A network is either permissionless or authoritarian. Open or closed. Censorship-resistant or censored.

Open networks inevitably run into the issue of spam and impersonation. Sybill attacks, DDoS attacks, resource exhaustion, and worse.

It's tempting to solve these issues in a centralized (read: authoritarian) way. But this just introduces new problems, turning the open network into a closed one.

These issues can't be solved perfectly. However, a clever combination of PoW + WoT will solve most of them, and yes, I include sats in this equation implicitly, because sats are just difficulty-adjusted PoW.

Identity has to be cryptographic, which means taken and defended, as opposed to given. Keys, not accounts.

Money has to be money proper, which means a bearer instrument as opposed to credit linked to an account. Cash, not credit.

Keys and sats have the power to usher in a new era of the internet. We must be careful to not repeat the mistakes of the past, however. It will take time. But it's fundamentally possible, and we're slowly but surely getting there. Key by key. Sat by sat. Npub by npub.

The Web is dead. Long live the web 🤙