Ah, I couldnt read it either. Thanks Aaron :)

2015-01-23 11:17 GMT+01.00, Aaron van Wirdum <aaronbitcoining@???>:
> > Great piece indeed, thanks for sharing.
>
> A friend of mine said he couldn't read it though, because he doesn't
> have a LinkedIn account?
>
> In case anyone else is encountering the same problem, here the flat text.
>
> Cheers, Aaron.
>
> ==========
>
> Why Bitcoin is and isn't like the Internet
> Joichi Ito - Director, MIT Media Lab
>
> In the post that follows I'm trying to develop what I see to be strong
> analogues to another crucial period/turning point in the history of
> technology, but like all such comparisons, the differences are as
> illuminating as the similarities. I'm still not sure how far I should
> be stretching the metaphors, but it feels like we might be able to
> learn a lot about the future of Bitcoin from the history of the
> Internet. This is my first post about Bitcoin and I'm really looking
> more for reactions and new ideas than trying to prove a point.
>
> Feedback and links to things I should read would be greatly appreciated.
> I'm fundamentally an Internet person -- my real business life started
> around the dawn of the Internet and for most of my adult life, I've
> been involved in building layers and pieces of the Internet, from
> helping start the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan
> to investing in Twitter and helping bring it to Japan. I've also
> served on the boards of the Open Source Initiative, the Internet
> Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN), The Mozilla Foundation,
> Public Knowledge, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and
> been the CEO of Creative Commons. Given my experiences in the early
> days of the net, it's possible that I'm biased and everything new
> looks like the Internet.
>
> Having said that, I believe that there are many parallels between the
> Internet and Bitcoin and there are many lessons from the Internet that
> can help provide guidance in thinking about Bitcoin and its future,
> but there are also some important differences.
>
> The similarity is that Bitcoin is a transportation infrastructure that
> is decentralized, efficient and based on an open protocol. Instead of
> transferring packets of data over a dynamic network in contrast to the
> circuits and leased lines that preceded the Internet, Bitcoin's
> protocol, the blockchain, allows trust to be established between
> mutually distrusting parties in an efficient and decentralized way.
> Although you could argue that the ledger is "centralized", it's
> created through mechanical decentralized consensus.
>
> The Internet has a root -- in other words, just because you use the
> Internet Protocol doesn't mean that you're necessarily part of the
> Internet. To be part of THE Internet, you have to agree to the names
> and numbers protocol and root servers that are administered by ICANN
> and its consensus process. You can use the Internet Protocol and make
> your own network, using your own rules for names and numbers, but then
> you're just a network and not The Internet.
>
> Similarly, you can use the blockchain protocol to create alternative
> bitcoins or alt.coins. This allows you to innovate and use many of the
> technological benefits of Bitcoin, but you are no longer technically
> interoperable with Bitcoin and do not benefit from the network effect
> or the trust that Bitcoin has.
>
> Also like the beginning of the Internet, there are competing ideas at
> each of the levels. AOL created a dialup network and really helped to
> popularize email. It eventually dumped its dialup network, its core
> business, but survived as an Internet service. Many people still have
> AOL email accounts.
>
> With crypto-currencies, there are coins that don't connect to the
> "genesis block" of Bitcoin -- alt.coins that use fundamentally the
> same technology. There are alt.coins that use slightly different
> protocols and some that are fundamentally different.
>
> On top of the coin layer, there are various services such as wallets,
> exchanges, service providers with varying levels of vertical
> integration -- some agnostic to whichever cryptocurrency ends up
> "winning" and some tightly linked. There are technologies and services
> being built on top of the infrastructure that use the network for
> fundamentally different things than transacting units of value, just
> as voice over IP used the same network in a very different way.
> In the early days of the Internet, most online services were a
> combination of dialup and x.25 a competing packet switching protocol
> developed by Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et
> Télégraphique, (CCITT), the predecessor to the International Telecom
> Union (ITU), a standards body that hangs off of the United Nations.
> Many services like The Source or CompuServe used x.25 before they
> started offering their services over the Internet.
>
> I believe the first killer app for the Internet was email. On most of
> the early online services, you could only send email to other people
> on the same service. When Internet email came to these services,
> suddenly you could send email to anyone. This was quite amazing and
> notably, email is still one of the most important applications on the
> Internet.
>
> As the Internet proliferated, the TCP/IP stack, free software that
> anyone could download for free and install on their computer to
> connect it to the Internet, was further developed and deployed. This
> allowed applications that ran on your computer to use the Internet to
> talk to other programs running on other computers. This created the
> machine-to-machine network. It was no longer just about typing text
> into a terminal window. The file transfer protocol (FTP) and later
> Gopher, a text-based browsing and downloading service popular before
> the web was invented, allowed you to download music and images and
> create a world wide web of content. Eventually, permissionless
> innovation on top of this open architecture gave birth to the World
> Wide Web, Napster, Amazon, eBay, Google and Skype.
>
> I remember twenty years ago, giving a talk to advertising agencies,
> media companies and banks explaining how important and disruptive the
> Internet would be. Back then, there were satellite photos of the earth
> and a webcam pointing at a coffee pot on the Internet. Most people
> didn't have the imagination to see how the Internet would
> fundamentally disrupt commerce and media, because Amazon, eBay and
> Google hadn't been invented -- just email and Usenet-news. No one in
> these big companies believed that they had to learn anything about the
> Internet or that the Internet would affect their business -- I mostly
> got blank stares or snores.
>
> Similarly, I believe that Bitcoin is the first "killer app" of The
> Blockchain as email was the killer app for the beginning of the
> Internet. We are in the process of inventing eBay, Amazon and Google.
> My hunch is that The Blockchain will be to banking, law and
> accountancy as The Internet was to media, commerce and advertising. It
> will lower costs, disintermediate many layers of business and reduce
> friction. As we know, one person's friction is another person's revenue.
>
> One of the main things we worked on when I was on the board of ICANN
> was trying to keep the Internet from forking. There were many
> organizations that didn't agree with ICANN's policies or didn't like
> the US's excessive influence over the Internet. Our job was to listen
> to everyone and create an inclusive and consensus-based process so
> that people felt that the benefits of the network effect outweighed
> the energy and cost of dealing with this process. In general we
> succeeded.
>
> It helped that almost all of the founders and key technical minds and
> technical standards organizations that designed and ran the Internet
> worked together with ICANN. This interface between the policy makers
> and the technologists -- however painful -- was viewed as something
> that wasn't great but worked better than any of the other alternatives.
>
> One question is whether there is an ICANN equivalent needed for
> Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin email and The Blockchain TCP/IP?
> One argument about why it might not be the same is that ICANN
> fundamentally had to deal with the centralization caused by the name
> space problem created by domain names. Domain names are essential for
> the way we think the Internet works and you need a standards body to
> deal with the conflicts. The solutions to Bitcoin's centralization
> problems will look nothing like a domain name system (DNS), because
> although there is currently centralization in the form of mining pools
> and core development, the protocol is fundamentally designed to need
> decentralization to function at all. You could argue that the Internet
> requires a degree of decentralization, but it has so far survived its
> relationship with ICANN.
>
> One other important function that ICANN provides is a way to discuss
> changes to the core technology. It also coordinates the policy
> conversation between the various stakeholders: the technology people,
> the users, business and governments. The registrars and registries
> were the main stakeholders since they ran the "business" that feeds
> ICANN and provides a lot of the infrastructure together with the ISPs.
>
> For Bitcoin it's the miners -- the people and companies that do the
> computation required to secure the network by producing the
> cryptographically secure blockchain at the core of Bitcoin -- all in
> exchange for bitcoin rewards from the network itself. Any technical
> changes that the developers want to make to Bitcoin will not be
> adopted unless the miners adopt them, and the developers and the
> miners have different incentives. It's possible that the miners have
> some similarities to the registrars and registries, but they are
> fundamentally different in that they are not customer-facing and don't
> really care what you think.
>
> As with ICANN, the users do matter and are key for the network effect
> value of Bitcoin, but without the miners the engine doesn't run. The
> miners aren't as easy to identify as the registrars and registries and
> it's unclear how the dynamics of incentives for the miners will
> develop with the value of bitcoin fluctuating, the difficulty of
> mining increasing and the transaction fees being market driven. It's
> possible that they will develop into a community with a user interface
> and a governance function, but they are mostly hidden and independent
> for a variety of reasons that are unlikely to change for now. Having
> said that, one of the first publicly traded Bitcoin companies is a miner.
>
> The core developers are different as well. The founders of the
> Internet may have been slightly hippy-like, but they were mostly
> government-funded and fairly government-friendly. Cutting a deal with
> the Department of Commerce seemed like a pretty good idea to them at
> the time.
>
> The core Bitcoin developers are cypherpunks who do what they do
> because they don't trust governments or the global banking system and
> are trying to build a distributed and autonomous system, one that is
> impervious to regulation and meddling by anyone at any time. At some
> level, Bitcoin was designed to not care what regulators think. The
> miners have an economic interest in Bitcoin having value, since that's
> what they're paid in, and they care about scale and the network
> effect, but the miners probably don't care if it's Bitcoin or an
> alt.coin that ends up winning, as long as their investments in
> hardware and plant don't disappear before they make a return on their
> investment.
>
> Regulators clearly have an incentive to influence the rules of the
> network, but it's unclear whether the core developers really need to
> care what the regulators think. Having said that, without some sort of
> buy-in by regulators, it's unlikely to scale or have the mainstream
> impact that the Internet did.
>
> Very much like the early days of the Internet, when we saw the power
> of Internet email but hadn't yet invented the Web, we are just
> imagining the potential uses of concepts such as crypto-equity and
> smart contracts ... to name just a few.
>
> I believe it's possible that over-regulation could cause Bitcoin or
> the blockchain to never achieve its full potential and remain a
> feature of the side-economy, much in the same way that the Tor
> anonymizing system is extremely valuable to people who really need
> privacy but not really used by "normal people"... yet.
>
> What helped make the Internet successful was the lack of regulation
> and the generally inclusive and permissionless nature of innovation.
> This was driven in large part by free and open source software and the
> venture capital community. The question I have is whether the fact
> that we're now talking about "money" and not "content," and that we
> seem to be innovating at a much higher speed (venture capital
> investment in Bitcoin is outpacing early Internet investments), the
> dialog in popular media is growing, and governments are very
> interested in Bitcoin makes this a completely different game. I think
> ideas like the five-year moratorium on Bitcoin regulation proposed by
> US Representative Steve Stockman are a good idea. We really have no
> idea what this whole thing is going to turn into, so a focus on dialog
> versus regulation is key.
>
> I also believe that layer unbundling and innovation at each layer,
> assuming that the other layers will sort themselves out, is a good
> idea. In other words, exchanges and wallets that are coin-agnostic or
> experiments with colored coins, side chains and other innovations that
> are "unbundled" as much as possible allow the learnings and the
> systems created to survive regardless of exactly how the architecture
> turns out.
>
> It feels a lot to me like when we were arguing over ethernet and token
> ring -- for the average user, it doesn't really matter which we end up
> with as long as in the end it's all interoperable. What's different is
> that there is more at stake and it's moving really fast, so the shape
> of failure and the cost of failure might be much more severe than when
> we were trying to figure out the Internet and a lot more people are
> watching.
>
> On 22-01-15 17:15, Amir Taaki wrote:
>> wow very enlightening. thanks for the post.
>>
>> On 01/22/2015 09:16 AM, Ben Vickers wrote:
>>> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-bitcoin-isnt-like-internet-joichi-ito
>>>
>>>
>>> Joichi posits an interesting point of leverage which might be
>>> useful to some people here for repositioning things.
>>>
>>>
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--
Mvh Ben Johansen