a16z partner Chris Dixon: Understanding the Two Waves of the Internet

Original Title: "a16z Partner: Beyond Web 2, Tokens are a New Digital Primitive"

Source: Shenchao

Original Author: Chris Dixon

a16z partner Chris Dixon has shared his latest views, dividing the waves of the internet into two eras: one is the analog era, similar to moving offline mail online to become email, and the other is the digital native era, such as websites, which are unique to the internet age. Tokens are also digital natives, and most of Web 3 still remains in the analog era.

Here are the full views:

1/ Tokens are a new digital primitive, similar to websites.

2/ Major waves of computing generally have two eras: the analog era and the native era.

3/ In the analog era, design thinking was largely adapted from earlier domains. For example, early web was mostly a digital adaptation of pre-internet activities, such as writing letters and mail order, where most websites were read-only.

4/ About a decade later, technologists began to seriously explore the idea that websites could be read/write and user-generated content. This led to the development of native web categories, such as social networks, crowdfunding, and social productivity applications.

5/ This pattern is continuously repeated in cryptocurrency/Web 3. There are some great native Web 3 products, but overall, we are still in the analog era. Many Web 3 products are adaptations of old domains.

6/ Popular analog Web 3 ideas include offline ticketing, supply chain management, and record-keeping of offline assets. These may be good ideas, just as read-only websites were good ideas, but they only scratch the surface of Web 3.

7/ Many of today's NFTs are adaptations from the offline world of art and collectibles. This leads people to believe that NFTs are limited to these areas, just as people once thought the web was limited to brochures and magazines.

8/ Tokens—both physical and NFTs—are best thought of as new digital primitives, similar in flexibility and universality to past digital primitives like websites.

9/ Tokens empower users with property rights: the ability to own a part of the internet.

10/ Web 2 missed digital property rights. When you use a website (or app), it only lets you borrow or rent things. Imagine if in the real world, you had to buy everything from scratch every time you went to a new place; that’s Web 2.

11/ Like websites, tokens are digital primitives that can be generalized to represent almost anything—money, art, photos, music, text, code, game items, control, access, and anything people dream of in the future.

12/ Users can now have a persistent inventory of objects in their wallets that they can take from one application to another. If their items appreciate, users benefit from the appreciation. This is very different from Web 2, where the appreciation mainly goes to tech companies.

13/ We are still in the analog era of Web 3, but we are beginning to see a new wave of native applications that have no previous equivalents and could not have existed before.

14/ For example, based on the mechanism design pioneered by DeFi entrepreneurs, a new wave of DAOs is exploring ways for groups to gather, pool resources, build things, and self-manage.

15/ Composable NFT games like Loot incentivize communities to build entire worlds around a set of NFTs—this activity would not be possible without the ownership and portability brought by Web 3.

16/ Fungible tokens have no inherent need to be related to currency and finance, and NFTs have no inherent need to be related to art and collectibles.

17/ These are all great initial applications and may still be very important, but tokens are best thought of as a new digital primitive, similar to websites—the atomic units around the new era of the internet.