Re-decentralizing web and Internet-based technologies is gaining momentum. Just recently there was a Decentralized Web Summit where many projects were represented. But while people contemplate importance of decentralized technologies and are building alternatives, to me it seems we are forgetting one important lecture from the past: we should be building layered technological stacks and not vertically integrated ones. This is how you can encourage diverse implementations (critical for stability of decentralized technologies) and experimentation at each layer without having to reimplement a whole stack. I can understand why this is happening. It is already hard enough to develop decentralized technologies. So it feels easier to control the stack at least vertically. But we should not be building decentralized technologies because it is easy. But because it is hard.

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I really like how Bitcoin brought up so much new energy into the cryptocurrencies world. It combined great ideas of P2P networks, proof of work, append-only databases, and others together into a working and popular system and spawn new ideas and new innovation. It started a new cycle of decentralization of technologies.

But as a currency itself, it lacks innovation. It is still an one-dimensional numeric-like value used to valuate everything humans do in the same traditional way. Bitcoin is often compared to the Internet, how it brings a new era. But if we are comparing it with the Internet, then it is the Internet at the stage where people would take physical books, scan them as images, and make them available online. No interactivity, no multimedia, no searching or social capabilities, no additional value besides digitizing the content in the most simple way. Bitcoin does the same. It just digitizes existing concept of money. It does this in an interesting and innovative way, but it is still just a digital image of money.

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