June 2022 – P2P.AI

On stage with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the 2010 Web2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg stared at the Summit backdrop, that had a map with various consumer technology areas that have been ‘conquered’, charted out. “Your Map is Wrong,” Zuckerberg said. “The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory — this map makes it seem like it’s zero-sum, but it’s not. We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.” (Source)

“It is not a zero-sum game” is something we tend to forget as we start competing in the marketplace. There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. Wealth is not a fixed pie (PG).

Steve Jobs famously said that there is no point in asking the customer what they need because they wouldn’t know until it is given to them. That is classic uncharted territory. None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us.

The next time you look at a map, look for the uncharted territory. Without that, your view of the map is most definitely wrong.

(You can follow the author on Twitter)

Web3: Let’s Not Miss the Forest for the Trees

Something interesting is happening in the technology world – many brilliant and accomplished technologists are outright dismissing Web3 in its current shape and form- criticisms range from ‘it’s a solution searching for a problem’ to ‘all of Web3 is one big Ponzi’.

There are certain points that need to be addressed in more detail by the Web3 community – for instance, the criticism that VCs with deep pockets and strong networks get in early on token sales, and use ‘bull markets’ to use retail money as their exit liquidity – but such criticisms mostly miss the big picture – Web3 promises to fill a critical missing piece in today’s world wide web – provable ownership of digital assets recorded on decentralized and immutable datastores.

Who owns your email address? If it is not you, how is this not the biggest problem that everyone should be trying to solve? How about other important pieces of your digital identity – let’s try this – can you name a single digital asset that you truly own?

Let’s define the term ‘ownership’ so we clearly understand the magnitude of the problem here. Here is an attempt – If you truly own a digital asset, you should be able to prove that you own it without relying on a trust hub and nobody should be able to take the asset away from you or control your access to the asset or limit your ability to do anything with it.

Now let’s try the same question we asked earlier – can you name a single digital asset that you truly own?

The fact that Web3 makes these digital assets programmable is really just icing on the cake. It is clear that there is a fundamental, multi-trillion dollar hole in the current iteration of the Internet that Web3 is attempting to fix – provable, decentralized, ‘true’ ownership. Our world has seen a lot of progress through capitalistic models, so it is only natural that Web3 would have such flavors and hence it its current shape might not appeal to all ideology sets – but it will definitely help if the critics really ask themselves what is it that they are missing that the Web3 folks seem to be so deeply convinced about. Let’s Not Miss the Forest for the Trees!

(You can follow the author on Twitter)