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 database-backed dynamic website developer in 1996, moved to Manhattan in 1999 working for a startup. 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 Internet 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 out, for the most part, along the way. I've had skin in the game and have followed cryptocurrency, along with finance professionals, since the beginning. I am far from an expert, and far from a novice.

For more than a decade, I have 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. I am learning about smart contracts and DAOs. The possibilities they open up hold extraordinary power, especially when combined with machine learning.

I am strapping in to a Curtis Jenny in 1921, heading out across the country, and seeing what happens next. It's the beginning of the Roaring Twenties and there is at least one 1929 coming.

It beats sitting on the sidelines.

Baseline

Web3

Decentralization is the central theme of Web3, and is otherwise a loose collection of many people's interpretation of what that means. The direction of Web3 is, itself, decentralized.

Most of the leaders in the space come from a cryptocurrency background. As such, the blockchain looms large in a lot of their proposed solutions. Some have pointed out that this is a narrow perspective that ignores existing decentralized solutions like Git. Another example is Web3 people flocking to Discord and agitating for it to integrate blockchain. The rather obvious counterpoint would be [Element.io], [Jitsi], and [Matrix].

But I digress. In short the leaders tend to overindex on blockchain, but IMO that leaves space for more clearheaded folks to bring in better solutions. There will be a lot of radical experiments, but there will also be a place for turning the Rube Golberg contraptions into more pragmatic solutions.

The main targets for decentralization are communication, transactions, organization, and identity. The goal is to decouple those from any single authority - government, corporate, or otherwise. This includes de facto centralization, like AWS, even where their services are based on Open Source.