Crypto and the Conservation of Centralization

So the real argument for crypto, and more broadly decentralization, is not that centralized systems are broken. Or that the current business models of the internet are not working. Because, in fact, they are for most consumers and many tens of thousands of creators. It’s that they are so functional that only a radical redistribution of control and ... See more

Some claim web3 is about ownership, but it is more appropriate to say that web3 is about wealth. Very little in the web3 advocacy space addresses how it will match Web 1.0 and 2.0’s successes in terms of discoverability and sharing. It offers little by way of guarantee that it will protect its users' digital rights, in some cases making them much w... See more

I love the idealism of the Web3 vision, but we’ve been there before. During my career, we have gone through several cycles of decentralization and recentralization. The personal computer decentralized computing by providing a commodity PC architecture that anyone could build and that no one controlled. But Microsoft figured out how to recentralize ... See more

But decentralizing the internet has been hard to do. When contrasted against the well-established efficiency and stability of centralized systems, decentralized systems have struggled to keep pace. Now, however, the emerging technology of crypto and web3 — specifically, programmable blockchains, composable smart contracts, and digital assets — make... See more