Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet Members of the tech elite are banding together to bring the Web back to its idealist origins. They call their vision ‘Web3.’ ....... The internet hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to. In its earliest incarnation, before some Wall Street Journal readers were born and the rest had fewer automatically renewing digital subscriptions, it was supposed to be distributed, user-controlled and, in a word, democratic. Then came Big Tech and the attendant centralization, windfall profits, culture wars, misinformation campaigns, Congressional hearings, EU rulings, antitrust battles and techno-nationalism that have characterized the past decade. What if there was another way? .............. The answers are taking the form of services and apps that are the first outlines of what their creators hope will someday eat the internet completely: a distributed, democratically ruled “Web 3.0” or “Web3” that will rise like a phoenix of 1990s-era Web 1.0-idealism from out of the ashes of the corporation-controlled Web 2.0 that all of us currently inhabit. ............... Here’s the basic idea:
New technologies like blockchain present the opportunity to loosen the centralized stranglehold that companies and governments have over everything from internet platforms to intellectual property to the creation and distribution of money.
These technologies operate by spreading responsibility or ownership among a group of users, who, for example, use their computing power to electronically fabricate—or “mine”—cryptocurrency, or record transactions for digital art. ................ These technologies represent an evolution of cryptocurrency beyond bitcoin—which some in crypto communities now deride as mere “digital gold.” In addition to monetary value, the “tokens” that make up these systems are each also encoded with information that has some other use, whether it’s membership in a club, the right to vote on how a company conducts itself, or even just data. ............... The blockchains that underlie all this are just ledgers of information stored on many different computers at once. This lets any given blockchain be resistant to control by a government or corporation, and lets people exchange tokens on that blockchain securely and transparently. ............ Mr. Dorsey, no quack, is clearly in the believers’ camp—and is, indeed, one of its most prominent members. In July he told investors bitcoin would be a big part of Twitter’s future, and in August he tweeted that it would unite the world. .......... Mr. Dorsey, no quack, is clearly in the believers’ camp—and is, indeed, one of its most prominent members. In July he told investors bitcoin would be a big part of Twitter’s future, and in August he tweeted that it would unite the world. .......... Block—the name was inspired partly by the blockchain—owns Cash App, which allows users to buy and send bitcoin. It also created a patent alliance to share crypto-related intellectual property and funds Spiral, an independent team of open-source bitcoin technology developers whose most recent promo video includes a muppet version of Mr. Dorsey answering the question “When did you know something was wrong with our financial system?” ............ In June 2021, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture-capital firm co-founded by Marc Andreessen, announced a $2.2 billion fund—its third—to invest in blockchain and crypto-related startups. Globally, investment in blockchain startups in 2021 has shattered all previous records, topping $15 billion so far this year, a 384% increase from total investment in all of 2020 .........If money can become code, then money can be way more than a means of exchange; it can also do anything that other software can do.
