originally published on my medium account:

This is an excerpt in response to this article: https://1729.com/the-billion-user-table/ The article challenges its readers to write a review. Here is my response to what I thought was a well-written article that laid out some potential iterations of blockchain based user databases.

I thought the prediction of blockchain databases becoming the primary form of storing internet users’ data is very accurate. An internet with users controlling their own data is superior both technologically and philosophically. The ability to, for example, port your LinkedIn recommendations to your twitter bio, or your reddit Karma to your LinkedIn profile, without any third-party approval is a powerful mechanism. It increases the internet’s network effects and the users’ ability to verify signals, while minimizing the power of big-tech companies. Furthermore, the rise of this technology is inevitable because once one company or protocol succeeds with this type of user storage, the network effects will be too strong to continue with the old business model. This is the essence of the article. I’d like to expound on these points, weigh some negatives, and come to a conclusion about where I hope this technologies goes:

A world in which every start-up has access to the data of every internet platform user is a much fairer place. Maybe at that point, large tech companies have been broken up and have no choice but to store user data on a blockchain. In this world, the ability for a user to grow his or her network exponentially rises. Imagine being successful with your posts in the reddit community and you wanted to start making videos on Tik Tok. Your Karma would display from the start, which would signal to others of your success in other places in the internet. This give users a better opportunity to grow their network, expand influence, and increase money coming in on different platforms. For entrepreneurs, new mediums and interfaces for users can be scaled at a much faster pace. Having access to the user base would mean the success of a start-up is more dependent on the merit of the interface. Whereas the current business model is more focused on growing the user base and making it difficult to leave through its network effects . It’s much easier for a user to change to a better platform by having the same identity across all platforms. We could see the rise of platforms that are really catered for the user, else the user leaves with his or her following.

Assuming that were are at least luke warm in how things could unfold, there will be mighty challenges ahead. You don’t have to be that old to have witnessed an internet sensation rise up in Silicon Valley to only fall down into societal purgatory. I don’t mean to say that every new internet medium was bad for its user base, but most of them came at some cost. If we go back 20 years, when Google was just a fledgling start-up, the promise to its users was the ability to find any data on the internet in seconds. This technology was life changing to internet goers. The drawback of course was that Google was tracking searches, and eventually e-mails and messages. “Don’t be evil” was, for what now seems to be a joke, an accepted slogan by the internet. Facebook — connecting the world — was going to allow users to maintain relationships they couldn’t have without the internet. And then it was decided to sell users data to consultants for political targeting. These companies value add to users came at an unexpected cost.

Okay, so now imagine again users can have one internet identity with new platforms coming out every so often. Individual’s networks are quite large on the internet, bigger than late night television hosts. The media apparatus has been and continues to be largely cozy with politicians. What does our governments do then? The ability to scale platforms and one’s own network is orders of magnitude higher. Controlling this type of popularity, as we currently see on cable TV, would take a new regime of regulations. People think Joe Rogan is a scary internet figure, how about a pseudonymous person or group with a bigger following that can articulate “dangerous ideas” on platforms that can scale overnight? The only loaded gun at this point would be change internet regulation. Not only does Section 235 come into question, but the entire way the internet is regulated could be rearchitected.

This is not a Luddite argument. But every improvement comes with a new set of challenges, some of which are quite daunting. And in the case of the blockchain databases, the trade-offs are worth-it. If the government becomes that challenge by obtaining more control and censoring what gets put on the internet, we should start preparing now like making censorship resistant technologies. Smart entrepreneurs innovate, but the ones that still standing innovate and anticipate.