Marc Andreessen][/B]That's right. And, if you think about it even today, if I want to do a mobile app, I need Apple's permission. I need Apple's permission. I need Google's position to get it in the app store. But, if I do a mobile website on mobile Safari--on Apple Safari--or Google Chrome, people can just access my website.
So, this permissionless capability is still there. It's still incredibly important and powerful. It's still a big contrast versus the status quo. And then--it's the thing that caused the internet to win. It's the reason the internet won and the reason nobody remembers all the prior networks anymore--other than me--is because the internet won, because the creativity that got unleashed by permissionless innovation meant that you had a million times the intellectual candle-power going into creating all of the use cases and all the great things for people to do. Those included all of the big internet businesses that we know today and all the things we like to do online.
So, what we had is: we had a decentralized, permissionless network of data but without trust. And, this is sort of, again, the internet's famous for this. There's no trust. Like there's no--it's the famous thing: On the internet nobody knows you're a dog, right? The famous cartoon. Which is there's no sense of trusted identity on the internet.
There is no internet-native money. Right? To this day, if you want to access money on the internet, you're still plugging in your credit card number and dealing with all that stuff. There's no internet native money the way that there's internet native data.
By the way, core internet services like email really ought to have a built-in method[?] of money. There's still no built-in concept of money so there's these huge incentive problems.
So, for example, spam. The reason spam is a perpetual problem with email is because of the economics of spam. It's free to send a billion emails. If you only have a 0.0001% conversion rate on the people that you're trying to trick, it's still cost effective to run a spam campaign. If we had had micropayments on the internet from the beginning--if we had had internet-native money from the beginning, we would've had a system where sending an email would've cost, let's say, a thousandth of a cent. So, from a consumer's standpoint, nobody ever would've noticed or cared if you spent a penny a day or whatever to send all your emails. But, it would've killed the spam industry, like, right out of the gate. We never would've had the spam problem.
And, then rolling into social networking, the same thing would've happened. We never would've had a lot of the downside things you see on social networking.
So, we didn't have internet-native money. We couldn't build economics into the system. And, then we couldn't build any other applications based on trust, right? So, we couldn't have internet-native transfer of money. We couldn't have internet-native stored money. We couldn't have internet-native contracts. Internet-native lending. Internet-native insurance. Internet-native title. Right? All of these concepts of trusted relationships and economic activity that we take for granted in the real world, in all of their various imperfect forms.
Like, there should be internet-native versions of all of those things. And, that's basically what this sort of Crypto Web3 revolution is now, in my view, is it's sweeping back in 30 years later and basically saying: Okay, now we finally have the technologies to be able to basically drop a trusted environment, a trusted architecture, in place on top of the un-trusted aspect of the internet; and all of a sudden have a trust environment in which everybody globally can do business and can transact in a way that is trusted and clear and straightforward. And, then again, globally ubiquitous. Just like the internet, globally ubiquitous. Anybody on planet earth can participate in this. And, that's why we get excited about this.
