The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization

Decentralized protocols would make very interesting base layers and I’m particularly excited about web3 in the context of identity. Does crypto solve the problem of suboptimal defaults? Well, that’s a different question and I’m honestly not sure. Just because you have decentralized base layers doesn’t mean you won’t see centralization, aggregation ... 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

The crypto ecosystem (or web3, or blockchain-based, or whatever you want to call it) is offering a new set of promises of how wonderful it will all be. Most of these promises will not be fulfilled, at least not fully or in the way we expect. But in trying to fulfill them, we will learn new things about what people can do online, and what types of b... See more