opinion has changed since then. As I did that I was happy to find that I have had a fairly consistent approach based on who has power. Over the years I have written a lot about keeping the government out of regulating content ...

Facebook is in the unique position today to face both the problems of centralization and decentralization. On its centralized core platform it is confronted with making content decisions, while on WhatsApp it struggles with slowing down the spread of rumors and calls for violence. Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for Facebook which has been arrogant about these issues and has put growth above anything else. Nonetheless everyone who is building new decentralized platforms would do well to ...

I became interested in Bitcoin reasonably early and was fortunate to invest in some early mining (although as with all good investments in retrospect not nearly enough). There is currently a fight brewing in Bitcoin world with the possibility of a hardfork a la Ethereum into two different currencies. Much like the Ethereum fight and resulting hardfork, emotions among the people close to it are running high. If you are inside this community, the stakes seem incredibly high. But it is moments l...

The power of the web has been that it has given us permissionless publishing. Want to publish your opinion? You no longer need to submit a letter to the editor of a newspaper in hope of it being published – you can just put it on your own website. Through additions to the original web specifications we have managed to extend this permissionless nature of innovation from content to entire applications. But the web specifications have been missing a crucial ingredient. We don’t have a standard ...

There is a confusion about Bitcoin that trips up a lots of people when they first learn about it: the blockchain is organizationally decentralized but logically centralized! What does this mean? Here is a 2 x 2 matrix that should help:The “organizationally centralized” column on the left contains systems that are controlled by a single organization (EBay and Microsoft in the examples, but this doesn’t need to be a corporation, it could also be a government). Conversely the “organizationally d...

One of the apps on your phone is unlike all the others: the web browser. There are many reasons it is different but here is the most fundamental one – you tell it what to connect to! Pretty much every other app connects to a specific set of servers that the app’s creators control. So the browser gives you as enduser a fundamentally higher level of control than most other apps. What makes this possible is the existence of the HTTP protocol. So what we need in order to shift more control back i...