| Note: The blockchain mini-series will pick up again in an upcoming week. This was a particularly special week as several events coincided to produce a rather striking signal that the landscape of the internet is changing and that Elastos is in lock-step pace with the progress. If one looked closely, there were more than literal fireworks being set off this week. This week Elastos published its first sidechain, the future backbone of the new internet. We announced the addition of a fantastic new advisor from Bosch Ventures, an international leader in the future of connected devices. Tim Berners Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, had an article about him published in Vanity Fair expressing how he is "devastated" about the state of the internet he helped invent, and The United States celebrated its Independence Day on the same day Elastos was in Paris, presenting their own vision of radical democracy in its modern birthplace. This article you are reading is in fact being written from Philadelphia, mere blocks from the exact site of the signing of the Declarations of Independence on another hot summer day, July 4th, 1776. It is also being written with the distinctly reminiscent spirit of revolution against tyranny and regression and for freedom and progress in mind. And all of this, while Elastos is circulating its own open source Constitution for our lock-up participants and developers to help shape. The times…they are a changing. This may not be an underground Sons Of Liberty pamphlet, but its aim is similar…create a better society…and be willing to fight for it. Tim Berners Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. By this November, it is estimated that 4 billion people will be on the internet, making it more important and potentially more dangerous than it has ever been. But how does he see the current state of his invention? "We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places." Berners Lee then referred to the current issues of centralization by saying that they have, "ended up producing — with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform — a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human." Failed. Anti-human. Phenomenon. This, the current internet. These are the words of a man who won a Turing Award and was named one of the 100 most important people of the 20th Century by Time Magazine, next to names like Albert Einstein, Mother Theresa, and The Beatles. This man invented the World Wide Web. If we cannot listen to his words, his opinions, his deep understanding of the issues facing us currently, and where we are headed without intervention, then there can be absolutely no surprise or complaints when we actually get there. We are at a point where centralization, extreme security threats, and anti-human centralized digital connection has become the standard of a platform that is only growing and will start to include physical objects next. The amount of points of vulnerability are about to explode, and with it, potentially our grip on the internet. If you cannot see the warning signs from the very man who is the authority on what the internet was intended to be, now failing his vision and hurting society, then you are either not looking or you are benefitting from it. The internet was never going to be a utopia. Grand ideas still involve people and humanity has found no systems that have ever worked perfectly because human beings and the human mind are at the heart of all systems successes and failures. But while we cannot control human nature, we can control the system. The centralization and security threats pose technological problems that can be remedied with technological solutions. This is what Elastos offers. We cannot invent a healthier human condition on a computer, but we can certainly invent, and have invented, a better digital world that will allow society to have a much better chance at a holistic leaning internet instead of the one that has been forced on us so that large corporations and hackers can profit at will over the vast majority of the 4 billion users and the tens of billions of things and devices we will see connected to the internet in the coming years. There are actions we can take and there are realities we must accept. We are not trying to change people — We are trying to change the mechanism of how people connect so that when this happens, the masses are given the gifts of the original and new founders intentions instead of what we now call the internet — a centralized-controlled vulnerable platform. Berners Lee recalls a childhood conversation in the 1960's with his father, at the same time the internet was being invented by the US government, of how computers could one day operate the way the human brain does. If readers recall a recent piece in this section about networks, and how the human brain and a Jackson Pollock painting and the Elastos world supercomputer all visually represent each other, and what this says about the interconnected, even metaphysical nature of the universe and the internet, then you can see that this very idea fascinated Berners Lee even as a child, similarly to how it fascinated a young Rong Chen who was growing up around the same time. History produces pioneers in pairs, even in groups, and sometimes scatters them across the world. When Berners Lee released his first source code for the World Wide Web, he said, "No one paid much attention." Interesting. Many would think that all revolutionary ideas are met with great applause and excitement by society, but this is almost never the case. If the masses were ready for something that could change society, it would have already been invented. Revolutionaries are a lonely bunch at the beginning. They create systematic changes and when they present them, many react with fear, or pessimism, or even boredom. How dare someone try to change the world. But as Apple famously said in an ad, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. But this word, "crazy," is quite subjective. For what if one who is very sane, who sees very clearly, who believes in people helping other people, also wants to change the world? Berners Lee's invention failed by his own account. But his creation is still young. Improvements can be made. If people think it is crazy for Elastos to try to upgrade the internet, to change the internet, then how do you think Tim felt when he tried to invent it in the first place? "No one paid much attention." But as we know…eventually…they all did. In the early years, things were relatively on track. "The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission. That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we've lost." But it is not lost forever. Tim's creation is an enigma, much like the machine Alan Turning cracked in WWII. This enigma gave an unfair advantage to those who knew how it worked. Average people never had a chance. His creation was also so new. There was no hindsight. There was no ability to predict the negative sides of the internet. Now, those advantages exist. We can see them. The network operating system that is the core of our project at Elastos was conceived of in the late 1990's. Berners Lee himself took over a decade to get his creation ready for prime time, and he probably could have used a few more years. The internet architecture and infrastructure is the single most important issue to address. We cannot continue to build on top of a crumbling stretch of road. We cannot continue to build castles of sand. The time for a new internet is upon us, even the inventor of the first one agrees. "While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people — and can be fixed by people." This is the truth. The problems of the internet that are in fact fixable, are problems that can be fixed with code, and this is why Elastos is so important. Elastos goes to the cause of the problem, instead of decorating its prison cell to make it appear nicer. We are addressing the architectural deficiencies of how people and things will access the internet — how they will literally access it — how they will not be granted access without verification from a decentralized blockchain. The network operating system for people and devices and things, the sandboxed environment to protect humanity from cyber attacks, the decentralized identities that will allow for safety and for ownership and control and privacy of data, and the open source, community driven autonomous nature of this project are all solutions auspiciously birthed and blossoming at the exact time they are needed. Blockchain came out of the same year of the epic collapse of trust in ledgers. Elastos is arriving at the exact time society is starting to understand that the internet is not healthy and it is not safe and it does not work for us anymore. People may not be paying much attention at the moment…but they will. The author of the piece writes, "The Web, which he had intended as a radical tool for democracy, was merely exacerbating the challenges of global inequality." A radical tool for democracy. Global inequality. In a week where America celebrated its own radical tool for democracy, in the midst of challenges to that democracy, some of which were actually caused by the current internet failures, and in a week that Elastos presented in one of the birthplaces of radical democracy on that same day, while privately distributing its own Constitution for radical democracy, there are obvious and quite brilliant connections to be made about what is starting to happen. Revolutions take years. Society must become fed up with the tyranny they are subjected to before they will act in unison, and even then, there are always those who rather remain under tyranny for it benefits themselves or they fear to act on change. Elastos is not afraid — and this is an important point. We are really overhauling the entire concept of the internet. We are not creating a new feature, or attempting to capitalize on a new fad or a new hype mechanism, we are systematically and methodically restructuring the internet and have been for years. This takes someone who knows how to do that — someone who has lived through the various phases of the internet — has watched the birth of the flaws and the failed attempts to patch and pray for their success — and has developed a new way to connect and send data across a network much like Tim Berners Lee did in the early 1990's. All of this talk of the past and the revolutions of the future must take into account the very real global shift to smart devices in our homes and the internet of things. Many are predicting IoT to become a multi-trillion dollar industry in the coming years with each person accounting for several connected devices. Authors Michael J Casey and Paul Vigna put it this way, "This is why the Internet of Things matters: it's not that we've empowered billions of new devices to do computation per se, it's that they are being connected with each other to create a computing colossus that's infinitely larger than the sum of its parts. We've reached a point of truth for Sun Microsystems veteran John Gage's famous quip that the "network is the computer." As we discover ever more ways to harness the power of these systems, the processing capacity of that "computer everywhere" just keeps building upon itself with every new device plugged into the network. This is no small moment for society. Whether this power will be leveraged for the good of the people, or to their detriment, has yet to be determined. A rugged, well-constructed, distributed truth machine meshed into these new networks would go a long way toward making sure these magnificent new virtual machines work to people's advantage." "In our opinion, the new software concepts that will most enhance our knowledge of social phenomena will be founded on or inspired by the blockchain. Without the principle of a distributed trust protocol, applications of virtual machines are limited; data controlled by centralized, trusted third parties, which monopolize the analytics through secret algorithms, is inherently limited. Not only is the data inaccessible to the wider community unless fees are paid, but mistrust of the monopoly can lead data providers to withhold information. A "global brain" can't really come into existence in an economy dominated by the centralized trust model. Blockchain-based network designs probably won't get the same attention in homeware magazines as smart doorknobs and self-driving cars, but they will be a fundamental backbone of the network computational capacity of an Internet of Things economy in which tens of billions of devices like doorknobs and cars are autonomously "talking" to and trading with each other." Computing colossus. The network is the computer. Global brain. Blockchain-based network designs. Backbone of the internet. IoT meets blockchain meets the network operating system meets the world super computer meets trust and decentralization and security. This is the next industrial revolution. This is no small moment for society. All of this needs to be taken into account when thinking of our new esteemed Advisor Luis Llovera. Luis is well-versed in all of these technologies. He sees the future and is now advising its missing link, saying, "I'm delighted to join the Elastos Advisory Board. Elastos' operating system product, based on blockchain technology, is unparalleled and addresses key and massive markets like IoT, autonomous vehicles, big data, as well as Industry 4.0. One of the exciting parts of this opportunity for me is to also be part of the organization's groundbreaking goal to create a new internet system driven by blockchain technology." We are truly headed into uncharted territory connecting everything to the internet when the current internet does not even work properly and is not even safe. Elastos provides all of these solutions for the internet, for people, and for things. The ID Sidechain released this week can provide a decentralized ID to all things and all people, and this will enable actual security and verification in an ecosystem for data to be owned, traded, and safe, and an ecosystem for people and things to scale like the internet before it. Sidechains will be the backbone of the new internet, enabling trust and security for decentralized applications. It seems only fitting that on a week that saw an Independence Day, Elastos is planning its own independence from the centralized systems of the internet. In fact, it is worth noting again and again that on Elastos, everything, yes everything, can be decentralized: the peer to peer network, storage, data, and fittingly, Cyber Republic, the community of people who passionately build and promote Elastos as a virtual and radically democratic country. We are all leaders in Cyber Republic, adjacent and in harmony with one another without any divisions of borders. Eventually, we all will decide the future of Elastos. What is more radical and revolutionary than that? Onward! Upward! Elastos!
Elastos is hiring full-time and part-time community members for technical and non-technical positions: https://medium.com/elastos/we-want-you-elastos-community-recruitment-da0e97694f63 | 
