Blockchain Bites: Last Day of Consensus, Will Crypto Save the Internet?

Consensus: Distributed ended on a high note with a keynote address from Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, who granted a rare interview as he closed out the week-long virtual conference. 

Speaking widely on the topics of decentralization and Web 3.0, Benet said, “the internet has become dramatically more important to us.” Over a 50-year time span, computing has gone from an idea to a “species altering technology.” 

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But the internet’s present configuration is a huge problem. The underlying principles of an open and permissionless web, as originally intended, have become distorted by monolithic, centralized service providers, and given way to surveillance capitalism, data encroachment, hacking and content siloing. 

Many of these problems were examined in an earlier…