Read Write Own

When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope. —Freeman Dyson

What seems late is actually early. Now is the time to reimagine what networks can be and what they can do. Software is an unbeatable playground for ingenuity. You don't have to accept the internet as you found it. You can make something better... as a builder, as a creator, as a user, and, most important, as an owner. You are here now. These are the good old days.

Blockchains are at the computing frontier, as PCs were in the 1980s, the internet was in the 1990s, and mobile phones were in the 2010s. People look back today on classic moments in computing and wonder what it was like to be there. Noyce and Moore. Jobs and Wozniak. Page and Brin. Hobbyists dabbling, debating, driving forward. Tinkerers hacking away on nights and weekends.

Chess-playing AI has trounced humans for two decades, yet playing and watching chess on websites like chess.com is more popular than ever. People crave human interaction despite the rise of machine intelligence. Post-Al artistic expression will focus less on the media itself and more on the curation, community, and culture around it.

There will also be important blockchain networks that are na-tive, doing what couldn't be done before. I expect many of these will involve media and creative activities. Inevitably, there will be categories of applications not covered here that end up being important. Entrepreneurs and developers who build the future are always going to outsmart armchair predictions.

Another important skeuomorphic category will likely be financial networks. Sending money should be as easy as sending text messages. Improving how payments work is mostly a collective action problem, something blockchains are well suited to solve. Blockchain-based payment systems could lower fees, reduce friction, and unlock new categories of applications.