Nothing New Under the Sun

New ideas are really just derivatives of other ideas and observations. And whether an idea comes to fruition is more about the environmental conditions around it than the “genius” of the idea itself. 

Those are facts that I’ve grown to appreciate more and more over the years. It’s a more appealing, memorable narrative to have a mythical point-in-time invention, but that’s just not how it works. 

It’s very freeing to acknowledge this. Instead of worrying about having the perfect, novel idea to make your mark, share in-process thoughts and remixed versions of other’s ideas without fear of being “unoriginal.” We’re all unoriginal. (But yes, always try to cite your sources the best that you can tease out. That just strengthens the knowledge graph.)

The Geo Web is definitely a synthesis of ideas explored by many technologists, economists, and philosophers before us. We didn’t know this when we started, but Nick Szabo even wrote about applying a “Georgian Tax” to property held in a cryptographically-secured digital property registry back in 1998 (which itself is just a proposed implementation of Henry George’s work).

Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson is an excellent book that thoroughly explores and defines this process. If you can’t dedicate the time to read the book, at least give this 4-min YouTube overview a watch.

For all its warts, this is something that Web3 gets right. Open source code is our proverbial coffee shop. Ideas are feely shared, ruthlessly exploited/critiqued, and forked. We embrace the connectivity and evolution of ideas. The space is better for it.

Technical

• We released a new Github repo and process for contributing Ceramic schemas that can be used on the Geo Web. It’s an exciting step to cultivating collaboration and open standard development on our network.
• We have a working implementation of AR/3D models anchored to set latitude, longitude, and altitude points served through Ceramic streams. The spatial browser interface uses WebGL. Up next is generalizing the framework and integrating it with Geo Web land parcels.

Community

• The Geo Web was featured in a new article about augmented reality property rights on Protocol.com. The article does a pretty good job of capturing the intuitions people have (or will have) about “their” property rights in a world filled with augmented reality. Hopefully we can build more support for our ideas and solutions through coverage like this!

On Deck

• Raid Guild Cohort Season IV continues
• Fair Launch auction smart contracts
• Continue our work to upgrade to streaming payments