I’m old enough to remember when ‘going online’ meant this:
Many Americans, myself included, first accessed the internet through AOL’s walled garden.
- There were only 130 websites in the world in June 1993.
- AOL reached 1+ million users in 1995 and 5+ million users in 1996.
- The whole internet only had 16 million users in 1995 and 36 million users in 1996.
Web 2.0 promised more openness but got dominated by centralized platforms like Google.
- The creation layer is now decentralized.
- There are now over 1.9 billion websites in the world.
- 43% of active sites run on WordPress.
- This was the promise of an open internet built on open source software.
- But the aggregation layer is highly centralized.
- Search (Google), Social (Facebook, Twitter), and Commerce (Amazon) are now dominated by platforms that curate (i.e. control) what their users see.
Now Web3 is promising to (re-)decentralize the internet.
- Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 Bitcoin White Paper provides one solution:
- Bitcoin uses a peer-to-peer network secured by cryptographic proofs, not “trusted third parties.”
The Centralization vs. Decentralization battle for Web3 has already started.
- Centralized governments will try to use cryptocurrencies to control their citizens.
- Imagine this news story from 2030: “Coinbase, an Alphabet company, announced its partnership with the IRS to automatically deduct wealth taxes from American wallets. The two other authorized US crypto platforms, Diem by Facebook and Wallet by Microsoft, quickly announced similar deals.”
- A centralized metaverse would be even more totalitarian.
- Most social interactions already occur online.
- What happens if governments are able to control what we see and feel in a metaverse?
- Most social interactions already occur online.
How do we ensure that decentralization wins for good?
- Own your data:
- We don’t own the content we create on centralized platforms.
- If we owned our own data, our ability to exit would limit the power of platforms over us.
- We don’t own the content we create on centralized platforms.
- Own the networks:
- Web3 aligns financial incentives between users and networks.
- Fractionalization allows for networks to have millions of owners, none with absolute power.
- Web3 aligns financial incentives between users and networks.
We can’t afford to get stuck in a centralized metaverse.
- Each version of the internet is more immersive and commands more of our waking hours.
- This raises the stakes for defending decentralization.
Cryptocountries are key to the decentralization of the metaverse.
- Centralized corporations are anchored by centralized countries.
We must ensure that an open metaverse wins the future.
Open Metaverse is one of my solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems.
- This idea is a work-in-progress. If you’d like to riff on it, hit me up @neilthanedar on Twitter.