I had a waking dream about a world where our identities were completely decentralized.
Where there was a coin, like Bitcoin, that held securely who we were as we traveled around the web and lived life. Where URLs were irrelevant. Where place online didn’t matter.
Where the web just served me whenever I needed it with a tap on my phone. Where everything was secure and the middlemen across a multitude of industries were burnt toast.
Where democratization of information was not a risk, but a necessity to kick start change.
And where transparency always seemed the right choice without the horrid compromises that certifications and standards demand.
I thank Albert Wenger’s excellent post yesterday for this fueled inspiration and now, Fred Wilson’s post today, for the whisperings of a new and different world. And some telling comments from Brandon Burns on both posts.
I’m listening and can’t stop thinking how this impacts just about everything, from how we live to how we market our companies.
Of course, this idea of a distributed identity, decentralized coined reality and transactions is not the real view from my window today. It’s not something that is really actionable.
Or is it?
Is it behaviorally already there in pieces? Has the market and culture already shifted with technology as the lag?
Usually big shifts like the Internet happen–then culture slowly intersects, verticalizes them to our behavioral needs in every imaginable form.
Bitcoin and transactional systems aside. A protocol of value aside. Even the absolute of decentralized identity aside as well—change in the market is already afoot.
The web and the big identity platforms are unbundling before our eyes. Even the marketplace itself is following suit with transactions part of where we discover what we want, not where we necessarily go to find it.
Do people really make a choice between using Facebook, What’s App, Twitter, Instagram and others? Not at all.
Are our identities really tied to just one of them today? I don’t think so.
All of the platforms are sub- and supersets of each other. How we sign on is not really who we are.
Everyone is on Facebook and Instagram though the communities in each are very distinct. The same picture posted in each will gather a mostly different set of people. This is true from platform to platform and app to app.
Bitcoin or something akin to it will certainly happen. A decentralized identity—maybe—but the change they represent to how we live, work and market is already in process and our common ways of doing things in flux.
I discovered Wollit this morning. A Bitcoin-based, cause-focused fundraising site. It’s scant and early, not well explained yet just felt very right. A Mcluhan-esque approach where indeed it makes sense as form and content become one, feels like a norm that has already become part of us.
Even from an everyday use case, pre the coin becoming tamed and ubiquitous, it’s already a behavioral layer in how we act without understanding a thing about the protocol.
It’s front and center in how groups and communities are formed today.
Most all group structures are horrific, yet we form groups and communities every day. We cut through different platforms forsaking the idea of a centralized place with a basic need in time. (Check out Vintage141 as an antidote.)
The market already understands decentralized realities all to0 well in how we act and connect with people on the web.
I started this rant with a jolt, fueled by a rush of Bitcoin intellectual stimulus with decentralized identity as the chaser.
Bitcoin is a wondrous mess and the most interesting thing happening on the web today. Most don’t understand it, most will ignore it till smart people build services that do something that matter. And just works.
That’s our birthright as consumers to demand this.
When that happens, it will spread like crazy, as people already live a semi-decentralized reality today. Its inefficient, but we are comfortable with it. Most of us simply embrace and incorporate the new when it does the job or sparks the imagination.
When Bitcoin is stable, my bet is we will use it without the need for education. We already understand the idea and act on it in human terms every day.
But the big realization—and the big upside to me—is that everything is yet again going to get turned on its head. A whole generation of new apps and solutions will flood in. A whole new way to market and connect new values with customers will be discovered.
The market will simply take it in stride, and adopt it as their own as it just makes sense.
They did it without fuss or bother when social became platformed because the behaviors were already present and the upside, enormous. They will do it again I think for very similar reasons.
