Click here if you can't see the embedded tweet above.

This is your daily reminder that many/most of the things that are ubiquitous today were once difficult to explain and understand (in the above example it's email and the internet). Once a new idea or technology becomes widely adopted, its inner workings and technical aspects tend to recede into the background.

Most people, for instance, probably aren't familiar with all of the various internet protocols and how they work. Could you explain the difference between TCP and IP and SMTP? If you can't, it doesn't matter. The various protocol layers of the internet now work behind the scenes to power our daily lives. And the innovation that continues to be built on top of them is getting increasingly more user friendly as time goes on.

The same thing will happen with crypto, which is talked about today in much the same way as the above folks are talking about email and the internet. New ideas will continue to emerge and we will all start deriving more and more utility from it (beyond just NFT art). And at that point, most people will stop caring about how all the sausages are made. They'll just like eating them.

P.S. One of the nice things about blogging every day is that I'll be able to look back on this post in ten years and see how right or wrong I was.

This is a great Twitter thread by Chris Dixon talking about why Web 3 -- the next major iteration of the internet -- is kind of a big deal. In it, Dixon refers to Web 1 as the period from about 1990 to 2005. This is the period of time that started out with CompuServe and AOL sending us all free CDs in the mail and most of us using a dial-up modem to access the internet. Web 2 was the period from about 2005 to 2020. It is the iteration of the internet that gave birth to social media as most of us know it today. If you subscribe to this timeline, then we are in year one of what's next. Maybe it'll also run for another 15 years or maybe it won't. But either way, getting in on the ground floor is usually a pretty valuable thing. When Dixon tweets, I listen.

This is the topic of Benedict Evan's latest blog post, which is all about the internet, regulation, and the rise of China, as well as other countries. The internet is now deeply ingrained in everyday life. As of 2017, about 40% of Americans had met their partners online. We do everything online. But 80-90% of the world's internet users are now outside of the US. There are more smartphone users in China than in the US and western Europe combined. And venture capital dollars have started to diversify away from just the US (see above chart). All of this -- but mostly Tiktok -- has Americans questioning how best to handle and how best to regulate.

Here's an excerpt from Benedict's post:

Both of these are captured in Tiktok. This is the first time that Americans have really had to deal with their teenagers using a form of mass media that isn’t created in their country by people who mostly share their values. It’s from somewhere else. That’s compounded by the fact that the ‘somewhere else’ is China, with all of the political and geopolitical issues that come with that, but I’d suggest that the core, structural issue is that it’s foreign. This is, of course, a problem that the rest of the world has been wrestling with since 1994, but it comes as something of a shock in Washington DC. There’s an old joke that war is how God teaches Americans geography - now it’s regulation.

For the full post, click here.

Image/facts: Benedict Evans