MyCrypto to Merge with MetaMask
Bitcoin is off to its worst calendar year start in eight years.
ConsenSys acquires MyCrypto wallet, plans to merge it with MetaMask.
Good news for everyone who’s tired of looking at Tether: USDC is closing the gap on the leading stablecoin and now controls 30 percent of the market.
In the U.S., 300 community banks are poised to offer Bitcoin trading via mobile apps. This trading should commence within the first two quarters of 2022. American Banker has all the details on when and how this went down.
India has reversed course and will tax cryptocurrencies a whopping 30 percent. They may even create a digital rupee. The Economic Times has the scoop on what coexistence for cryptocurrencies and CBDCs in India would mean (A GREAT READ!).
How the Modern Internet’s Power Structure is Centralized
Decentralization is sharing control over all the resources on a network. It means that no one individual or group of individuals makes all the decisions. Since everyone can participate, everyone can benefit to the degree that they participate in the ongoing operations of the network.
There’s decentralized finance, decentralized file storage, decentralized gaming, decentralized marketplaces, decentralized organizations, and decentralized computing. So why not decentralized social media?
This may come as a surprise to some people, but the internet started as a decentralized network that has since strayed from its decentralized roots.
In its infrastructure and architecture, the internet is still decentralized. No one owns or controls the TCP/IP, FTP, or SMTP protocols, which are the basic building blocks of the internet. However, several large organizations do exert a certain amount of control over the web and how it is used. For instance, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the nonprofit entity that controls the issuance of domain names, the approval for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), and country code TLDs. Google controls which websites rise to the top of its search results. And Wikipedia editors decide what content makes it into the web’s clumsiest encyclopedia.
In November 2020, Google owned 69.80 percent of the search market on desktop computers and a whopping 93.96 percent of mobile searches. By the same token, 3.21 billion people used at least one of Facebook’s core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger) each month in the third quarter of 2020. In September 2019, 150.6 million mobile users shopped from Amazon’s mobile app, almost twice as many that used the second most popular e-commerce shopping app, Walmart.
These are startling statistics considering there are almost 2 billion websites today. Let’s take a quick look at the development of the internet so we can see how it became so centralized.
An excerpt from my forthcoming book Cryptosocial: How Cryptocurrencies Are Changing Social Media by Business Expert Press, to be published in March 2022. Learn how to get in on the ground floor of my launch team and be the first to read.
First published at Cryptocracy. Not financial advice.
Image credit: Forex Suggest (the highest and lowest crypto transaction fees this week)
