Money Reimagined: Fixing the Internet's Big Flaw

Arguably, internet platforms have usurped that role.

An original sin was committed at the internet's conception: its underlying, decentralized architecture was built without an identity layer.

Even though companies complain about the liability in storing user data, they find it hard to resist surveillance capitalism, the data-exploitation practice that has become the core business model of the internet.

Because the internet's underlying architecture is decentralized, the identity solution must also be decentralized.

Still, standardization across the internet will be critical.

An important piece is the decentralized digital identifier, or DID, being developed within the world wide web consortium, or WC3. Groups of tech and finance heavyweights have also formed associations to promote open-source collaboration, including the Digital Identity Foundation and the Trust Over IP Foundation.

Think of people who live without credit cards and can't generate credit scores but whose trail of internet connections - their so-called web of trust - show a history of fulfilling commitments.

After a stunningly buzzy summer for decentralized finance, when new wild-idea projects were being announced on a daily basis, bringing new speculative money surging into the DeFi ecosystem, the once-soaring prices for those projects' tokens have fallen sharply and deeply.

Among the most interesting aspects of it was how DeFi's composability enabled "Lego" innovation, where one new protocol became a building block for a new developer to build their next new innovation on top of it and how that new idea breeds its own new surge of speculation.

Not a big surprise that bitcoin rose on the news Friday.