In 2008, the world’s four top companies in market capitalization were Exxon, Walmart, China Petroleum, and China Industrial and Commercial Bank. Ten years later, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were in the top spots – a tremendous upset. How did the landscape change so drastically in just one decade? “In an information age, economies can change as fast as minds can change,” said Gilder.
In 2023, will the top four companies change again? Will they be Google-inspired, Gilder asks, meaning they reflect the Google business model? Or will the new leaders come from what he calls the Cryptocosm: companies like Ethereum, Bitmain, Neo, or Blockstack?
10 Laws: Google v. Cryptocosm
To answer the question, Gilder compared the ten laws of a Google-inspired technology system – the world’s current prevailing system based on search and satisfy, big data, cloud computing, and machine minds – with the ten equivalent laws of the cryptocosm/Blockstack.
- Google law number one is focus on users. Communication first, and how do you focus on users under the Google regime? You give them free stuff. The first law of the cryptocosm is to focus on security.
- Google law number two is it’s best to do one thing really, really well, be world champion in AI-based answers. Cryptocosm law number two is to create a secure foundation for customers to do many things really, really well.
- Google law number three is fast is better than slow, even if humans can never keep up, especially if humans can’t keep up. Then you can project your machine learning off out into the universe in the new singularity. The Blockstack law number three is to recognize the primacy of human scale over computer gigahertz. Indeed Blockstack or blockchain is slower in recording individual transactions, but it’s faster, perhaps millions of times faster ultimately in synchronizing a ground state across the whole system.
- Google law number four is democracy in the web works, but keep it on the web. Google is a hierarchy and we rule. This is really the vision of Google. This belief in democracy is absolutely correct, but the cryptocosm law number four is distribution. The blockchain is a heterarchy, not a hierarchy. If you distribute the power, if you truly distribute the power as blockchains do, you don’t need voting. The power is already distributed. Voting is a hierarchical concept where centralized bodies need to gain the authorization of their constituents. But blockchain distributes power.
- Google law number five, you don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer. The cryptocosm law, the Blockstack law number five is if your phone is smart, the least it can do is suppress ads.
- Google law number six is you can make money without doing evil. I don’t really think that we need to explore this very fully, but real money is good. The cryptocosm law is, make money while building systems and applications that can’t be evil.
- Google law seven is there’s always more information out there and we can get it by giving our services away for free. But the cryptocosm law number seven is information should be owned by their creators, not by their distributors, and nothing is ultimately free.
- Google law number eight is the need for information crosses all borders. The cryptocosm law is that the cryptocosm respects the borders of your computer. Security is the property of the user and the device, not the network or necessarily or even the nation..
- Google law number nine is you give up information to receive information, on our terms. The cryptocosm law number nine is you can and should be able to conduct transactions without committing personal data to an insecure net.
- Google law number 10 is that great isn’t good enough. We are casually great. We are cosmically great. The cryptocosm law number 10, Blockstack’s law, is we provide an architecture of security and time-stamped factuality which enables our customers to be great.
Who Will Win?
Gilder believes that Blockchain has already provided a remedy for the IPO collapse. “Ethereum had $20 billion of ICOs, but I believe that Ethereum will not ultimately win,” he said. “It’s going to make a huge contribution…but I believe ultimately Blockstack will win because it offers a small attack surface compared to Ethereum.”
“It’s logically centralized, but with one ground state, but it’s organizationally decentralized. It’s scalable because it separates the data plane from the control plane, so you don’t mix up various functions and thus create a broad attack surface for hackers. And it leverages the existing infrastructure. It doesn’t disrupt the existing internet…it provides a complementary new foundation for key Internet services such as identity and security.”
So can Blockstack emerge as the victor? “The big shift shifts the control to the user. In the existing system, the network service is central, and all the users pay tribute to it,” said Gilder. “Its a porous stack in which all the data, money and power rises to the top.”
“In the new system, the user is central, and all the services have to cater to the user. Blockstack that keeps content and identity with the user. This reversal can be achieved through the triumph of Blockstack, creating not a winner-take-all-Internet, but an internet in which again we all can be winners.”
From September 2018 through January of this year, Blockstack hosted the “Decentralizing the World Tour,” a global speaker and meetup series (recapped here). The final leg of the tour was held in Hong Kong and included talks from William Mougayar, known Blockchain theorist and best-selling author of The Business Blockchain, Nick Grossman of Union Square Ventures, and many other experts in the field.
“Will Life After Google be Blockstack?” was the topic of a talk from leading economic and technological thinker George Gilder, founding fellow of the Discovery Institute, and author of nineteen books including Wealth and Poverty, Life After Television and Life After Google: The Rise and Fall of Blockchain* (where Blockstack was featured in two chapters).
Transcript:
00:04 Why do I think Blockstack will win in the world of life after Google? Now, Life After Television, that was an early book I wrote that said the computer of the future will be as portable as your watches, personal as your wallet. It will recognize speech. It will navigate streets. It will collect your news and your mail. It just might not do windows. It’ll open doors. That was in 1993, and Steve Jobs did pass it around so I like to believe that I had some influence on Apple launching the teleputer, as I called it, but they didn’t call it the teleputer. It’s still available, folks. You can call your new device the teleputer.
01:10 I think that in thinking about new technologies, you have to have a sense of systems of the world. Those are the set of ideas that unify a society’s technology institutions and culture, and investors and entrepreneurs always have to have a sense of the system of the world in which they operate. I believe that the system of the world that is emerging is completely compatible and favorable to the emergence of Blockstack.
01:53 And Yuanfen. I think fate has now made China and the United States into collaborators in creating a new system of the world. There are always friction and disturbances and trumpery and posturing, but in the end China and the U.S. have to collaborate on the new frontiers of the global cryptocosm, and I think that is happening today.
02:28 But the prevailing system of the world now is Google system of the world. It’s based on search and satisfy, big data, cloud computing, machine mind, based on the accumulation of big data, and this system is all has to be free. It’s based on giving away most of the products.
03:03 Zhou Xiaochuan in March 24, 2009 launched an idea for a new system of the world. He was chairman of the Chinese Central Bank, a great monetary statesman for some 30 years, and he called for an end to freely floating currencies and the creation of a new global money. I think this proposal was a visionary first step for a new system of the world. Zhou Xiaochuan’s proposal followed by just a couple months Satoshi Nakamoto’s proposal for a new monetary system, and both of them were prompted by the same event, by the collapse of the existing monetary system in 2008, the existing financial system of the world, essentially collapsed. And it is yet to be retrieved, the idea that the patchwork of existing monetary devices which actually can prevail in the new economy is quixotic. There’s a new system of the world and Bitcoin is a representative of this idea.
04:48 Though we’re moving from the microcosm which was the microchip and the telecosm into the cryptocosm, and these are key figures of the giants of the early period. A lot of people don’t like Craig Wright, but it seems that he really was intimately involved in the beginning of Bitcoin. The great new figure, Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum created the Ethereum platform for a global new computer architecture. Bitmain has been a team of Chinese engineers since 2012, the same time that Buterin was launching Ethereum—they launched Bitmain which was the fastest microchip in the history of the world, conceived by a group of kids in China. This was the first ASIC that could mine Bitcoin at pedahashes a second. It’s a great feat, the kind of feat that used to happen only in Silicon Valley.
06:27 So systems of the world can change overnight. That’s how this can happen. In 2008 the world’s four top companies in market cap were Exxon, Walmart, China Petroleum, and China Industrial and Commercial Bank. In 2018, just 10 years later the four top companies in market cap were Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, with shifts among these companies’ rankings. This was a tremendous upset, and it could happen so fast because in an information age, economies can change as fast as minds can change.
07:29 In 2023, will the top four companies change again? And will they be Google-inspired? Will they be Chinese companies? They have the largest market, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance. ByteDance is TikTok, and they have a market cap of some 75-to-80 billion dollars today. These are Google-inspired companies, I say, because they reflect the Google system of the world in general.
08:16 Or, will the new companies come from what I call the cryptocosm? Ethereum, Bitmain, Neo, a Chinese Ethereum, Hedera Hashgraph, an ingenious new different kind of blockchain, or Blockstack?
08:36 So, to see this change in systems of the world, we have to compare the laws of Google, the 10 laws of Google, the 10 things we know to be true on the Google website, and compare them with the 10 laws of Blockstack. I say laws of the cryptocosm, but they’re essentially the same laws that govern Blockstack, so I’m going to call them the Blockstack laws and counter-poise them with the Google laws.
09:23 Google law number one is focus on users. Communication first, and how do you focus on users under the Google regime? You give them free stuff. The Blockstack law number one is to focus on security. You get security first, and nothing is finally free.
09:56 Google law number two is it’s best to do one thing really, really well, be world champion in AI-based answers. The Blockstack law number two is to create a secure foundation for customers to do many things really, really well.
10:24 Google law number three is fast is better than slow, even if humans can never keep up, especially if humans can’t keep up. Then you can project your machine learning off out into the universe in the new singularity. The Blockstack law number three is to recognize the primacy of human scale over computer gigahertz. Indeed the Blockstack or blockchain is slower in recording individual transactions, but it’s faster, perhaps millions of times faster ultimately in synchronizing a ground state across the whole system. It may be a million times slower than VISA in handling each transaction, but in synchronizing all the transactions it has the promise of being many times faster. And that’s really the promise of the blockchain. It is slower, but it’s also more complete. It actually reconciles all the transactions in minutes rather than days.
12:02 Google law number four is democracy in the web works, but keep it on the web. Google is a hierarchy and we rule. This is really the vision of Google. But this belief in democracy is absolutely correct, but the Blockstack law number four is, I would style it, is majority rule is a 51% attack. That’s a catastrophe, and they had one of these catastrophes, it appears, in Ethereum classic yesterday. Another $400,000 worth of transactions were double spent in what appears to be some kind of 51% attack. The blockchain is a heterarchy, not a hierarchy. If you distribute the power, if you truly distribute the power as blockchains do, you don’t need voting. The power is already distributed. Voting is a hierarchical concept where centralized bodies need to gain the authorization of their constituents. But blockchain distributes power.
13:39 Google law number five, you don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer. Well, gosh, we’d better buy AdMob for ads on Smartphones. The cryptocosm law, the Blockstack law number five is if your phone is smart, the least it can do is suppress ads. Most ads don’t work on Smartphones anyway, as Brendan and Ike will tell you, and the Brave browser is a great product of cryptocosm.
14:18 The slide is missing here, but the point of that slide is that ads on Smartphones simply don’t work. The click-through rate is about .03%. It’s actually .06%, but half of the click-throughs are in error, and so the net click-through rate is in fact .03%, which is a reasonable click-through rate if you’re a spam artist in Nigeria trying to fool grandmothers into buying, accepting their legacy. But the Smartphone is really the death of the advertising model as it’s currently pursued.
15:23 Google law number six is you can make money without doing evil. I don’t really think that we need to explore this very fully, but real money is good. Money is real. It registers the actual scarcities in the universe, and the ultimate scarcity, what remains scarce when everything else grows abundant, is time. And money translates time into the economy, and the efforts to falsify money by central banks and their currency trading, $5.1 trillion a day, is actually an effort to cancel time, to escape time by generating $250 trillion of debt and imposing it on future generations. Money is real. It’s a measuring stick, not a magic wand for sovereign central banks.
16:37 So Google law seven is there’s always more information out there and we can get it by giving our services away for free. But the Blockstack law number seven is information should be owned by their creators, not by their distributors, and nothing is ultimately free. We respect the proof of work of our customers, which is translated into their money.
17:08 Google law number eight is the need for information crosses all borders. The Blockstack law is that the cryptocosm respects the borders of your computer. Security is the property of the user and the device, not the network or necessarily or even the nation. You can be serious without a suit, but you’d better wear denim and give us your username, password, date of birth, last four digits of your Social Security number, your mother’s maiden name, and other password and so on in order to function in the top-down internet.
18:00 The Blockstack law number nine is you can conduct transactions without committing personal data to an insecure net.
18:12 Google law number 10 is that great isn’t good enough. We are casually great. We are cosmically great. The cryptocosm law number 10, Blockstack’s law, is we provide an architecture of security and time-stamped factuality which enables our customers to be great. Your face here in the Blockstack blog.
18:49 So, the blockchain has already provided a remedy for the IPO collapse. Ethereum had $20 billion of ICOs, but I believe that Ethereum will not ultimately win. It’s going to make a huge contribution, and it’s going to persist because Vitalik is a genius, but I believe ultimately Blockstack will win because it offers a small attack surface compared to Ethereum. It’s not Turing-complete. You don’t want to be Turing-complete if you’re providing a protocol across the whole internet.
19:38 It’s logically centralized, but with one ground state, but it’s organizationally decentralized. It’s scalable because it separates the data plane from the control plane, so you don’t mix up all various carriers and thus create a broad attack surface for hackers. And it leverages the existing infrastructure. It doesn’t disrupt the existing internet. It provides a complementary new structure for the internet.
20:30 So can it be Blockstack? The big shift shifts the control to the user, and the existing system, the network service is central and all the users pay tribute to it. In the new system, the user is central, and all the services have to cater to the user. This reversal can be achieved through the triumph of Blockstack, creating not a winner take all internet, but an internet in which again we all can be winners. Thank you very much.