This is the best tech article this year (so far).Welcome to the chainiacs!There’s a blockchain for that!The code that secures Bitcoin could also power an alternate Internet.First, though, it has to work.There’s this hopelessly geeky new technology.It’s too hard to understand and use.How could it ever break the mass market?Yet developers are excited, venture capital is pouring in, and industry players are taking note.Something big might be happening.That is exactly how the Web looked back in 1994 — right before it exploded.Two decades later, it’s beginning to feel like we might be at a similar liminal moment.Our new contender for the Next Big Thing is the blockchain — the baffling yet alluring innovation that underlies the Bitcoin digital currency.Robert Steele: Reflections on the Next Data Revolution Robert Steele: The End of Servers Thomas Schwotzer: SharkSystem Negates Cloud and Servers — the Next Internet EmergentThe internet was a wide open frontier then.

It was easy to be the first in category X. Consumers had few expectations, and the barriers were extremely low.Start a search engine!Serve up amateur videos!Of course, that was then.Looking back now it seems as if waves of settlers have since bulldozed and developed every possible venue, leaving only the most difficult and gnarly specks for today’s newcomers.Thirty years later the internet feels saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years.Even if you could manage to squeeze in another tiny innovation, who would notice it?Yet if we consider what we have gained online in the last 30 years, this abundance smells almost miraculous.We got: Instant connection with our friends and family anywhere, a customizable stream of news whenever we want it, zoomable 3D maps of most cities of the world, an encyclopedia we can query with spoken words, movies we can watch on a flat slab in our pocket, a virtual everything store that will deliver next day — to name only six out of thousands that could be mentioned.But, but…here is the thing.

In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet.The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning.If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014.People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then.And they’d be right.litecoin mining volumeBecause from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us.liberty x bitcoin reviewAll these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit — the equivalent of the dot com names of 1984.Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014?litecoin step by step

It was a wide-open frontier!You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud.Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now.Expectations and barriers were low.It was easy to be the first.And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2014 is the best time to start something on the internet.bitcoin xeon processorThere has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something.wager with bitcoinThere has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now.oil contractors bitcoinRight now, this minute.This is the time that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh to have been alive and well back then!”The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things.

However the coolest stuff has not been invented yet — although this new greatness will not be more of the same-same that exists today.It will not be merely “better,” it will different, beyond, and other.But you knew that.What you may not have realized is that today truly is a wide open frontier.It is the best time EVER in human history to begin.Customers Also Bought Items By Yuval Noah Harari Steven Johnson Ray Kurzweil Richard Dawkins Dylan Evans Nick Bostrom Andrew McAfee Jacques Barzun Erik Brynjolfsson Sangeet Paul C... Jean Baudrillard Brian Christian Sheila Faria G... Tom Griffiths Alec Ross Steven Kotler Are You an Author?Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography.› Learn more at Author CentralI once worked with Steven Spielberg on the development of Minority Report, derived from the short story by Philip K. Dick featuring a future society that uses surveillance to arrest criminals before they commit a crime.

I have to admit I thought Dick's idea of “pre-crime” to be unrealistic back then.I don't anymore.Most likely, 50 years from now ubiquitous monitoring and surveillance will be the norm.The internet is a tracking machine.It is engineered to track.We will ceaselessly self-track and be tracked by the greater network, corporations, and governments.Everything that can be measured is already tracked, and all that was previously unmeasureable is becoming quantified, digitized, and trackable.>If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species it is that the human impulse to share trumps the human impulse for privacy.We’re expanding the data sphere to sci-fi levels and there’s no stopping it.Too many of the benefits we covet derive from it.So our central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon – or a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers.The first option is hell, the second redeemable.We can see both scenarios beginning today.

We have the trade-secret algorithms of Google and Facebook on one hand and the secret-obsessed NSA on the other.Networks require an immune system to remain healthy, and intense monitoring and occasional secrets are part of that hygiene to minimize the bad stuff.But in larger doses secrecy becomes toxic; more secrecy requires more secrets to manage and it sets up a debilitating auto-immune disease.This pathology is extremely difficult to stop, since by its own internal logic it must be stopped in secret.The remedy for over-secrecy is to think in terms of coveillance, so that we make tracking and monitoring as symmetrical – and transparent – as possible.That way the monitoring can be regulated, mistakes appealed and corrected, specific boundaries set and enforced.A massively surveilled world is not a world I would design (or even desire), but massive surveillance is coming either way because that is the bias of digital technology and we might as well surveil well and civilly.#### Kevin Kelly ##### About [/kevin2kelly) is Senior Maverick at WIRED.

He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999.Kelly is the author of *What Technology Wants* (2010), *Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities* (2013), and other books.He was involved with the launch of the pioneering online community The WELL (1985) and also co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference.In this version of surveillance – a transparent coveillance where everyone sees each other – a sense of entitlement can emerge: Every person has a human right to access, and benefit from, the data about themselves.The commercial giants running the networks have to spread the economic benefits of tracing people’s behavior to the people themselves, simply to keep going.They will pay you to track yourself.Citizens film the cops, while the cops film the citizens.The business of monitoring (including those who monitor other monitors) will be a big business.The flow of money, too, is made more visible even as it gets more complex.Much of this scenario will be made possible by the algorithmic regulation of information as pioneered by open source projects.

For instance, while a system like Bitcoin makes anonymous bank accounts possible, it does so by transparently logging every transaction in its economy, therefore making all financial transactions public.PGP encryption relies on code that anyone can inspect, and therefore trust and verify.It generates “public privacy”, so to speak.Encoding visible systems open to all eyes makes gaming them for secret ends more difficult.Every large system of governance – especially a digital society – is racked by an inherent tension between rigid fairness and flexible personalization.The cloud sees all: The cold justice of every tiny infraction by a citizen, whether knowingly or inadvertent, would be as inescapable as the logic of a software program.Yet we need the humanity of motive and context.One solution is to personalize justice to the context of that particular infraction.A symmetrically surveilled world needs a robust and flexible government – and transparency – to enforce adaptable fairness.But if today's social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species it is that the human impulse to share trumps the human impulse for privacy.

So far, at every juncture that offers a technological choice between privacy or sharing, we've tilted, on average, towards more sharing, more disclosure.We shouldn't be surprised by this bias because transparency is truly ancient.For eons humans have lived in tribes and clans where every act was open and visible and there were no secrets.We evolved with constant co-monitoring.Contrary to our modern suspicions, there wouldn't be a backlash against a circular world where we constantly spy on each other because we lived like this for a million years, and – if truly equitable and symmetrical – it can feel comfortable.>Bitcoin generates 'public privacy', so to speak.Yet cities have "civilized" us with modern habits such as privacy.It is no coincidence that the glories of progress in the past 300 years parallel the emergence of the private self and challenges to the authority of society.Civilization is a mechanism to nudge us out of old habits.There would be no modernity without a triumphant self.So while a world of total surveillance seems inevitable, we don’t know if such a mode will nurture a strong sense of self, which is the engine of innovation and creativity – and thus all future progress.