User-Centric Web Thesis

Below is a one-page summary of my work over the last 5 years

An economy requires trust to operate effectively. Trust between countries, banks, companies, people and even two IoT devices or smart contracts.

Historically, trust is provided either by the state (healthcare, legal, education systems) or platforms (Uber, Airbnb, Steam, Amazon, Booking). The state is conservative, slow, inefficient. Platforms strive for monopoly, user lock-in, profit maximization.

A more efficient alternative is web3, decentralized identity/reputation.

From the application-centric world — the one where my music on the Spotify server, my medical history on the Kaiser server, my transactions on the JPMorgan server, my games on the Steam server, my resume on the LinkedIn server — we are moving to a user-centric model. Any external service writes or requests read permissions to/from a personal data pod that the user controls.

The protocol and marketplace of the scoring models ensure trust (so that there is no Chinese social rating or one-model-fits-all problems). A scoring model is an algorithm that assembles a summary of reputation in a specific context from thousands of individual data points. Even for a credit score, there can be a hundred different models. These models will be gamed and they will evolve to counteract.

There are three types of data sources: self-reported data about yourself; data from peers, other agents; data from the authority, e.g. state, network consensus, provable fact.

Today there are hundreds, and tomorrow we will see thousands of such products.

Bureaucracy: portable trusted data between jurisdictions, programmable bureaucracy. “If you have flown 100k miles, a visa to the UK is automatic”

Loyalty: all shops, restaurants, hotels write order history to your data store, you can share this data with others to get more personalization, discounts or payments for providing personal data from the advertisers

Social: all your posts, photos and videos are in your data store. For each piece of content, you make privacy settings. 1,000s of frontends and apps that generate feeds.

Professional: all my projects, work experience, public speaking, commits in the DAO, customer reviews, education are in my data store in an authenticated form. For a bank, employer or investor, I prepare a summary of key facts.

Blue checkmark: open and transparent profile validation rules, which are then reusable on any platform.

All these products need a protocol and it is the same one in terms of functionality between them. But a protocol is not a corporation. For-profit protocol will either become the next BigCorp, or immediately lose. The one which is most similar to Bitcoin will win: no CEO, no owners, no investors, a public good.

Building institutions is hard. Harder than companies. But more important for humanity.

None of the above require a blockchain. Except when we talk about financial transactions.