Crypto is the open source (r)evolution

"I'm the firestarter, twisted firestarter. You're the firestarter, twisted firestarter." -The Prodigy

Open source lit a candle, and illuminated a new way to create software.

Before open source, companies only trusted software from big (“reliable”) companies.

Aging monopolies grew. Innovation suffered. Nobody got fired for buying IBM.

Creating a way to trust code written by anyone (e.g. formerly-unknown developer Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux), changed everything. Today, open source underlies everything from top-secret government clouds to your iPhone. MySQL and Linux were revolutionary by themselves; AWS is unimaginable without them.

Open source enabled this by moving the atomic unit of trust from the corporation to the code. Unknown individuals (like Torvalds) said "you don't need to know me to trust me, look at my code”. By making code open and trustworthy, a generation of individual developers and small companies were able to focus on newer, bigger problems. A thousand flowers bloomed.

The cloud, SaaS, Internet and mobile booms only happened because of open source, and the composability of systems it enabled.

Today, we still transact with corporations (AWS, Salesforce, Peloton, Twitter, Spotify, etc.) through a multitude of middlemen (all extracting a tax), largely because we rely on the legal system to enforce law, contracts and payment. An open-source blockchain is a legal system expressed in transparent code. It guarantees predictable, deterministic decisions and secure payments.

To gain the value generated by some software, would you pay the “Corporation Overhead Tax”, if you could pay the code directly? Corporations are a useful legal fiction, and will be around for generations, but they’re a technology in decline: “on premise” infrastructure amidst a generational shift to the crypto “cloud”.

How much innovation and efficiency will be unlocked when we transact with code instead of corporations?

Crypto is Prometheus’ gift to creators of every kind. Countless sparks will fly.