Reread "behind the bitcoin bubble" : when the Internet became a detour in human development

BlockBeats note: in January 2018, Steven Johnson of the New York times wrote this article while bitcoin prices were at an all-time high.

Some time ago, red tide AKASHIO published an article entitled "is the Internet a detour in human history?" ", in about 40,000 words, tells us that there is something wrong with the Internet. There has never been such a tool for bringing humans together like this. The price is an opinion, a hobby, some behavior, may attract the attention of the country's 1 billion Internet users, such pressure no one can bear.

Bitcoin has fully become a commodity, recently beating gold as the highest-yielding asset of the year so far in 2020. Blockchain technology also seems to be out of the running after the craze last October.

But the meaning of blockchain still exists, which may be the only hope for the return of the Internet to its original meaning. BlockBeats has retranslated the article "behind the bitcoin bubble", hoping to get you to read it again and understand that "although bitcoin is driven by greed, it is possible that this mania will eventually produce something more important than wealth."

one

Layer innocent nothing argues pottery winner cotton menu task slim merge maid

This set of words is unordered and meaningless: it is just a random number algorithm in the English dictionary that selects and then randomly arranges the strings together. Their value comes from the fact that they were generated specifically for me by the MetaMask software tool.

In cryptographic terms, they are called mnemonics. They connect like a meaningless, incoherent stream of consciousness, but the words are like a key that can unlock a digital bank account or even an online identity with a few simple manipulations.

A prompt popped up on my computer screen reminding me to "write it down or save it in a safe place on my computer" to keep the mnemonics safe. So I jotted down the 12 words in notepad and converted my mnemonics into 64 seemingly unrelated strings with one click:

1 b0be2162cedb2744d016943bb14e71de6af95a63af3790d6b41b1e719dc5c66

This is cryptography's "private key" : a way to prove identity. Just like in real life, when you use the key to open the first door in your home, it also proves the identity of the owner of your home. The mnemonic generates a certain sequence of characters each time, but there is no known way to push the private key back to the original mnemonic. This is why it is important to keep mnemonics in a safe place.

After two conversions, the character of the private key will become another new string:

0 x6c2ecd6388c550e8d99ada34a1cd55bedd052ad9

This string is my ethereum blockchain address.

Ethereum is the same type of cryptocurrency as bitcoin, which has seen its price rise more than 1,000 percent in the past year. And the ethereum blockchain can issue its own cryptocurrencies, the most famous of which is ether. But ethereum is a platform that does more than just exist as a monetary function. An address can also be thought of as a collection of bank accounts, E-mail addresses, and social security Numbers.

While it's currently on my computer, it's just a meaningless string, but when I do other types of transactions (such as crowdfunding or voting in online referendums), the address is publicly broadcast to other computer networks randomly participating in the validation of the transaction. The results will then be broadcast again over a wider network, and more computers will compete to perform complex mathematical calculations. The winner will record the transaction on the ethereum blockchain. Ethereum blockchain records all transaction history in a unified form and standard. Because these transactions are recorded in a series of data "blocks", these records are known as "blockchain".

The whole transaction took only a few minutes. From my personal point of view, this trading experience is hardly different from our usual online trading. But technically, this is happening in a way that was unthinkable a decade ago. Without having to trust any traditional institutions, I have succeeded in making a secure deal. Throughout the process, there was no intermediary to broker the deal, no social media to get the data from my deal for more accurate advertising, and no credit bureau to build my credit rating based on my deal.

All it takes is a platform over which no one has control, right? Since there is no ethereum, there is no venture capital backing it. As a form of organization, ethereum is closer to the nature of democracy than a private company, and it doesn't have powerful authoritarian leaders. By joining the community and making a contribution, you can gain some power to influence the development of ethereum. Like bitcoin and most other blockchain web platforms, ethereum is more like a hive of fuzzy boundaries and flat hierarchies than a formal physical organization.

In addition, some of the members of the hive have acquired billions of dollars in book value through their contributions to ethereum, which was priced at $8 on Jan. 1, 2017, and $843 a year later.

You can shrug off the surge in cryptocurrency prices because runaway price increases like bitcoin and ethereum are a classic example of irrational exuberance. And this esoteric technological innovation now looks no different than logging into an online bank to pay off a credit card. So why should we care about such a technology?

Such contempt is clearly shortsighted. One lesson we have learned from the history of the Internet is that while this software architecture may seem esoteric, once it is more widely distributed and applied, it will have a profound impact on the world.

If the email standard, adopted in the 1970s, had made public-private key encryption the default setting, we might have avoided catastrophic email hacks, from SONY to John Podesta. Millions of ordinary consumers could also do without having to worry about identity theft.

If Tim berners-lee, the inventor of the world wide web, had applied protocols to locate social identities in the original standards of the web, Facebook might not exist today.

True believers in blockchain technologies such as ethereum argue that distributed trust networks are a great technological advance in software architecture, and that time will prove valuable. This expectation of technology has further driven up the price of cryptocurrencies.

But on the other hand, the price bubble in bitcoin could eventually reduce attention to the real blockchain technology. Many technology enthusiasts argue that the real promise of these new technologies is not that they will replace our existing monetary system, but that they will upend our current perception of the Internet and bring it back to a decentralized egalitarian system, which is a way to get back to its essence.

two

The Internet was once the inspiration for utopian dreams of limitless knowledge and global connectivity, but in the past few years it seems to have become a lightning rod: the root of almost all our social problems.

Russian hackers posted fake news on Facebook to undermine democratic institutions; Hate speech raged on Twitter and Reddit; The geek elite has accumulated vast wealth, exacerbating the gap between the rich and the poor.

For many of us involved in the early days of the web, the trends of recent years have left us feeling depraved. The Internet promised to be a new kind of egalitarian media, made up of tabloids, blogs and self-built encyclopedias. The information giants that dominated popular culture in the 20th century should have been gradually replaced by a more decentralized structure, a collaborative network that reflected the peer-to-peer architecture of the Internet, rather than a hierarchical distribution channel.

But the current Internet is no utopia, with financial bubbles, spam and myriad other problems. However, we believe that there is still potential for improvement behind the various defects.

"The price bubble in bitcoin could eventually reduce the focus on the real blockchain technology."

Last year, that narrative logic finally collapsed. Sceptics are nothing new on the Internet, though. But the difference is that much of the criticism now comes from the same people who were once so enthusiastic about the Internet.

"After 40 years of development, the Internet itself, and the rest of us who are part of it, are beginning to rot," James Williams, a former strategist at Google, told the guardian.

Brad Burnham, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a top venture capital firm in New York, complained in a blog post about the added harm of quasi-monopolies in the digital age: "On Facebook content stream without differentiation, press finds itself into a commodity content suppliers. A tiny change in the Google search algorithm, can be on a website hits and great impact on traffic. When amazon decided to reorganize his demand for commodities, and directly purchase goods in China, the manufacturers can only helplessly looking at sales decline." (full disclosure: Burnham's firm invested in the company I founded in 2006; There has been no financial relationship between us since the sale in 2011.)

Even berners-lee, the inventor of the world wide web, wrote a blog post expressing his concern that advertising-based social media and model-based search engines have created an environment in which "shocking or disinformation published specifically to attract bias can spread like wildfire across the web."

For most commentators, the solution to these grand structural problems is either to reflect on the dangers of these tools, such as turning off our smartphones and keeping our children away from social media; Or it can only resort to strong regulatory and antitrust measures: subjecting tech giants to the same scrutiny as other industries vital to the public good, such as early railroads or telephone networks.

Both ideas are worthy: we should probably develop a new set of rules to govern the way we interact with social media. And it seems sensible that big companies such as Google and Facebook should be subject to the same regulatory scrutiny as television networks.

But these interventions are unlikely to solve the core problems facing the online world. After all, it was not just the justice department's antitrust division that questioned Microsoft's monopoly power in the 1990s, but the emergence of new software and hardware (such as the web, open-source software and Apple products) that undermined Microsoft's dominance.

And the blockchain technology evangelists behind ethereum and others argue that a range of advanced technologies about software, cryptography and distributed systems have the power to solve the digital problems facing them today: corrosive incentives for online advertising, for example; Quasi-monopolies of Facebook, Google and amazon; The fake news campaign in Russia.

If they succeed, their technological creations may be able to challenge the hegemony of tech giants more effectively than any antitrust rule. They even claim to offer a solution to capitalism's winner-takes-all model, rather than driving the distribution of wealth to levels not seen since the days of the robber barons.

But no such remedy has yet been found in products that any ordinary tech consumer would understand. So far, the only blockchain project to gain mainstream acceptance is bitcoin, but it is in a speculative bubble. Compared with the bitcoin bubble, the frenzy of Internet ipos in the 1990s was a neighborhood garage sale.

This leaves a cognitive conflict for anyone trying to understand blockchain technology: the likely revolution is being undermined by the very people it attracts, including veritable crooks, false prophets and mercenaries.

Not for the first time, techies who pursue open and decentralized networks have found themselves surrounded by speculators seeking to make a quick buck. The real question is whether the promise of blockchain technology will be fulfilled when the bubble bursts.

three

For the history of modern technology, the decline of the Internet is an inevitable historical script.

As Tim Wu in his 2010 book "the universal switch", the study of all the major information technology of the 20th century, both followed a similar development model: first is driven by curiosity and community, is the plaything amateur and researchers, but in the end all ended in multinational companies only focus on how to maximize shareholder value.

Wu calls this pattern a "cycle," and on the surface at least, the development of the Internet follows exactly this "cycle."

The Internet began as a hotchpotch of government-funded academic research projects and hobbies. But two decades after the world wide web came to public attention, it has been born in the most powerful and valuable companies in the history of capitalism: Google, Facebook, amazon (and, indirectly, Apple).

The evangelists of blockchain technology do not believe that "cycles" are inevitable. In essence, they argue, the Internet is indeed more open and decentralised than previous information technologies, and if we succeed, it may stay that way. That way, the online world won't be dominated by a few information giants, and news platforms won't be so vulnerable to manipulation and fraud. Identity theft will be less of a problem; Advertising revenue will also be distributed across a wider range of media.

To better understand why, we can think of the Internet as two disparate systems stacked on top of each other, like geological layers in an archaeological dig.

One layer consists of software protocols developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and reached critical mass in the 1990s, at least on the audience side. (protocol: a software version of a common language, a way in which multiple computers agree to communicate with each other; Some protocols control the raw flow of data on the Internet, some control the sending of E-mail messages, and some define web addresses.

Then on top of them, there's another layer of web-based services, including Facebook, Google, amazon, and Twitter. For the next decade, these services dominated the Internet world.

The first layer, called InternetOne, is based on an open protocol. Open agreements are defined and maintained by academic researchers and international standards organizations that do not belong to anyone. Email is still based on open protocols POP, SMTP and IMAP; Websites still use the open protocol HTTP; Bits are still transmitted over the Internet's original open protocol, TCP/IP.

You don't need to understand the technical mechanics of how these software protocols work to enjoy their benefits directly. The key feature they share is that anyone can use them for free.

If you want to create a web page, you don't have to pay the license fee to the company that owns the HTTP protocol. If you want to use SMTP to send emails, you don't have to sell some of your identity to advertisers. Like wikipedia, the open protocols of the Internet are among the most impressive mass-market products in human history.

But how to make sense of the huge but hard-to-observe benefits of these agreements? Imagine what would happen if one of the key standards was not developed.

For example, we use open standard GPS to define geographic locations. The global positioning system (GPS) was originally developed by the us military and was first used for civilian use during the Reagan administration. For about a decade, it was widely used in the aviation industry and later in automotive navigation systems for individual consumers.

Now that we have smartphones that can pick up signals from the GPS satellites above us, this remarkable technology is being used for everything from finding nearby restaurants to playing Pokemon Go to coordinating disaster relief efforts.

But what if the military had kept GPS out of the public domain? At some point in the 1990s, then, innovators in silicon valley and other tech hubs might find the market signaling that consumers were interested in establishing precise geographic coordinates that could be projected onto digital maps.

Rivals will compete fiercely for years as they scramble to put their dedicated satellites into orbit and upgrade their exclusive deals. But since all the improvements in efficiency come from competition, the market will eventually choose a dominant model and a single common criterion for validating the position.

Let's say that company is called GeoBook. Initially, the full embrace of GeoBook will be a quantum leap for consumers and other companies trying to build location-aware capabilities into their hardware and software. But slowly, a darker story emerges: a private company that can track the movements of billions of people around the world will become an advertising giant based on data from our ever-changing geography. Any startup that tries to build geo-aware applications will be threatened by the powerful GeoBook. Some angry voices will be heard denouncing the public threat posed by the invisible big brother.

But none of this happened, for the simple reason. We use open protocols to solve the problem of geolocation (such as the location of web pages, E-mail addresses, and domain names). But this is a problem we've never had before, so we rarely consider how well GPS works and the many different applications built on top of it.

Open, decentralized networks have proved to be very active and work well on the InternetOne layer. But since we started using the world wide web in the mid-1990s, we've rarely adopted new open standards protocols. After 1995, the big problems solved by technologists (many of which revolved around identity, community and payment mechanisms) were left to the private sector. As a result, in the early 2000s a new, powerful layer of Internet services emerged, which we might call InternetTwo.

For all their ingenuity, the inventors of open Internet protocols failed to put some key elements into them. These elements proved crucial to the future development of Internet culture. Perhaps most important of all, they failed to establish a secure, open standard for identifying people on the web.

Information units can be defined as "pages, links, or messages," but people don't have their own protocols, which means they can't define and share your real name, location, interests, or (perhaps most importantly) relationships with other people on the web.

This turns out to be a gross oversight, because identity is a problem that can be solved with an accepted solution.

This is what ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin calls the "base layer" of infrastructure: the language, the roads, the postal service, the platforms that carry commerce and competition, all of which are actually built in the public domain. We don't have an open market to buy and sell physical passports or social security Numbers offline, but we can prove to others that we are who we claim to be through prominent, mostly state-backed authorities.

Online, the private sector has rushed in to fill the gap. Because identity issues are so common, there is a huge demand for applying a common standard to define yourself and the people you know.

A self-reinforcing feedback loop, known to economists as "increasing returns" or "network effects", kicks in. After a period of experimentation with social media start-ups such as Myspace and Friendster, the market confirms the special criteria that are essentially used to identify yourself and the people you know. That standard is Facebook.

With more than 2bn users, Facebook is far bigger than the entire Internet at the height of the dotcom bubble in the late 1990s. In just 14 years, Facebook's user growth has made it the sixth most valuable company in the world.

Facebook is the ultimate dividing line between the economies of InternetOne and InternetTwo. No private company has a protocol that defines email, GPS or the open web, but Facebook has the data that defines the social identities of today's 2bn people, and Mark Zuckerberg alone owns a majority stake in the company.

If you think of the development of centralized networks as an inevitable cycle in the cycle, and the idealism of early open protocols as a youthful delusion, there is little reason to wonder why we abandoned InternetOne. Are we now in a state of depravity, unable to return to the garden of Eden, or is the garden itself a fantasy that must be destroyed by centralisation?

In either case, it makes no sense to try to revert to the InternetOne architecture; Our only hope is to use the power of the state to control these giants through regulation and antitrust measures.

This is a variation on the old Audre Lorde maxim: "the master's tools will never demolish the master's house." In other words, we cannot solve the problems caused by the technology itself by providing more technical solutions. We need to find powerful outside forces beyond the software and server worlds to break up monopolies.

In this analogy, the master's house is a duplex. It's true that the superstructure can't be dismantled with the tools to build it, but it can still take advantage of the underlying open agreements to create something better.

One of the most iconic preachers of the open deal revival is Juan Benet, a mexican-american programmer. He now lives in a three-bedroom rented house in an alley outside palo alto, calif., with his girlfriend, another programmer, and a few roommates who come and go, some of them members of Protocol Labs, which Benet founded.

The inside of the house is like an incubator and a fraternity from HBO's silicon valley; The living room is lined with black computer monitors. "Welcome to Rivendell," scrawled on the whiteboard in the entrance hallway, a nod to Elven City in "the Lord of the rings." "We call this house Rivendell," said Benet sheepishly, "but it's not a very good Rivendell. There aren't enough books, waterfalls or elves."

Benet, 29, sees himself as a product of the first P2P revolution, which occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s and was briefly prosperous in human history. That revolution was driven largely by networks that often spread media files illegally, such as BitTorrent.

The P2P revolution flourished primarily because of the logic of the decentralised, open nature of the Internet. People can safely publish documents on a public network-based Internet. Services such as BitTorrent or Skype, which take the nature of the Internet to a new level, allow ordinary users to add new features to the web: creating (mainly pirated) distributed media libraries through BitTorrent, for example; People can also make phone calls over the Internet, for example using Skype.

Benet, sitting in Rivendell's living room (or "office"), tells me that he believes the early 2000s began to enter a "peak summer" for P2P, with the rise of Skype and BitTorrent. "But then P2P kind of hit a wall, partly because the P2P business model was driven by piracy, and then people started looking at the architecture of the centralized system." He said.

Benet, a computer science graduate from Stanford university, speaks in a way reminiscent of Elon Musk: when he speaks, his eyes scan the top of your head, as if he's looking for words through an invisible teleprompter.

He is passionate about the technology being developed at Protocol Labs and about applying it more broadly. For Benet, few would have anticipated the impact of the shift from distributed systems to a more centralized approach.

"The rules of the game, the rules that govern all of these technologies, are very important," he said. "the architecture of the system that we're developing now is going to have a very big impact on what happens five or 10 years from now." He added: "I knew at the time that P2P had a very special meaning, but I didn't know how risky it was. I didn't realise I had to take over the baton, but now I know it's my turn to protect it."

To take over the baton from P2P, Benet created Protocol Labs. The first project is to overhaul the Internet's file system, including the basic scheme we use to locate web pages on the web. Benet called this System IPFS, short for the InterPlanetary File System.

The HTTP protocol that currently runs is to download web pages from a single location and has no built-in mechanism for archiving online pages. IPFS, on the other hand, allows users to download a page from multiple locations at the same time and contains what programmers call "historical versioning," where previous iterations are all included in the history.

To support the protocol, Benet also created a system called Filecoin, in which users could rent out their unused hard drive space (like an Airbnb database).

"There are millions of hard drives on the planet that are sitting idle," Benet said. "these users are wasting their money.

Clearly, Protocol Labs' ambitions go far beyond these projects. Benet is on a larger mission to support more new open source protocols over the next few years.

Why did the Internet go from open to closed? Part of the problem is inaction: as a new generation of programmers starts to solve problems that InternetOne hasn't solved yet, there's a lot of money to be spent if programmers just turn the system off.

Why will the InternetOne open deal succeed? Because they developed in an age when most people didn't care about the Internet, they were able to quietly reach critical mass without having to compete with wealthy conglomerates and venture capitalists.

But by the mid-2000s, promising new companies like Facebook could attract millions of dollars in financing, even before they became household names. Moreover, private sector funding ensures that the company's key software information is a trade secret in order to extract as much value as possible for shareholders.

"We don't want to replace the U.S. government.

But as Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist, points out, there is another factor that is more technical than financial in nature.

Sitting in a conference room in the New York office of Andreessen Horowitz, Dixon, a general partner, said, "suppose you want to create an open Twitter, which I call @cdixon, how do you store that information? You need a database."

Closed-end architectures like Facebook or Twitter store all information about users, including their operations, thumb up, photos, and network connections with others on the network, in private databases maintained by the company. Every time you look at Facebook's feeds and streams, you only have access to a very small portion of the database and can only see information about you.

Running Facebook's database is an extraordinarily complex operation, relying on thousands of servers around the world and overseen by the world's most brilliant engineers. Facebook is providing a valuable service: creating a common social graph for almost everyone on the planet.

They have to rely on selling advertising to cover the high cost of providing the service. But the high cost of access to a Shared social graph is inevitable, and the scale of Facebook's network also gives them the incredible power to influence the minds of two billion people around the world.

In the middle of the 21st century, that trade-off does make sense; Creating an interactive database that tracks hundreds of millions of people (well under 2 billion) requires an organisation.

But as Benet and his blockchain evangelists are eager to demonstrate, that may not be the case.

So, in an era when big tech companies already have billions of users and hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, how can basic-layer protocols be applied more meaningfully? If you happen to believe that the Internet has caused significant and growing harm to society, this seemingly profound problem -- the difficulty of getting people to apply new open source technical standards -- will ultimately have a major impact.

If we can't introduce a new, base-level infrastructure that rivals the existing architecture, we'll be stuck with the current Internet.

The best we can hope for is that government intervention to reduce the influence of Facebook or Google, or consumer behaviour to steer the market towards online services with less hegemony, is the digital equivalent of giving up large agricultural facilities for local farmers' markets.

Neither approach would undermine the basic thrust of InternetTwo's development.

four

In 2008, shortly after Mr Zuckerberg opened the first international headquarters for his growing company, the first challenging project for the closed-source era emerged.

A mysterious programmer (or group of programmers) emailed the academic community of cryptography A paper called Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer Electronic Cash System under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr Nakamoto has proposed a new digital currency system that does not require a centralised trusted authority to validate transactions.

At the time, Facebook and bitcoin seemed to be worlds away from each other. One was a burgeoning venture-backed social media startup that allowed users to share birthday wishes and connect with old friends. The other is a byzantine-style cryptocurrency scheme published only by email.

But a decade later, the ideas that satoshi nakamoto set out in this paper have posed a major challenge to the dominance of Internet giants like Facebook.

The paradox of bitcoin is that it has the potential to be a truly revolutionary breakthrough but also a huge failure as a currency.

As I've written, over the past five years, the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed by nearly 100,000 percent, not only making a fortune for its early investors, but also making it a highly volatile, speculative payment mechanism. But the process of creating new bitcoins is also surprisingly energy-intensive.

History is also full of stories about new technologies, and the difference between their early development and their later application is enormous. As a result, all attempts to use bitcoin as a payment system may also prove to be a flash in the pan, a losing sesame in the technology world.

In his initial technology manifesto, satoshi nakamoto referred to bitcoin as a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system," and the technological innovations he (or she or they) proposed were essentially lower-level and universal structures that had two key characteristics.

First, bitcoin provides proof that a secure database can be created, a network of blockchains spread across hundreds of computers, with no authority to control and verify the authenticity of the data.

Second, satoshi nakamoto designed bitcoin. In return for maintaining the distributed ledger, a small number of bitcoins are issued in deflation. If you put half of your computer processing power into the bitcoin network to help defend against hackers and scams, you will be rewarded with a small amount of bitcoin.

Mr. Nakamoto designed the system so that bitcoins would become harder to obtain over time, ensuring a degree of scarcity in the bitcoin system. If you helped the bitcoin network secure its database in the early days, you would earn more bitcoins than those who later entered the network, a process known as "mining."

To better understand bitcoin, forget all the crazy things about it. Just remember these two things:

What satoshi nakamoto brought to the world was a way to agree on the contents of a database without anyone being "responsible" for it; And a way to compensate those who helped make the database more valuable without paying a formal salary or allocating equity. Together, these two approaches solve the distributed database problem, as well as the funding problem.

Suddenly, a way to support open protocols that didn't exist in the early days of Facebook and Twitter emerged.

Both features have now been replicated in dozens of new bitcoin-inspired systems. One such system is ethereum, which Vitalik Buterin proposed in a white paper when he was 19. The ethereum network also has its cryptocurrency, but ethereum is not designed to facilitate electronic payments, but to allow people to develop and run applications on the ethereum blockchain.

Currently, hundreds of ethereum apps are under development in areas such as prediction markets, social media like Facebook, and crowdfunding services. Almost all products are currently in the pre-beta stage and are not yet ready to be marketed to consumers. While the apps are still in their infancy, ether has already seen a bitcoin-like price bubble that is likely to make Buterin a fortune.

These cryptocurrencies can be used cleverly.

Juan Benet's Filecoin system will be based on ethereum technology and reward users and developers who apply the IPFS protocol or help maintain the Shared database they need. Protocol Labs is creating its own cryptocurrency, also known as Filecoin, and plans to sell some of it on the open market in the coming months. (in the summer of 2017, the company raised $135 million in the first 60 minutes by "pre-selling" tokens to qualified investors.) Many cryptocurrencies were also the first to raise money publicly through initial coin offerings (icos).

The acronym ICO is the initial public offering that corresponds to the first dotcom bubble of the 1990s. But a key difference between the two is that what speculators buy in icos is not the ownership of private companies and their proprietary software as they would in a traditional IPO.

Then tokens will continue to be created in exchange for labor. For Filecoin, this is the people who help maintain the Filecoin network. Developers who help develop the software get Filecoin; Ordinary users can also obtain Filecoin by providing the remaining disk resources to expand the storage capacity of the network. Filecoin ACTS as a signal that someone, somewhere, is adding value to the network.

Blockchain evangelists such as Chris Dixon have started referring to tokens rather than COINS as a form of compensation for this type of labor transaction. Stress that such technology does not necessarily undermine the existing monetary system.

He said: "I like" tokens "symbolic significance, because it is very clear it is like a video game city. You go to the video game city, you can then use these tokens in the video game city. But we're not going to replace the us government. It is not a real currency; it's just a" fake "money that is in the world."

Dan Finlay, MetaMask's founder, agrees. "The most interesting thing to me is that we can program new value systems that don't have to mimic the existing monetary system," he says.

Whether real or fake, icos have spawned a number of cross-border offerings, some backed by celebrities who also seem unlikely to be blockchain enthusiasts like DJ Khaled, Paris Hilton and Floyd Mayweather.

Fred Wilson, the founder of Union Square Ventures and an early evangelist for the blockchain revolution, voiced strong opposition to the ICO expansion in an October 2017 blog post. "I hate it," Wilson wrote, adding, "most icos are frauds. And the celebrities who stand for this, and others who are trumping it on social media, are behaving so badly that they may have violated securities laws."

There is growing interest in icos, as well as in bitcoin and Ethernet COINS that have already been issued, most notably how much financial speculation is being attracted by platforms that are not actually used by consumers.

At least during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the average user bought a book on amazon or read a newspaper online; Trends at the time did suggest that the web would be the dominant platform of the future. But now, with the hype cycle so fast, billions of dollars are chasing a technology that few people outside the cryptocurrency community understand and that has very little practical application.

five

For the sake of clarity, let's assume that hype is necessary and that blockchain platforms like ethereum have become an essential part of our digital infrastructure. So how will the distributed ledger and token economies challenge the tech giants?

Brad Burnham, a partner at Union Square Ventures, where Fred Wilson works, points to another tech giant, Uber. Last year, the company was Mired in a crisis of regulation and public opinion.

"Uber's role is basically a platform for driver and passenger coordination," Burnham said.

But when new services like Uber take off, the market has a strong incentive to consolidate an industry leader. In fact, as more passengers start using the Uber app, it attracts more drivers to join, which in turn attracts more passengers to use Uber. More people are using the Uber app; People started attaching credit CARDS to Uber; There are also more Uber drivers on the road. Even if Uber's CEO seems like a jerk; Or, more abstractly, consumers would prefer to have more than a dozen competitive markets like Uber, but the switching costs of users trying to use other competitors' services will eventually discourage them.

"Then there will be less and less innovation around coordination," says Burnham.

Blockchain technology, on the other hand, offers some new ideas. Imagine a group like Protocol Labs deciding to add another "base layer" to the stack. Just as GPS gives us a way to discover and share locations, this new protocol will define a simple request: I'm here, I want to go there. A distributed ledger can keep track of all users' past trips, credit CARDS, favorite locations, and so on -- metadata that service providers like Uber or amazon encourage users to lock in. For the sake of argument, call it the "Transit" agreement.

The standard for sending Transit requests to the Internet will be completely open: anyone who wants to build an application to respond to the request will be able to use it for free. Cities can develop Transit applications that allow taxi drivers to request. So can bike-sharing organizations, or rickshaw pullers.

Developers can create a Shared marketplace application, and all vehicles using Transit can try to get your order. When you're walking down the sidewalk to get a ride, you don't have to limit yourself to a particular service provider before you call a cab. You just have to say you're standing at 67 Madison square and need to go to union square. Then you get a stream of competing offers, and in theory you could even get an MTA offer. It could set up a service to remind Transit users that it might be cheaper and faster to ride directly on line 6.

How will Transit reach that critical point when Uber and Lyft already dominate the ride-sharing market? This is where tokens come into play. Early Transit users will receive Transit tokens, which can be used to buy Transit services or exchange them for traditional currency at the exchange. As in the bitcoin model, as Transit becomes more widespread, token distributions will become less frequent.

An early developer who used Transit to develop an iPhone app might get a big token; Uber drivers who start using Transit to find passengers will receive tokens as a reward for using the new system; Adventurous consumers are also rewarded with tokens for starting Transit early, because there are far fewer drivers on Transit than on existing platforms such as Uber or Lyft.

As Transit surges, it attracts speculators, who attach tokens to the fiat price and inflate their value to generate more interest in Transit, attracting more developers, drivers and users. If the system eventually evolves as Transit's creators believe, a more competitive and fair market will emerge.

All the value in the economy, will no longer be one or two by big shareholder, dominate the market, but in a broader group allocated: Transit early developers, those who make agreement more user friendly application developers, early use Transit drivers and passengers, user, and the first wave of speculators.

Scrip economy introduced a set of totally different from the traditional model of elements: and in the shareholders' equity model by having capital to create value, through perfecting the underlying protocol, help people maintain books (like COINS mining), application development based on the agreement, or merely using services to create value. The boundaries between founders, investors and customers are far more blurred than traditional corporate models; All incentives are explicitly designed to avoid a winner-takes-all outcome. At the same time, however, the whole system depends on the initial speculative phase, in which outsiders bet on the currency to appreciate.

"When you look at the dot-com bubble in the '90s, and all the great Internet infrastructure that we got out of it, we actually took those gains and scaled them down to the size of apps," Dixon said.

six

Even a decentralized encryption movement will have its critical nodes. One of ethereum's nodes was ConsenSys, a brooklyn-based group founded by Joseph Lubin, an early ethereum developer. In November, consensus sys' chief marketing officer, Amanda Gutterman, 26, showed me around the group's headquarters. When we first met, she insisted on making me a cup of coffee, only to find that the drip coffee machine in the kitchen was completely dry.

"How are we going to improve the Internet if we don't even make coffee?" "She laughed.

Consensus's headquarters in industrial bushwick, next to Roberta's, a pizza-lover's pilgrimage site, is at odds with the usual "headquarters" image. Graffiti and stickers decorate the front door, and the stairwell remains the style of the Coolidge years.

In just three years, consensus has more than 550 employees in 28 countries and territories and has never received any venture capital. As an organization, ConsenSys doesn't fit well into any common category: technically, it's a company, but it also has organizational components similar to nonprofits and workers' groups.

Consensus sys members share the goal of strengthening and expanding the influence and scale of the ethereum blockchain. They allow developers to develop new applications and tools based on the ethereum platform, including MetaMask, which generates my ethereum address. But they also provide consulting services to businesses, nonprofits or governments to help them integrate ethereum's smart contracts into their own systems.

As with many online crises over the past few years, the real test for blockchain will be around identity. Your digital identity is now spread over dozens or even hundreds of different sites: amazon has your credit card information and purchase history; Facebook knows about your friends and family; Equifax keeps your credit history. When you use these services, you're actually seeking to borrow some information about yourself to accomplish a task: like ordering Christmas gifts for your uncle or opening Instagram to see pictures from last night's office party.

But all of your different identities don't belong to you personally, they belong to Facebook, amazon and Google. These companies are free to sell information about you to advertisers without telling you.

Of course, you can delete these accounts. If you stop using Facebook, Zuckerberg and Facebook's shareholders won't be able to divert your attention to their real customers and make money from you. But you can't port your Facebook or Google identity. If you want to use another promising social network, which is less likely to be infected by Russian bots, you can't extract your social network from Twitter and store it in a new service. You have to build your network from scratch (and convince all your friends to do the same).

"Bitcoin is now a nine-year-old bounty of billions of dollars for bugs that no one can crack. It feels like good proof."

Blockchain evangelists argue that this approach is outdated. You should have your own digital identity, including your date of birth, your network, your purchase history, etc., which you should be free to access and lend to any service provider you see fit.

But because your identity was not incorporated into the original Internet protocols, and distributed databases were very difficult to manage before bitcoin, this form of "autonomous" identity was not possible in the past. But now it can be done.

A number of services based on blockchain networks are trying to solve this problem, including uPort, a new identity system that is independent of consensus, and Blockstack, now based on the bitcoin platform. Tim berners-lee is leading the development of a comparable system called Solid that will also allow users to have control over their personal data. Although these competitors use slightly different protocol frameworks, they are all based on solving the same problem: how identity should exist in a truly decentralized Internet.

What would make a new identity standard based on blockchain no longer follow the cycle of Tim Wu? Tim Wu's cycle has made Facebook a market giant. There may be no stopping the trend. But imagine how blockchain technology will work in practice.

Someone has developed a new protocol based on ethereum that defines your social network. It may be as simple as any other ethereum address; In other words, these public addresses belong to people I like and trust.

This approach to defining a social network may prove popular and eventually replace Facebook's closed system of self-defining user networks. Perhaps one day, everyone on earth will be able to use this standard to reflect their social relationships, just as everyone on the Internet USES TCP/IP to share data.

But even if this new form of identity were ubiquitous, it would not create the same opportunities for abuse and manipulation that exist in closed systems.

I can use a facebook-style service to filter news, gossip or music for me based on my social dynamics, but if I'm not happy with the service, I'm free to choose other services without incurring switching costs. An open identity standard would be able to create an opportunity for ordinary people to sell their attention to the highest bidder, or opt to block them altogether.

Gutterman thinks such systems could be applied to more important forms of identity, such as medical data. Instead of storing your genome data on a private institution's server, store your information in a personal data archive.

"Maybe I don't want a lot of real businesses to see this data, but maybe I'd like to donate it to medical research." "I can send my blockchain-based autonomy account to a research group and allow them to use my data, but no one else can," she said. "I can also sell them or donate them."

Blockchain-based identity standards with token architectures have an advantage over closed standards such as Facebook. Many critics argue that there is little compensation for the average user creating content on a social media platform that captures all of the economic value in an industry that spans from content production to AD sales.

With a social network based on tokens, early adopters are rewarded at least a little for their efforts to make the new platform more attractive.

"It would be very attractive if someone really created a facetile-style social networking platform where people own part of the network and get paid for it," Dixon said.

Would information in a distributed blockchain network be more secure than the elaborate firewalls of tech giants like Google or Facebook?

Bitcoin is instructive in this respect: it may not be a currency because its value is unstable; But bitcoin does provide compelling evidence that distributed ledgers are highly secure.

Dixon said, "look at the currency and etheric fang's market value: $80 billion to $25 billion. This means that if you attacked the system successfully, you can roll away billions of dollars at least. Have you ever heard of" bug bounty bug bounty? Some people say, 'if you are successful invasion of my system, I will give you one million dollars'. In the past nine years, the currency has accumulated billions of dollars of bug bounty, but no one can invade the currency network. This seems to be a good lesson."

Blockchain-based identity protocols are decentralized, which also increases the security of information.

In Blockstack's proposed identity system, actual information about your identity, such as social connections, purchase history, etc., will be stored anywhere in the online space. Blockchain networks use encrypted security keys to unlock information and share it with other trusted suppliers. A central storage system with data from hundreds of millions of users, known to security experts as "honey POTS", is more attractive to hackers.

If you were a hacker, which approach would you prefer? Hacking into 100 million individual PCS, sifting through each brain, finding the right data and stealing 100 million credit histories? Or invade an & NBSP; Equifax's central storage system then scooped up the 100 million pieces of data in a matter of hours.

As Gutterman says, "it's the difference between robbing a house and robbing a whole village."

seven

Many blockchain network architectures fall into the following prediction loop: how might the architecture be abused once it is applied to a wider audience?

This not only reflects the charm of the block chain, but also reflects the power of the block chain. Blockchain shares the value of tokens with a large number of true supporters, reducing the potential for speculative bubbles. It prevents any individual or small group from controlling the entire database; Its encryption mechanism is designed to prevent surveillance or identity theft. In this respect, the blockchain network shows a resemblance to the political and constitutional family: its rules are designed to focus only on how the rules will be used.

The community of bitcoin and other illegal cryptocurrencies is bursting with anarchic liberals; The neighborhood is filled with slogans that sound like those of some Montana militia (" autonomy, "etc.).

But for a fairer distribution of wealth and a break with mass centralisation in the digital age, blockchain technology offers the possibility of unravelling the highly centralised and exploring a more democratic model of ownership.

In a sense, the idea of blockchain technology is also representative of liberals, providing an unofficial solution to the problem of excess capitalism, such as information monopolies. If the system of blockchain regulation is designed to complement authority, then trust in blockchain technology does not mean that regulation must be opposed.

For example, Brad Burnham suggests that regulators should firmly support "private data storage rights" for every citizen, including all aspects of a citizen's online identity. But instead of governments designing these identity protocols, they will be developed in blockchain networks and made open source.

Ideologically, the storage of private data requires collaborative support: it is created as a knowledge-sharing resource, financed by scrip speculators and operated with the support of regulators.

As in the early days of the Internet, the idea of blockchain is radical, even communist, for the masses, while attracting some of the most speculative returns.

The first phase of the online world was defined by open protocols and knowledge sharing; The second phase is dominated by a closed architecture and proprietary databases. We've learned from the history of the web that, at least when it comes to the basics, being open is more effective than being closed. But it is hard to see a way back to open agreements. For outside the realm of defence research there is unlikely to be a messianic, disruptive next generation Internet protocol like the first nearly 50 years ago.

Blockchain technology looks like the worst form of speculative capitalism, and it's hard to understand. But the beauty of open agreements is that those who discovered them early and embraced them can take them to places we can't even imagine.

Now, the only hope for reviving the spirit of open agreements is blockchain technology. Whether it can live up to its promise of equality will largely depend on its champions on these platforms.

As Juan Benet puts it, they took the baton from the early web pioneers.

If you think that under the current Internet architecture, you can't change the system by thinking and F.C.C. regulations on your own, you need new code to help you do it.

This article is translated by beat BlockBeats. If you need to reprint it, please attach the hyperlink:https://www.theblockbeats.com/news/16096

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