Great Protocol Politics

We do not argue that states are irrelevant; rather, they will be more relevant if they embrace the arrow of history and work with the network and less relevant if they attempt rearguard actions against it. Such is the nature of great protocol politics.

About 75 percent of the world’s population, more than 60 percent of global GDP, and around 50 percent of all billionaires are neither Chinese nor American. Those two superpowers may well fight, but it’s not obvious if the rest of the world will want to align with either party. Indeed, with the rise of decentralized protocols, we anticipate that man... See more

10. Power is decentralizing away from the United States and China

9. Companies, cities, currencies, communities, and countries are all becoming networks: We should start thinking of collections of people—whether communities, cities, companies, or countries—as cohesive agents unto themselves, less constrained by territoriality and with different layers aligned with one another in shifting combinations.

8. Web3 is addressing global inequality by sharing the reward—and the risk. Put another way, if the roughly $5 trillion total market cap of Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft were split across a billion users to give them around $5,000 each, they’d be much more supportive.

7. International rule of law is becoming rule of code

6. Property rights have become encryption. The state’s conception as the legitimate guardian of private property extends back to at least philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. But cryptocurrencies challenge this view as they establish a full-fledged theory of digital property rights outside the state.

the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was set up to regulate Merck and Pfizer, not 1 million biohackers; the Federal Aviation Administration was built for Boeing and Airbus, not 1 million drone hobbyists; and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was created to go after Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, not 1 million Web3 developers.

For example, GoTo Group, parent company of the ride-sharing service Gojek, now powers more than 2 percent of Indonesia’s over $1 trillion GDP, creating millions of jobs and bringing nearly 2 billion annual transactions into the taxable formal economy. This gives Gojek a massive base of public support. Second, these companies won’t remain companies ... See more