Replacing Atoms with Shared Bits

As Marc Andreessen famously wrote, “Software is eating the world.”

The core truth of Marc’s statement is simple. Replacing physical widgets, processes, and services (i.e. atoms) with infinitely scalable, replicable, and malleable software code (i.e. bits) creates tremendous opportunities for productivity gains and profit. This is accepted as obvious today, but was “contrarian” at the time.

Many might not agree yet… but I believe the Geo Web will unlock the next huge wave of software eating the world. 

Most importantly this time, we will direct (and compound) more of the value created by this transformation toward the public good rather than just the “high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses” of Silicon Valley that Marc was writing about. (Yes, these businesses also create surplus value for consumers, but we can do better.)

So far, software has been used to great effect in automating and scaling informational processes and transmission. The step-function impact that the Geo Web will offer is information being experienced by people as a shared physical reality. 

You, a stranger, and I can all walk down the street and see the same signs, architecture, murals, etc. without any coordination. Physics and biology make it so (save for foggy days, color blindness, or other impairments). 

With a software-based consensus for what we should or, better yet, want to see as we walk down the street, we unlock many physics-bending possibilities to more efficiently use scarce resources, create new value, and spark joy. This simple, but powerful consensus is what the Geo Web provides.

The events industry is a perfect example of the impact this will have. Live sports, concerts, conferences, and trade shows generate many billions in annual revenue. They rely on heavy physical buildouts to create the spectacle that keeps their patrons coming back. But, ultimately that spectacle rings hollow if it’s not shared with other people.

The Geo Web will transform the atoms of marquees, billboards, pyrotechnics, and jumbotrons into bits that don’t require structural materials, don’t get consumed, and can be rearranged with the click of a button. The capstone is that those bits won’t be confined to a siloed app and a glowing rectangular screen, but will be naturally experienced with the friends and family right next to you.

Venues and promotors will produce better products with higher margins. To maintain this magical ability, they’ll simply need to contribute a commensurate value to public goods through the Geo Web’s partial common ownership land market. 

This win-win scenario will repeat itself across industries on the Geo Web as software takes its next bite out of the world.

Technical

• Cadastre performance with our new method for defining and retrieving parcel shapes is night-and-day better than the previous approach. Based on that change, we implemented a fix for recognizing parcel overlaps from a visual perspective this week (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/cadastre/pull/287) and updated the Spatial Browser too (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/browser/pull/48). 
• We continue to push out small incremental improvements to the Cadastre and they’re adding up. We’re getting VERY close to a mainnet-ready UI (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/cadastre/pull/286, https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/cadastre/pull/290, https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/cadastre/pull/291, & https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/cadastre/pull/292). 

Community

• Vitalik released a blog about a new framework for thinking about public goods–The Revenue-Evil Curve. This is a concept that we’ve implicitly explored with the Geo Web’s approach to being a public good, so it’s really fun to see the dots connected so eloquently. Go read it! 
• After a really good open governance discussion and vote, Gitcoin DAO released a blog outlining their path to sunsetting their centralized grants platform and transitioning to their decentralized protocol.
• Friends of the Geo Web project and fellow partial common ownership enthusiasts launched NiftyApes this week. One of the more interesting implications of NiftyApe’s “Harberger-style lending auctions” is the creation of better, open pricing data on the NFT market (a public good!).

On Deck

• More polish and more security work

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