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The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanBitcoin as Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes.Bitcoin at first was "weird internet money...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Internet's Next Business Model: A Conversation with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
I just released a new episode of The Slow Hunch with Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. Since we invested in their Series C back in 2013, I've watched Matthew and his team build one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure—protecting and accelerating vast portions of global web traffic. Our conversation traces Matthew's journey from his early "slow hunch" that the internet was fundamentally broken and needed fixing. We start with his law school days in 2000, when ...
One of my former colleagues, Rob Marianski, and I used to have a running joke -- we would be building and debugging something, and he'd finally say, "Oh, so you just want me to set just_work = true?".
That was over 10 years ago, but it still gets me every time for some reason. (as an aside, I have always thought justworkequalstrue.com would make a great blog name, and actually bought the domain for Rob a few years back -- still waiting for that first post, Rob...).
But the idea of things "just working", automatically, and without friction, is magical and exciting. I mention it because of where we are today in the crypto/blockchain space. 99% of the attention recently has been on ICO hype and the financial use cases of crypto (fundraising, trading, payments, tokenized assets, etc) -- but I believe we are about to turn the corner and get a taste of what kinds of new online user experiences will become possible because of this technology.
This is where it's going to get fun. just_work = true will be the foundational element of this experience. Here is what I mean, by way of a few examples:
1) Browsers with identity and money built-in: the browsing experience will be directly tied to identity and payments, and any app will be able to natively, frictionlessly, tap into both. Users of Toshi, or Brave, or Metamask, or Blockstack are already getting a taste of it. Because all cryptonetworks are built around public key cryptography, and the private key is both your identity and your wallet, when you have a public/private keypair built into the browser, you can do lots of things -- be "logged in" everywhere, control & provision your own data, make seamless and flexible payments and payment arrangements (e.g., subscriptions). Imagine the entire web working as seamlessly as Amazon and Apple do today. As you surf the web, there will be less logging in, fewer passwords to remember, fewer forms to fill out -- it will just work.
One of my former colleagues, Rob Marianski, and I used to have a running joke -- we would be building and debugging something, and he'd finally say, "Oh, so you just want me to set just_work = true?".
That was over 10 years ago, but it still gets me every time for some reason. (as an aside, I have always thought justworkequalstrue.com would make a great blog name, and actually bought the domain for Rob a few years back -- still waiting for that first post, Rob...).
But the idea of things "just working", automatically, and without friction, is magical and exciting. I mention it because of where we are today in the crypto/blockchain space. 99% of the attention recently has been on ICO hype and the financial use cases of crypto (fundraising, trading, payments, tokenized assets, etc) -- but I believe we are about to turn the corner and get a taste of what kinds of new online user experiences will become possible because of this technology.
This is where it's going to get fun. just_work = true will be the foundational element of this experience. Here is what I mean, by way of a few examples:
1) Browsers with identity and money built-in: the browsing experience will be directly tied to identity and payments, and any app will be able to natively, frictionlessly, tap into both. Users of Toshi, or Brave, or Metamask, or Blockstack are already getting a taste of it. Because all cryptonetworks are built around public key cryptography, and the private key is both your identity and your wallet, when you have a public/private keypair built into the browser, you can do lots of things -- be "logged in" everywhere, control & provision your own data, make seamless and flexible payments and payment arrangements (e.g., subscriptions). Imagine the entire web working as seamlessly as Amazon and Apple do today. As you surf the web, there will be less logging in, fewer passwords to remember, fewer forms to fill out -- it will just work.
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanBitcoin as Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes.Bitcoin at first was "weird internet money...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Internet's Next Business Model: A Conversation with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
I just released a new episode of The Slow Hunch with Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. Since we invested in their Series C back in 2013, I've watched Matthew and his team build one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure—protecting and accelerating vast portions of global web traffic. Our conversation traces Matthew's journey from his early "slow hunch" that the internet was fundamentally broken and needed fixing. We start with his law school days in 2000, when ...
3) Automatic dev / deploy environments: my colleague Albert described a story recently where his son participated in a Solidity hackathon -- the time from setup to deploy was vanishingly short, since all of the deployment infrastructure is part of the open Ethereum network. No need to set up accounts at amazon, heroku, stripe, etc to get started -- just write a contract, buy some ether for gas, and publish it, and you're online. We've never had a development / deployment environment this drop dead simple, and as blockchain dev tools mature further, it will get even easier.
I mention all of the above just as a thought exercise. It is easy for folks in this space to focus on issues like privacy and "freedom" -- and while these things do matter to some users (especially technically-minded power users), I don't believe this technology will unlock mainstream opportunity until we begin to surface the magical capabilities that make everyday users feel like "wow, it just works".
3) Automatic dev / deploy environments: my colleague Albert described a story recently where his son participated in a Solidity hackathon -- the time from setup to deploy was vanishingly short, since all of the deployment infrastructure is part of the open Ethereum network. No need to set up accounts at amazon, heroku, stripe, etc to get started -- just write a contract, buy some ether for gas, and publish it, and you're online. We've never had a development / deployment environment this drop dead simple, and as blockchain dev tools mature further, it will get even easier.
I mention all of the above just as a thought exercise. It is easy for folks in this space to focus on issues like privacy and "freedom" -- and while these things do matter to some users (especially technically-minded power users), I don't believe this technology will unlock mainstream opportunity until we begin to surface the magical capabilities that make everyday users feel like "wow, it just works".
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