Tech Opinion My boldest contrarian belief is that advertising as a form of revenue on the internet faces extinction in the next decade. The rise of a decentralised internet where everyone owns everything but nothing simultaneously is inevitable. This will enable us to reclaim the data we are currently providing companies for free, preventing the targeted invasive advertising we are victimised by and stalked across the web relentlessly by. If you’re not paying for the product you are the product, will evolve to become you being the product that pays with a currency you control — attention Businesses must evolve or be replaced. This is in recognition that we should control our own destiny — why should multi-national conglomerates commoditise our attention by turning us into zombies whose only contribution to society is the accrual of capital to drive purchasing? If advertising disappears how will creators of products/content/services be paid? It is already incredibly difficult to receive payment for these things online, so there would need to be a foolproof way to guarantee this without the need to physically pay for things with money. For this, I look towards the periphery of legality What is happening right at the edge of what is legal, exploiting loopholes and the day’s innovative technology to do things that had previously been impossible? The winds of change typically arise from the sources that require evolution. Progress forced by constraints is where your finger should be taking the pulse. Innovation is often driven by illicit sources because a need for revenue necessitates it. Pornography and illegal activity online typically provide a vision of what the future of the internet will look like. The innovations these domains drive in regard to payment and innovative tech are almost always what is ubiquitously adopted across the internet. In the same way the SilkRoad understood the utility of crypto before society at large, and Pornography developed online streaming, what’s next? Digital taxation In the same way Napster was a precursor to Spotify, what is the next route to revenue for products/services online? The tech isn’t ready yet — and cost to produce products for online consumption is still significant so payment has to be of a sufficient amount to cover costs — but with the marginal cost of tech trending towards $0 with each additional user, distributed global platforms will solve this problem. A digital taxation will be achieved by using your CPU/GPU to mine a currency which is distributed to creators as per the volume of attention you provide their product, service or content. Companies will emerge that enable the consumption of content/products/services without the necessity for users to pay creators or service providers directly. For low CPU usage tasks — watching video, reading articles, social networks, photo sharing, almost every task you undertake online — these services will tax you a % of your CPU usage and use that to mine Crypto which will be distributed to the creator according to how long you spent watching, reading or using what they made. That is where the next great company will emerge from, enriching creators in a way that rewards their contributions. The Future Imagine the replacement of the internets largest institutions with ‘free’ alternatives, that includes Facebook, Netflix, Google and every other £Billion multi-national conglomerate you can imagine. These services won’t be paid for by exploiting the data you provide and advertising to you, instead their revenue will come directly from you, and your contribution to the upkeep of the worlds most sophisticated and widest distributed blockchain. A digital currency will emerge which grows directly from attention. Attention will evolve to become the cash of the internet because eventually it will become the only thing that matters. There will be a direct correlation between engagement and payment for online services. To participate there will need to be a significant evolution of how our financial world operates. Our banks will undergo a massive transformation in the next decade as our money and accounts are forced to integrate with this new world. Our bank accounts will become the central hub from which all our online activity will originate. It will enable our anonymity while assuring our safety while creating a mechanism to punish bad actors. Punishment Punitive measures will not be financial, in that there will be no erosion to the money deposited in our account, it will be purely reputational. Imagine a universal mechanism for trust which tracks a persons trustworthiness across the whole internet and measures how they have behaved on all systems. This will take the form of removal from services or a detrimental impact on our digital balance. For example, participation on social media platforms can be controlled to alter behaviour. Snapchat messages transmitted will be traceable based on digital watermarks placed on information sent to specific parties. Where this is shared against our wishes the offending users will be ejected from the service. To enable a safer, fairer and better online world to emerge we need a central hub which allows all these services to emerge from. That is what we are building at Nexves By marrying a traditional spending account to a cryptographically secure wallet we believe we can remove any obstacles to participation. You accrue tokens naturally as a by-product of use and get richer as a result. At the same time, you enable the infrastructure for the emergence of the third wave of the internet Join the revolution today: www.nexves.com
