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Disclaimer: I own less than $100 in cryptocurrencies. This is not an attempt to get you to buy any. Rather I hope you join the ecosystem with a more long-term view of Web3’s importance to humanity.
My Introduction
I first heard about Web3 at a party in October 2020. I was very, very high and desperate for change after spending the past year working on different startups with no success during a worldwide pandemic.
One thing that really frustrated me was how hard it was to build startups in Africa. It wasn’t hard to build products per se. The issue came when you actually wanted to do what every company needs to do to survive.
Make money.
You see there’s a high financial wall that separates Africa from the rest of the world. Meaning I can’t just create a Paypal account or Stripe to get paid by customers.
This simply wasn’t possible.
The only way someone like me in Lagos could charge money from someone in the U.S. would be to create a U.S.-based entity and go through all the paperwork and months of waiting required. Remember I’m doing all of this remotely too.
It was painfully frustrating.
Building a startup was hard enough without worrying about all of this.
So when someone at the party told me about Web3. That it made possible instant global payments without gatekeepers. Where the only thing that mattered was that you had an internet connection.
It was the best thing I’d heard all year.
When I got home I spent all week learning everything I could about Web3. And the more I learned the more incredible everything was to me.
I immediately stopped working on the social media startup I was building—lol—and went fully into Web3.
I had found a much more exciting game to play.
The Old World
The way I see it, if you’re not in the U.S. or Europe you’re being fucked by the current version of the internet and financial services.
You’ll understand this if you ever try to send money to or from Africa.
Come to think of it—even if you’re in the U.S. you’re still being fucked because it’s not just an internet problem. The problem is bigger than payments.
To illustrate, I’ll use Facebook.
If you were among the first 100 users on Facebook, and still have an active account today—God forbid.
It means you’ve watched the company explode in value from being worth almost nothing when it was an app for Harvard students in 2004 to being worth more than $200 billion dollars in 2022.
Yet you—loyal user—would get no part of this financial upside. Even though Facebook is only valuable because of the presence of people like you on their platform.
An even more committed example is Uber drivers.
If you were among the first hundred drivers at Uber and stayed on their platform until today, you would have no financial benefit.
Whereas Uber is now a multibillion-dollar corporation. And again, it only got this far thanks to drivers and riders on their platform.
You can make this same example for every internet company— Youtube, Instagram, Twitter—and even non-internet companies.
This is just the way traditional businesses work. This is the old world.
We expect the financial upside to go to a small group of people at the top. And contributors whether they be content creators, workers, or customers get nothing unless they hold shares of the company— which are only available to the public years later when the company is already very valuable.
This is part of the reason why we have so much inequality in the world. With half of the world’s GDP in 3.6% of land area.
Even the poorest people in society are customers of different multibillion-dollar corporations.
But they get nothing for being customers. That’s just not how it works.
If things remain the same as we “Tech-ify” everything. Inequality will only get worse.
As societal inequality increases, violence and instability will rise.
The New World
This is where Web3 changes everything and why it’s necessary for human progress.
The first thing you need to understand about Web3 is that isn’t just about the “Web“. It’s actually a philosophy around resource control.
The Web is just an enabler of this philosophy.
The Web3 Philosophy
The most important tenet of Web3 is:
Control of the resource should be with those who use the resource.
Because of how its designed Web3 is intended to be community-owned and controlled. Meaning by default there’s a crossover of ownership between the people who create things in Web3 and those who use it.
Take the app, Ethereum Name Service for example.
They rewarded everyone who bought a domain name from them with their native token.
Rewards worth thousands of dollars for buying a $50 domain name.
This is frankly unheard of in the old world.
That the apps and businesses you use will pay you for being a customer.
Now imagine if we can scale this to every app on your phone. In the future, this might be how a large number of people get universal basic income (UBI).
Not from some government agency but from the apps they use.
Aside from being a possible way to end extreme poverty in the 21st century. Web3 also levels the playing field.
We are used to powerful people operating by a different set of rules than the rest of us.
In fact, Satoshi Nakamoto the founder of Bitcoin, made a reference to the 2009 bailout of banks at the start of the Bitcoin network.
This marked the beginning of Web3 and the new world.
The Future of Humanity
The vision of Satoshi Nakamoto is a world where we no longer need a centralized authority to organize ourselves and our resources.
In the old world, our fates are decided by lawmakers, presidents, and dictators who don’t always have our best interests at heart. And those who do care usually find themselves tied to an inefficient system.
The issue is that our structures for government existed before the internet and instant global communication.
So if you want to organize large groups of people you need to allocate power to a central source to make all the decisions on behalf of everyone.
Imagine using messengers on a horse to gather the opinion of a few million people spread out across the country.
If we operated like this civilization would have gone nowhere. So to make decision-making faster we granted default power to a small group of people.
But power corrupts and the incentive of those in power doesn’t always align with the people they’re supposed to serve. But this was the best we could do at the time.
Now the internet has made new things possible.
I consider Satoshi’s invention one of the most important innovations in human history.
If he was not a pseudonymous cyberpunk with a desire to upend global power structures he’d probably get a Noble prize.
What Web3 brings about is a world where humanity doesn’t depend on the goodwill of centralized authority but on a shared collective vision.
Before 2009 with Bitcoin, it wasn’t possible for us to collectively control resources without trusting someone with the “keys”.
Now we can all collectively control any resource. I see this as a monumental shift.
Like the state of the world before humans started using fire and after.
Humans are a coordinating species. But until recently the scale of coordination has been restricted.
Earlier versions of the internet broke down geographic/information silos and now Web3 has broken down money silos.
Coordination can now happen at an unprecedented scale.
Want to stop deforestation of the Amazon? People around the world can crowdfund to buy parts of the Amazon. Pay Brazilian farmers with that money so they stop burning it down.
How much is human life extension worth to us as a species? A billion dollars annually? Great! 100 million people could donate $100 and hand that out to life extension researchers.
We’ve already seen examples of this type of global coordination.
See ConstitutionDAO: A bunch of strangers around the world crowdfunded $47M to buy an original copy of the U.S. constitution.
They failed to buy it however because they were outbid. But they did raise the money. Now apply this to other grand schemes.
We can do whatever we want now. The gatekeepers are gone.
The possibilities are limited only by our collective imagination.
What Next?
Share this article with someone you know, learn as much as you can about Web3, join a DAO, and start building cool shit!
The future literally depends on it.
Until next time friend ✌
P.S
A16 Crypto Startup School is one of the best resources for learning about Web3.
Web3 will lead to new forms of government: https://youtu.be/gLcZFeIkjyM