It’s A Brave New World

George Gilder is a tech visionary with a few good thoughts on where technology is headed. His new book, Life After Google, is quite the read although too many stretches of very technical stuff that is quite boring. But the gist of the book is amazing, so much so, I thought it was worth sharing with you.

Executive summary: Google within 20 years will not be around and the Blockchain Economy will be the reason behind its fall. The main reason: Google doesn’t care about your privacy and Blockchain is all about privacy.

Best tip from reading the book: You have to read below!

Fun tidbits you might find interesting:

1. Security is the foundation of all other services and crucial to all financial transactions. It is the most basic and indispensable component of any information technology. Current computer and network architecture cannot solve security issues.

2. Newton helped to establish the gold standard

3. All wealth is a product of knowledge

4. Google is a new system of the world and the first company to create such a system. It combines science, commerce, religion, philosophy, economics and epistemology.

5. Everything Google offers to its customers is free: Internet searches, email, data centers, YouTube, Earth, Waze, Maps, Music, Calendars, Android apps, games, images. But nothing is free, how annoying to watch an ad to watch a video. Google third most valuable company giving everything away for free.

6. Google got its name from “googol,” meaning ten to the one-hundredth power, the symbol of the company’s reach and ambition.

7. Google digitized every book in the world (2005), every language and translation (2010), topography of the planet (2007), traffic (Waze 2016) and now digital facial recognition is next.

8. Google makes it money from advertising. But we hate advertising: Ad-blockers, ad-filters, mutes, Tivos, ad-voids all tricks we try to use since everything is free. 85.5 million Americans use ad-blockers.

9. But not only is “free” a lie, but a price of zero signifies a return to the barter system. You pay not with money but with your attention. Above all, you pay in time.

10. Google handles a billion YouTube videos and 3.5 billion searches every day, 1.5 trillion a year. If it charged just a penny per search it would earn $15 billion a year.

11. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, blockchain app platform. Second most valuable bitcoin but most interested in blockchain to control the Internet.

12. Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin in 2009, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. Completely decentralized with no server or central authority. Total circulation: 21,000,000 coins distributed to network nodes when they make blocks with the amount cut in half every 4 years (there are about 18,000,000 coins in circulation, average value $6500). Note: Bitcoin peaked at about $19,000 just a few months ago.

13. When information becomes abundant, time becomes scarce.

14. Cookies, not chocolate chip: Memory element on your computer that a website can control. They can be sweet when they remember you after you leave a site and allow you toggle back to it without reentering your user name and password. They are a menace when they are used by rogue websites to insert malware on your machine.

15. Now are you ready for my very BIG TIP? So amazing! Meet Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, author of JavaScript. JavaScript is the demon in targeting ads and invasive tracking of Web users by using cookies. Eich was ousted from Mozilla and started the new revolutionary Brave Browser that remedies the bad effects of cookies. No more targeted ads! In just two weeks, Brave saved me from seeing more than 10,000 ads. Because there are no ads, the sites run lightening fast. Best of all, Brave is free, you can download at brave.com. Bye-bye Chrome, bye-bye Explorer.

16. Crytocurrency total market only $200 billion, but experts expert it to hit more than $3 trillion sooner than later.

One last interesting statistic from the book. The average speed in which we expect results from a Google search: 1/20 second. Is it really possible for Google to fall?

Happy Monday!