Web3

Backstory

In 1991, I started using the Internet through CRWU's freenet. In 1994 I started my first web venture; my business card read, "Welcome to the Internet. The natives are restless." It was a reference to how commercialized the Internet was becoming, on the same card I used to seek contracts for website development. My passion, then and now, was the individual making their own reality on a peer-to-peer network.

I became a full-time web programmer in 1996, moved to Manhattan in 1999, worked for a series of startups, lived in Seattle, San Francisco, and Phoenix. Worked for startups, Apple, Amazon, and a few others. I have watched the peer-to-peer network promise of the Internet turn into a wasteland of corporate silos that pay lip service to openness while creating barriers to entry, proprietary networks, and walled gardens.

I am not a kool-aid drinker about Web3. I'm an old-school hacker who has believed in the promise of decentralization for three decades, and sees Web3 warts and all. It's not a magic solution, but it has tools that are useful to rebuilding a healthy ecosystem for those who care about what the Interent is intended to be.

My brother and a number of my friends are bankers (active or retired). Two of them and I bought Bitcoin at 3.5, and sold most of the way out along the way. I've had skin in the game and have followed cryptocurrency with financial professionals since the beginning. I am far from an expert, and far from a novice.

My past decade has been primarily focused on data engineering and data science. I think those two fields combined with Web3 are going to write the next major stage of our evolution toward the singularity. So now I am learning about smart contracts and DAOs. I think using ETFs for art is a lot like China (perhaps only apocryphally) limiting their use of gunpowder to fireworks - and I think that is just one example of how we are not seeing where these things are going.

But that's the fun part. Strapping in to a Curtis Jenny in 1921, heading out across the country, and seeing what happens next. It's the Roaring Twenties and there will be at least one 1929 in our future. Sure beats sitting on the sidelines.