Elon Musk has successfully acquired Twitter. Many people seem convinced he will ruin it in short order. And while that’s of course conceivable, it is also possible that he will fix some long running problems. It’ s not like Twitter had been a well-run company. So now seems like a good time to resurface what I had tweeted in April.Restoring full API access would dramatically shift power back to endusers. We could run apps other than the official Twitter client for interacting with Twitter, whi...

One of the problems with a relatively open platform such as Twitter is impersonation. I can claim to be somebody else, upload their picture to my profile and tweet away. This is particularly problematic for public figures and businesses but anyone can be subject to impersonation. Years ago, Twitter decided that it would “verify” some accounts. While a good idea in principle, Twitter’s implementation, sowed the seeds of the current mess. First, Twitter chose to go with a heavily designed check...

I have written repeatedly about why I don’t think “encrypt all things” is the right answer for constructing a democratic society going forward. I am, however, a fan of the idea to “sign all things.” What I mean by this is that ideally all my emails, blog posts, etc. would be automatically digitally signed using a private key. Anyone with the corresponding public key could then verify that I really did write this email or post. Why does this matter? Because with digital tools it is also incred...

When we invested in Onename in 2014 it was with the conviction that decentralized applications will require human readable identity systems for some applications. Take the DAO for example. As of writing this post it has raised nearly $110 million dollars including some from me. The allocation of this capital will be decided through voting. Now imagine the difference between voting on a proposal made by 0x8f585e5578a9695151fe51ac92f560c8a9cc9a14 (my DAO address) versus one made by albertwenger...

The blockchain holds great promise for developing decentralized protocols and applications such as marketplaces (e.g., openbazaar), registries for digital and physical assets (e.g. mediachain) and social networks that have no value extraction by a controlling company. Everyone who wants to develop such applications though faces the same foundational problem: how to refer to resources and people without resorting to existing centralized systems. On the existing web we use URLs to point to reso...

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 lot we can learn from github and its identity model about the role of individual identity in the future of firms, networks and markets. When Linus Torvalds released git in 2005 he made a crucial innovation in version control widely available: git makes the full development history available locally to every developer (or put differently it is a distributed system). Over time this has made git the most widely adopted system of its kind. That in turn opened up the opportunity for git...

GamerGate has laid bare a fundamental fault line for online discourse. A. Words matter. Anyone dismissing tweets threatening violence along the lines of “sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me” is trivializing the power of words. We all know that words can cause immediate emotional harm. And beyond that immediate effect, words lead to thoughts and thoughts (can) lead to actions. I am not claiming some deterministic causality between a specific tweet and a specific a...

While gathering up additional data for the next post on wealth, here are some thoughts on the Heartbleed security vulnerability. At USV we sent out a notice of the issue to all the heads of engineering as well as all of the CEOs. This was easy to do since as part of the USV network we have these groups pre-defined. It was immediately clear based on the severity of the issue that this requires CEO level attention. For an example of an excellent response from one of our portfolio companies, her...

If you ask someone who they are on the Internet, they will likely give you an email address or point to their profile on Twitter, Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn. Some people might instead reference a profile on a more industry specific network such as Behance for creatives or Doximity for doctors. Others use a personal home page provider like about.me and an even smaller fraction have their own domain. This is a pretty unsatisfactory state of the world from both an individual and a service cre...