Reinventing Google: Tokens are the "hyperlinks" of the new era

Original Author: Maciej Olpinski, Founder and CEO of the blockchain-based content platform Userfeeds

Translation: Retric

As a blockchain media focused on products and technology, one of the most valued directions of the Orange Book is the early infrastructure development of the industry. However, the blockchain industry is still too early—so early that before you can really start doing something, you often need to ask: What do we actually need? We believe that the premise of solving problems is to ask a good question.

Innovation and the understanding of innovation itself will continuously roll forward in alternation. This will be a norm in the blockchain industry. Today, we introduce an article about tokens, in which the author believes that tokens are hyperlinks between people, and thus we need to reinvent a new Google for tokens.

Userfeeds is a startup from Poland.

The Metaphor of Newspapers and Search Engines

In the early 1990s, when web 1.0 was still in its infancy, the most mainstream way to discover and find a new website was through online classified portals like Yahoo. We reused the experience of discovering content from the newspaper era on the internet. When people read newspapers, they would go through well-organized sections to read the next article. Although the internet is a new medium, classified portals still followed the old path of print media.

The business model under this design is to keep users on your website as much as possible, jumping between different sections. This is how newspapers have operated for decades. The web pages on a website look like an electronic "virtual paper," so giving these virtual sheets a categorized directory seems like the most natural way to discover these "virtual papers."

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell the Google search engine for $1 million but ultimately failed, as no one was willing to buy.

But these two actually hid a big idea in the PageRank algorithm of the search engine: the internet needs a new content discovery model—a search engine based on mutual links between websites, rather than a top-down directory. At that time, this idea seemed absurd. Of course, we now know they were right.

I believe we are in a new wave of technological transfer. A new internet—I call it the Economic Web—is slowly forming with the power of blockchain and decentralized technology.

Blockchain can be seen as a decentralized database, with read and write permissions controlled by cryptographic public and private keys. You can find a plethora of articles online discussing what the essence of blockchain really is.

But for me, the significance of blockchain is akin to that of routers, servers, and communication network protocols for the early internet—it ensures smooth communication and data exchange between computers, and on this foundation, people build higher-level services that ultimately allow users to communicate freely.

The Economic Web uses blockchain as the underlying infrastructure, allowing value to be exchanged more directly between two nodes, ultimately enabling people to freely act as agents of economic transactions within the network.

Tokens as "Hyperlinks" Between People

In my thinking model, tokens are a very critical and important part of the Economic Web. Tokens to users are like code to computers—they are a way to program "behavior."

Bitcoin has successfully proven that it is feasible to change the economic behavior of a large crowd through the simple concept of tokens; you just need to gather people in the same network and let them contribute actions to the network.

People have discovered that tokens are a particularly efficient driving force because they exploit many human weaknesses. Our brains have retained many instincts and intuitions after thousands of years of evolution—the fear of gains and losses, the desire for opportunities, the anxiety of missing out, and the fear of regrets, among others.

As biological beings, we are genetically programmed to seek and strive for more economic returns, and tokens amplify this. We create a set of token code through programming, but tokens also program us in return.

To incentivize a large group of users scattered around the world to take certain actions through economic measures, a few years ago, you would have needed a government or a multinational corporation to do so. Now, a slightly smarter 15-year-old boy can achieve the same effect with a computer and cryptocurrency tokens.

Our instincts and intuitions do not judge whether the so-called "incentive" is an apple hanging from a tree, a stock of a NASDAQ-listed company, or a tradable cryptocurrency token. People will do anything for rewards.

The Economic Web, or Web 3.0, is still composed of "people"—only now these people are a group of individuals holding the same type of token, linked together by the ownership of tokens.

The migration of this wave of internet technology can be seen in the following image:

A New Network Requires a New Content Discovery Mechanism

"History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes."—Mark Twain

Looking at the image above, you might notice: We still do not have a native web 3.0 content discovery model.

This is the same problem the early internet faced in the early 1990s. A new wave of technology has emerged, but we are still using outdated content discovery models from the old world.

Today's social networks and search engines relate to the emerging Economic Web like Yahoo's portal and directory did to early internet websites.

Outdated. And out of place.

Searching for any kind of token content on Facebook/Twitter or Google is like trying to browse other website content on Yahoo's portal.

You will never get the optimal results. Why?

Yahoo completely ignored the weight value contained in the hyperlinks between websites; instead, they chose to manually edit directories. Thus, Yahoo missed the primitive characteristics that truly reflect the value of internet content.

Naturally, without capturing the core metrics of content, manually curated directories cannot include the most valuable websites. Google captured and amplified these primitive characteristics through the PageRank algorithm.

Similarly, today's Google/FB/Twitter/Reddit also completely overlook the weight value contained in the token-based economic networks (Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many other cryptocurrency networks). Therefore, their sorting of this information and content is also inaccurate.

Want to see specific examples?

Or you can check any community related to tokens.

Decentralized Interest Communities

The autocomplete suggestions you see when searching on Google are actually the results of a decentralized interest community conducting search behaviors.

Although interest communities are not a new phenomenon, they have historically been limited by geographical factors, and the identities of stakeholders have been fixed. In other words, whether a person belongs to a certain interest community, their relationship with that community is relatively fixed. You can clearly determine who is currently a member of this community and who has exited the organization.

Decentralized, distributed interest communities are unique products of publicly accessible cryptocurrency networks based on blockchain technology. Thousands of people can join this network at any time and become part of the interest community. Moreover, the establishment of this interest relationship can be completed without anyone knowing, without needing to inform others.

Joining is simple; just buy and hold a token; exiting is equally simple—just sell all the tokens you hold.

Once people choose to join a certain cryptocurrency network and become part of the interest community, they will work towards the same goal based on the same consensus, ultimately aiming to ensure the success and value appreciation of the tokens they hold.

This effort includes ordinary internet users posting a comment in a forum expressing their optimism about Bitcoin, as well as experts tirelessly explaining in their technical blogs why a certain coin is the future while another will fail.

Indeed, tokens do not merely lead people to waste a lot of electricity.

Tokens also prompt you to open your mouth and automatically say something online.

But search engine ranking algorithms have no concept or understanding of the incentive mechanisms and interest relationships represented by these behaviors and voices.

Google will not calculate how many X tokens you hold and factor that into a website's ranking. Facebook can recommend articles liked by your friends, but it cannot tell you which articles have been liked by people holding at least 1% of the same tokens as you.

And this issue is the problem we want to solve.

This is also why we believe that in the new world of cryptocurrency, we need to reinvent a Google.