What the New Currents War Means for Decentralization

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Whether Verizon is courting government contracts for its 5G upgrade, blockchain startups rolling out routers with crypto mining incentives, or Elon Musk making Starlink available to the Ukrainian resistance, broadband and internet of objects (IoT) are the new battleground for companies, ideologies and visionaries.

This op-ed is part of CoinDesk’s Crypto 2023 series.

While it’s still too early to tell if there will be a singular or divergent solution, the new interoperability technology framework will have an ideology embedded in its code. Crypto and freedom advocates should uphold decentralization as a principle and cooperate to realize and expand Nikola Tesla’s vision of a decentralized, ubiquitous network.

In the late 1800s, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse found themselves in an ideological battle over the future of electricity. Threatened by the widely adopted alternating current (AC) power system Tesla and Westinghouses, Edison built his stations on direct current (DC), while deploying ruthless public relations campaigns to undermine the credibility of his rivals. As the three men rushed to market their products and built supporting infrastructure, companies on the periphery also competed for market share, including Brush Electricity Company, which was installing its arc lighting solutions in key regions, including New York.

Tim Kravchunovsky is the founder and CEO of Chirp. A graduate of Columbia University’s master’s program, he has over 20 years of experience as a network engineer and was previously a consultant for the World Bank.

The AC system took over and became the underlying gold standard for all electrification. An important lesson remains for those developing a new architecture: the best technology can only triumph if it is also widely adopted.

After developing the AC system, Tesla devoted much of his life to revolutionizing wireless electricity. The inventor envisioned infinite energy via a global network of towers that would electrify the world without wires. While investors including JP Morgan initially backed Tesla’s venture based on its past success with AC electricity, they later cut funding for a system that ceded that power to end users, regardless of the big companies that clashed in the War of the Currents, was too radical for many to handle at the time, and the technology was not yet in place.

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Tesla died penniless in New York, but his vision of ubiquitous energy in a decentralized wireless system inspired scientists, entrepreneurs and world leaders. Founders need to think carefully about the incentive structures that go into building such a system, while resisting centralized parties that seek to co-opt its mechanisms under their own frameworks, the blockchain industry in particular is in a unique position. to guard against these attempts.

While there is heroism in Elon Musk, an heir to the Tesla legacy, who is stepping in to provide Starlink to Ukrainian citizens, there are also caveats the founders should note. After Starlinks was deployed, Musk backtracked on his initial support for the cause and threatened to pull the program unless the US Department of Defense footed the bill. Although Musk also walked back those comments and kept Starlink operational in the region, the reversal exposed an incentive structure based on geopolitics, profit margins and billionaire impulses that millions of innocent people suddenly turned to. found tied up. Musk is no exception when it comes to the murky relationship between centralized vested interests and state power. Telecommunications companies provide government entities with troves of data on millions of users on a daily basis.

As an original use case for blockchain technology, Bitcoin allows anyone, regardless of socio-economic class or country of origin, to take custody of their money. When applied to IoT devices, broadband infrastructure and telecommunications, blockchain technology can bring more universal digital rights, including the ability to access modern internet and telephone services without being monitored.

In today’s builder market, blockchain developers and founders need to pay more attention to the developments taking place in telecommunications, broadband and IoT, rather than the speculative digital asset bubbles that unfortunately , have defined the space in recent years. Whether setting up routers to power decentralized wireless networks (following the tradition of Satoshi Nakamoto sending himself test quantities of bitcoin) or writing interoperable code, the crypto community should apply the principles of decentralization to this next frontier and working together to ensure the ubiquitous network as envisioned by Tesla can scale to the same scale as the inventors’ AC gold standard.

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