This blog post was motivated by the article that I read over the weekend written by Gary Sharma in the Wall Street Journal Accelerator section, titled “Weekend Read: The Imminent Decentralization of Computing Revolution“, I would encourage you to read it, read also the comments where there is references made to Shannon-Hartley theorem/capacity problem and the article itself refers to the Byzantine Generals Problem. IMHO, both of these things are secrets in mesh networks and blockchain mechanism. Startups are the best and most effective group to solve these secrets. The article refers to so many different use cases and solutions that have already been developed so far. I believe there is more to come.
I have written why I believe Cryptocurrencies and their various incarnations are a great leap in computing, identity and decentralization. It is usually not obvious, to quote Paul Graham, most great startups at the initial stage sound like really bad ideas. The whole notion of decentralization, mesh networks and autonomous agents makes everyone to think about Skynet or Terminator. I don’t believe we need to worry about those things for another couple of decades. The article talks about the revolution, but I think it is going to be much bigger than that. It is the next wave of value drivers on the network. This is a technological jump that aligns with the Zero to One philosophy popularized by Peter Thiel.
There was a case made to bring identity on the internet, Facebook solved it in its own way. I also believe that there are various things that can done with Anonymity without compromising security. The blockchain and autonomous agents are paths to solutions to those problems. We as humans have a tendency to think of edge cases and we are usually scared of being wrong. That is one of the main reasons for crowd behaviour. Technological progress always happens as discrete jumps, i.e the iPhone was a huge jump in actually delivering a smart phone that worked. Even Microsoft Windows 95 was a huge jump in graphical user interface for the main stream.
