In a previous post, I wrote that I believe the Blockchain has the potential to be as disruptive -- and unlock as much opportunity and innovation -- as the Internet and that it could become a ubiquitous, interoperable, reliable, low-cost network for transactions of various kinds. But along with that enormous potential, the Blockchain also faces challenges that are similar to, but in many ways very different from what we had and continue to have with the Internet and the Open Web.

I'm worried about the current situation of Bitcoin and the Blockchain.

Partially driven by the overinvestment in the space, and partially by the fact that Bitcoin is much more about money than the Internet ever was, it is experiencing a crisis that didn't really have any parallels in the early days of the Internet. Nonetheless, the formation of the Internet offers some important lessons -- most importantly, on the question of the talent and knowledge pool. In those early days, and at some layers maybe even still today, there were only a very small number of people who had the background, brain type and personality to understand some of the core elements that made the Internet work. I remember when there were only a handful of people in the world who really understood Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and we had to hunt them down and share them with our "competitors" when we were setting up PSINet in Japan.

It's very similar today with Bitcoin and the Blockchain. There are a small number of people who understand cryptography, systems, networks and code and are capable of understanding the Bitcoin software code. Most of them are working on Bitcoin, while some are working on Ethereum and other "related" systems and a few more are scattered around the world in other places. It's a community including some who have been around since the 90s, before the Web, going to crazy conferences like the Financial Cryptography conference. Like any free and open-source software community on the Internet, it's a bunch of people who know each other and mostly, though not always, respect each other, but which fundamentally holds a near monopoly on talent.

Unfortunately, the wild growth of Bitcoin and now "the Blockchain" has caught this community off guard from a governance perspective, leaving the core developers of Bitcoin unable to interface effectively with the commercial interests whose businesses depend on scaling the technology. When asked "can you scale this?" They said, "we'll do the best we can." That wasn't good enough for many, especially those who don't understand the architecture or the nature of what is going on inside of Bitcoin.

Many companies that are used to making decisions around less complicated systems -- like building a website or buying and running Enterprise Resource Planning systems -- felt they could either just hire other engineers who would listen to the customer needs better or became so annoyed with the, "we can't promise but we'll try" attitude of the core developers that they lowered their standards and went with whomever would promise to meet their demands.

The future of Bitcoin, decentralized ledgers and other Blockchain-like projects depends on this community. Many people call them "Bitcoin Core" as if they are some sort of company you can fire or a random set of developers with skills that you can just train others to acquire. They're not. They're more like artists, scientists and precision engineers who have built a shared culture and language. To look for another group of people to do what they do would be like asking web designers to launch a space shuttle. You can't FIRE a community and, statistically speaking, the people working on the Bitcoin ARE the community.

If you try to build "something like Bitcoin but better!" it will probably turn out insecure, underwhelming, and will go against the the fundamental principles that give Bitcoin the potential to be as impactful to banking, law and society as the Internet has been to media, communication, and commerce.

Bitcoin is an open project, with a sometimes-inefficient-but-open community process that always pushes for the fundamentals of decentralization, robustness, and innovation. But Bitcoin isn't a single installation, it's a living, working system that presents a $6.5Bn bounty for anyone who can break it. This high valuation causes a great deal of caution and testing before anything is deployed on its network, but we can be quite sure that many many people have been thinking about how they can break the system and have so far failed.

Ethereum and Ripple are probably the two next largest networks in the $100's of millions range (Etherium is currently $400M+) - Ripple with a fundamentally different consensus protocol and Ethereum with interesting and useful features. If you can't do certain transactions or develop certain application on Bitcoin, I can see why Ripple or Ethereum might be interesting. If you're serious about security and stability -- and you should be -- Bitcoin is almost the only choice with the largest bounty, and largest community, with the most practical modern experience deploying to a broad and active network in the real world.

Many people who are so excited about the potential applications that they have ignored completely the architecture of the system on which they would run. Just as many Internet companies assume that the Internet works on its own, they assume that all blockchains are the same and work, but blockchain technology is not as mature as the Internet where you can almost get away with that. They often view the people working on Bitcoin as a bunch of crazy Libertarians who came up with a cool idea but believe that a bunch of hired guns could put the same thing together given enough money. Governments and banks are launching all kind of plans without enough thought going into how they're actually going to build the secure ledger.

I fear that we'll build something that at the application layer looks like what Bitcoin and the Blockchain promised, but under the hood is just the same old transaction system with no interoperability, no distributed system, no trustless networks, no extensibility, no open innovation, nothing except maybe a bit of efficiency increased from new technology.

We have a good example of that. One of the key benefits of the Internet was that the open protocols allowed innovation and competition at EVERY layer with each layer properly sandwiched between standards developed by the community. This drove costs down and innovation up. By the time we got around to building the mobile web, we lost sight (or control) of our principles and let the mobile operators build the network. That's why on the fixed-line Internet you don't worry about data costs, but when you travel over a national border, a "normal" Internet experience on mobile will probably cost more than your rent. Mobile Internet "feels" like the Internet, but it's an ugly and distorted copy of it with monopoly-like systems at many layers. This is exactly what happens when we let the application layer drag the architecture along in a kludgy and unprincipled way.

Lastly, but most importantly, we're burning out those developers who we most need to be focused on the code and the architecture. Many are dropping out or threatening to drop out. Many are completely discouraged and depleted by the public debate. Even if you believe that we will eventually have a new generation of financial cryptographers, you can't train them without this community. We have many smart people on all sides of this debate and I think that most of them are doing what they are doing with good intentions. However, those of us on the sidelines fanning the flames, making uninformed and provocative statements and fundamentally disrespecting and undervaluing the contribution of the Bitcoin community to the past, present and future of this possibly world-changing innovation, are doing harm.

I've been sitting back quietly hoping that things would just calm down, and they might eventually. But I see more and more misinformation and hype with "Blockchain" being reduced to the same useless suitcase words that "IoT" and "The Cloud" have become and it makes me sad and a bit mad.

I've decided to spend the next chunk of time trying to counteract or balance some of the most misguided stuff that I'm seeing in areas that will have an impact on our future. It feels like while the Bitcoin Core development community is robust, the ecosystem of stakeholders and the understanding of how decisions are made and information is shared is still fragile and vulnerable. I fear that the communication and now emotional rift between various key groups and individuals is wide right now, but I believe it's imperative that we try to bring the community together and focus on executing on a shared technical plan that represents our best shot at broad consensus from both a technical and a practical perspective. Hopefully, we can build a community and a process that is more robust and can handle the inevitable disagreements in the future in a less emotional and more technical and operational way.

Dave Winer just posted about his trip to the Media Lab.

He ends with:

Where to go?

In one of the follow-up emails I listed three things we could do to help the open web reboot. I had written about all these ideas before, in some cases, a number of times.

1. Every university should host at least one open source project.
2. Every news org should build a community of bloggers, starting with a river of sources.
3. Every student journalist should learn how to set up and run a server.

These ideas came out of my work in booting up blogging and podcasting, and working successfully at Berkman to get the first academic blogging community going. Had I continued that work, this is where we would go.

I agree that universities can make good homes for free and open source software projects and I think we should have more of them at the Media Lab. I also know a news org or two and agree that having a community of bloggers with a river of sources sounds like a pretty good idea. And... we have a number of what I would consider are student journalists at the Media Lab and more broadly, in our network, we have many. I've always believed that everyone involved in "publishing" should know how to set up a server so agree with the third one as well.

But agreeing is easy. Now it's time to try to do something about it. That's the challenge from Dave.

PS This back and forth feels like "good old fashioned blogging." Maybe this is the trigger to start doing it regularly again. Thanks Dave.

After the first Internet bubble burst around 2001 and the Nasdaq came crashing down to pre-Internet size, most of the world wrote off the Internet as having been a failure or a fad. Douglas Rushkoff said at the time, that it was just the Internet fending off an attack. I was lucky enough to still be investing at the time and was very excited by blogging which emerged from the ashes of the crashed dot-com space.

As I become familiar with the characters active in blogging, Dave Winer was one of those guys who was inspiring, aggravating, but only ignored at great expense. When I first started blogging, I learned a ton from Dave, sometimes by having him attack me for using the wrong version of RSS, but with a conviction to the Open Web and a clarity of mission that seemed almost a bit overboard when it felt like everyone was just trying to do the right thing - when many blogging platforms allowed you to export your whole blog and import it into another blogging platform and everyone was mostly working together on all kind of standards.

I've had my own strong beliefs around decentralized networks from when I was in the ISP business, copyright from when I ran Creative Commons and was on the Open Source Initiative Board, but it was only when I saw Dave just a few weeks ago that his views about the importance of the Open Web, or more precisely, the particular layer of the Open Web that Dave has been so focused on since I've known him, hit me with a big "ah ha!"

We talked about how "the walled gardens" like Facebook and at some level Twitter feed off of the Open Web and need it but how the Open Web was being torn apart from all sides. Even the somewhat reasonable sounding announcement that Google will be lowering page rank for non https: sites will push self-hosted blogs lower in the results.

It reminded me about an argument that Google Translate is trained with human-created translations and that it wouldn't be able to train anymore if the translators went out of business. On the other hand, I suppose we may have figured out better translation training by then or maybe already have. Anyway, I digress.

We talked about how a healthy system probably involves a vibrant Open Web along with for-profit companies and that this balance was important, but how we are leaning away from the Open Web right now. Dave isn't anti-platform, just anti-anti-Open Web. Listening to Dave speak at Ethan's Center for Civic Media group meeting, I realized that I needed to pay more attention to Dave, amplify his message and take some of his recommendation to heart and into action.

If you haven't been tracking him recently, I recommend you do. I think he's speaking up about an important topic and a very timely moment in the evolution of the Web.

Here's a provocative but insightful post about why NOT to post on Medium or at least cross-post to the Open Web, which caught my attention most recently and trigged inviting Dave to the Lab with Ethan.