I’m dubious that much else of Web 2 will survive the hop to Web 3, either from the tech or consumer point of view. The one thing I’m absolutely convinced will have to exist for Web 3 to succeed is effective and natively on-chain attribution that gives NFTs and other virtual goods their due (and gets their owners paid).

Consider vacuum tubes. It was obvious to nobody that they would enable the first computers. This only became clear after vacuum tubes and associated computing discoveries had been made, so that someone could make the connection. If you had set out to build a computer in the 1800s (as Charles Babbage did), it’s unlikely that you would have drawn thi... See more

Belief in oneself and one’s vision for how the world could be different is what fosters a cult — or what I like to call the “atomic unit of human coordination.”

Defined broadly, ‘ads’ are pieces of paid, targeted media meant to drive user behavior in a specific direction .... Web 3 marketing will be radically different in ways that are hard to imagine now (though we’ll try in a moment), which is why it’s key to get the attribution system right first. With the media cash register in place, the budding web 3... See more

In this future, mainstream media no longer interprets scientific information. Instead, they draw directly from the source. In fact, all scientific communication and learning, including every textbook, lecture and online course draws from the same, original, primary artifacts accessible through the same interface. Expert scientists, lay readers and ... See more

To those who say, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if the person with good ideas had been the one to get fabulously wealthy instead?” – sure, but in the same way that a founder wants to focus on building their company, not being an investor, sometimes “idea operator” types aren’t the same people who have eight-to-ten-figure startup outcomes. In this wo... See more

If philanthropy is pluralistic – and, like any idea marketplace, that is one of its virtues – then there is no single school of thought that can “solve” complex social questions, because everyone has a different vision for the world. If you’re pro-pluralism in startups, you should also be pro-pluralism in philanthropy.

The second path is to create an idea, mechanism, feature, or whatever that is so novel and unique that it survives and eventually sifts down on the back of another product, even if the company that created it fails.

A major development in this trajectory, not limited to scientific journals alone, was the invention of graphical displays of information...Graphical displays of information are the foundation of every discipline concerned with quantitative information, because they make information human readable.