Censorship-resistance, you hear it a lot in crypto. Censorship resistance is just a byproduct of account ownership. Once you own your account, you can no longer be deleted.
However, account ownership offers much more than censorship resistance. When you own your account, you hold leverage as a content creator. Twitter doesn't need to run ads for you to keep using their service, neither does Facebook. That's weird, huh? Have you ever seen a Youtube ad? There's a reason they don't need to fight over your business; it's because they own you. They own your account, your content, and since a lot build their businesses around their social media followings, they own your income. To top it off they can remove you at their discretion without needing even to tell you why. It's a "privilege" to use their service. Never forget this, you're not a owner; you're just a renter, more like a unwitting victim.
However, if these centralised sites didnt own your account, they would need to fight over you. Hell, they even need to pay you.
But it gets much deeper than account ownership. Owning one account just the foundation needed to make fully self-sufficient communities.
Breakaway communities that are 100% self-sufficient create a positive feedback loop whereby every action inside the ecosystem creates an event. Whether it be the velocity of transactions, buying goods and services, providing liquidity, every action, even selling, creates volume and transactions, both good measurements of a healthy network.
The philosophy behind account ownership in itself creates a decentralised free market. If you go to a pavilion and all it has is a Walmart, well, Walmart wins. But if you go and there are dozens of smaller, more niche stores, the consumer wins, and society as a whole wins. Sure, Walmart creates lots of jobs, but they also have the power to remove those jobs on a whim and create a huge single point of failure. Having many store owners gives the store owners and their employees much more resistance to being wiped out while giving the customer more freedom of choice.
The same is true with digital account ownership. Think of Twitter like a Walmart. Sure, they have many accounts in one place, but those accounts are controlled and owned by Twitter, alongside the data on that account, including content. It's much better to make every user into an account owner. Sites turn into skins, whereby easily interchangeable, while the accounts can move between skins with ease.
Account ownership is the nucleus for any human on web 3. Owning the keys to your account is as fundamental as owning the keys to your car or house. Leverage is king. As our data is stripped away from "big tech" web 2 giants and redistributed back to their rightful owners, the price of that data will skyrocket.
Supply and demand, right now, the supply of free data is overwhelming. Still, as web 3 competitors arise that grow in value as a whole due to the attention accompany, people will start to be paid for their attention. Web 3 is fierce, lean, with no overhead nor CEO to pay or middlepeople to take cuts. This means web 3 can always do it "at cost," it's the most brutal competition if you're trying to compete against it instead of build on top of it.
What this means, as a free market, web 3 will dominate due to being able to offer deals, not the centralised entity can compete with. It's a domino effect, and the first domino is already in motion. Slowly then, suddenly, you'll see the implosion of web 2 business models for the adoption of radical new cutting edge web 3 models.
How to pivot control from one entity to many various communities?
Having the foundation for decentralisation to grow on the first layer is only the first step; even achieving decentralisation consistently on layer 1 is only the first step.
The next step is to give the ability for web 2 apps to convert into web 3 dapps. Because business models are so cutthroat, tokenized breakaway communities can form on top of the base layer to create powerful distributed platforms.
Tokenizing the value around a community or platform and decentralising the control have tremendous benefits. Tokenized communities help each other succeed in a positive feedback loop not seen in traditional employee-to-owner situations. When everyone is an owner, big and small, the difference is astonishing. So compared to the legacy system and traditional centralized business models, strong communities have a huge edge.
In the future, having partial ownership in a community rather than a company through stake without the need for legally binding contracts will be normal.
On web 3, I own a small stake in the entire ecosystem. We have a saying in crypto; "we're all going to the same moon!" This is the power of stake-based ownership; it drives incentives on a conveyor belt to success.
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