This is the plan of a crack team of computer geeks currently trying to re-engineer the entire damn internet using the block chain. Armed with 30,000 Bitcoin (around $12 million dollars) of crowd funded support, the "Ethereum" project is 40 of the smartest people you'll ever meet, based mainly in Amsterdam, Berlin and London. They are currently hard at work building a new programming language and platform that uses the block chain and applies it to anything on the internet (and should be released early next year). Vinay Gupta, a member of this team, explains that the current internet is layered with several piecemeal systems which have accreted over the years: the fact so much internet traffic goes via the US is because it was invented there; the certificate system which allows secure sites to be accessed is driven by the interests of a few large commercial browser companies, and so on. The end result, he says, is a hacked together network that is inefficient, insecure, and subject to invisible political expediency and control. Ethereum is a system that its developers hope will change all that, heralding a revolution in the way we use the net – allowing us to do everything online directly with each other, not through the big companies that currently mediate our online interaction and whom we have little choice but to trust with our data.