“The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.” — Tim Berners-Lee

For the last three months, we have posted a section to our Weekly Update that aims to contextualize Elastos within the larger scale of our shared history and future. This section is about a lot of things: art, science, music, literature, politics, technology, the ever-changing landscapes of our society, our shift to new power models, and of course, the internet and the movement to modernize it, re-decentralize it, fix its security problems, give power back to the people, free our planet from its current ills, and to do all of this together, as one global community. These pieces are about our Foundation, our Community, and about our world from our earliest recorded history to the coming century ahead. We are part of the everything — connected to everything — a node in the network that is life. We invite you to read about and to share some of our thoughts and conclusions so far.

On the fifty year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, it is an appropriate time to think back on the American hero’s steep uphill battle for civil rights. Revolutionaries are almost always met with resistance from the status quo, and when that status quo is afraid to change in the face of a new freedom, in the face of a new equality, the resistance is even steeper. MLK’s movement cannot be trivialized by comparing it to other movements, and decentralization is no exception, but the comparison is still apt. The internet was conceived of as a plane of equality. A universe where all could access the native limitlessness offered by interconnectedness, vast possibilities of information accessibility, and self reliance. Quite simply, a place of civil rights. With no middle man — who cannot come to the table? Who cannot participate in this new economy? Who cannot have their own digital ID and be admitted to a world where they are included, autonomous and free-willed? What few can see, because this original vision has never come to fruition, is that the internet is still so young, and the addition of blockchain and the security it offers can revolutionize a digital world still unknown to us. It is not too soon and we are not too naive to begin to imagine the future of the internet and believe it a reality. That time is now — and its leader is Rong Chen.

It is said that in 1900 Lord Kelvin claimed, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics.” Five years later Einstein had his “extraordinary year.” This is true of all breakthroughs — most people, even experts in the field they happen in, do not see them coming. We are at a point where a breakthrough is coming. But it will not be seen by the short sighted, by the complacent, or by those content with thinking there is nothing new to be discovered. Imagine explaining the internet to someone in the early 1990’s knowing what we know today. Now imagine someone in the 1890’s. Elastos is hard to conceive of in either era. Quantum mechanics is as equally radical today as it was 100 years ago. It is going to take more than just the scientists and the futurists to lead us forward, for the implications of a new internet, or digital currencies, or a shared economy, or any leveling of the playing field through technology goes against history and yet towards the future.

There is a point where the humanities and science intersect and it is this point that is the most potent union for global change. The arts, literature, philosophy, and science and technology must join together to appeal to the hearts and to the minds of society and propel us forward toward a harmony that has become stuck on the boulders of centralization in an otherwise free-flowing river of human endeavor. But it will not be technology that saves us, that improves society on its own, as we have already seen with many tech companies. It will be people who are just and honest and kind and true and loving. People who stand out in the world of technology. People like Rong Chen.

Below is a quote by MLK worth thinking about. It is not technology that has failed us, but how we have used it.

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

“There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong. I don’t think we have to look too far to see that… And when we stop to analyze the cause of our world’s ills, many things come to mind. We begin to wonder if it is due to the fact that we don’t know enough. But it can’t be that. Because in terms of accumulated knowledge we know more today than men have known in any period of human history… And then we wonder if it is due to the fact that our scientific genius lags behind… Well then, it can’t be that. For our scientific progress over the past years has been amazing… I think we have to look much deeper than that if we are to find the real cause of man’s problems and the real cause of the world’s ills today. If we are to really find it I think we will have to look in the hearts and souls of men. The trouble isn’t so much that we don’t know enough, but it’s as if we aren’t good enough. The trouble isn’t so much that our scientific genius lags behind, but our moral genius lags behind. The great problem facing modern man is that, that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live… The problem is with man himself and man’s soul. We haven’t learned how to be just and honest and kind and true and loving. And that is the basis of our problem. The real problem is that through our scientific genius we’ve made of the world a neighborhood, but through our moral and spiritual genius we’ve failed to make of it a brotherhood.” — Martin Luther King

The French poet Arthur Rimbaud once wrote, “One must be absolutely modern.” On a week where the United States House and Senate held joint committee hearings to discuss data privacy for its citizens, an issue that faces potentially billions of people globally, Elastos’ revolutionary vision is truly emerging at the right time and is truly the definition of modern. Rong Chen has said there will be room for both centralized internet companies, “chain grocery stores,” and modern decentralized organizations like Elastos, “farmer’s markets.” One involves a middle man, takes a cut of the profits, and compiles data on its customers. The other allows for person to person interaction without a middle man, and allows assets to be distributed more evenly — like a fine organic butter.

The centralized internet platforms, or “fenced gardens” as Rong calls them, segregate the internet while in many cases concurrently “sharing” your data with third parties, because they, not you, own this data. This allows the profits to go to the centralized corporation, and allows “mistakes,” as one CEO put it before Congress this week, that result in mass data breaches. These fenced gardens allow you to produce the content and share it within those walls, but only the central authority can truly own and share the data outside of those walls. This does not sound much like a garden at all, but another fenced-in institution in our society.

But on a peer to peer platform with decentralized applications that allow the same file sharing and communication and “platform for ideas” that some social networks espouse as their current virtues, Elastos envisions all of the strengths of the modern landscape of the internet but without the self-centered corporate mentality. Elastos is an organization. A shepherd ushering in a new vision of the internet that does not put walls around gardens, but allows the creation of endless harvests of ideas without limits. It invites developers to create the next decentralized vision. It invites absolute modernity.

The conversation of data privacy is happening this week and is one of the very few issues with bipartisan support in the current political climate in America.

Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, said about the hearing, “All of the convenience and the connection that we are now seeing comes with a price. Our privacy has been invaded in a manner that would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago. This nation needs a serious conversation about the proper role of these companies. Should Facebook, Google, and Amazon be allowed to control so much of the internet? Today’s hearing must be considered as a beginning, not an end, of the discussion about the dramatic impact that Facebook, technology companies in general and the internet at large play in our society.”

In light of this conversation, an image comes to mind, sprung forth from the halls of freedom and revolution. Imagine this: Rong Chen and his millions of lines of original code, cascading over the ether to the sound of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free.”

Because it’s time.

So if you ‘want to break free,’ because you’ve ‘fallen in love’ with Elastos — you’re not alone — you’re a part of something — something big.

There is a beautiful music in the air this week. Can you hear it? It is the dawning of a new web. A smart web. And it emanates from the musicality of the Elastos vision. It’s not just the code, but something altogether invisible. Jimi Hendrix said, “What’s good or bad doesn’t matter to me; what does matter is feeling and not feeling. If only people would…think in terms of feeling… You’ve got to know much more than just the technicalities of notes; you’ve got to know what goes between the notes.”

It’s true. There is a feeling about Elastos. Can you feel it? It’s what goes between the notes, between the lines, those millions of lines of original code, that pinnacle of the life’s work of a visionary, because that is the intangible… the ineffable… the mysterious and indescribable essence of the vision that births the results into our physical world, all over our planet, that will connect us all like we have never been connected before. No middle man, no central authority, no big brother taking a cut, owning your data, selling your data, and making you just an analytical commodity. “You own your data,” says Feng Han.

So take back your identity. Break free. Fall in love.

Free the web.

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

In a week where the the FBI, the US Department of Homeland Security, and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre issued a joint alert warning for a hacking campaign directed at devices like routers, it’s a good time to be able to actually comprehend the merits of Elastos.

The Russian hacks are designed to look at data passing through routers and undermine the firewalls that protect the device from malicious traffic. The warning was directed at internet service providers, firms, government departments, and large companies.

Former NSA hacker Jake Williams said of this, “Everybody hacks routers. Saying that home routers with default passwords are getting owned is like saying that thieves are picking up unattended money in a public area.”

Yet of all of the national media outlets in both the US and UK that detailed the extent of these attacks, not one of them mentioned an operating system that could have prevented them. This is a potential crisis of personal and national security that is not going away on its own. While many projects in this space struggle to truly define how they will change the world, Elastos is ready to solve a problem at the highest levels of technological vulnerabilities. This has the potential for globally earth-shaking reverberations. Smart routers run by the Elastos OS could have an enormous impact — in fact, the word enormous is an enormous understatement.

Why should we settle for allowing thieves to pick up our unattended money in a public area? Our phones and computers and devices should not be laughably easy to gain access to. Yet this never even crosses the average person’s mind.

Rong Chen has said, “I think the internet as we know it today is broken. Broken from a cybersecurity point of view. For example, according to Kaspersky Labs, on peak days we can see about 1500 individual Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDos) attacks every day. Some of these attacks last a whole day. What worries me is that we are now moving to build really safety-critical applications on top of this “broken” infrastructure.”

This is not just about technology anymore. This is about society. This is about how we live our lives, so much of which are now lived online. It’s also about our phones and our computers, our routers, and soon, our cars, our things will live online too. We live online, yet we accept a different set of rules there like we are just visitors to some foreign world with its own laws, its own kings and thieves. Though Rong Chen may never say it himself, he is not average among the great minds he calls his peers, he is exceptional in a way that is bigger than any operating system, any mere technological product could ever be. That is his vessel, his lens, his portal to make the world better by creating the platform for people to build that world while simultaneously keeping our physical world safe. To protect our physical identities while giving us digital identities. Rong is a philosopher. A pioneer heading west, envisioning a digital society that is not a series of dictatorships masquerading as innovative egalitarian ecosystems, but as a chunk of breathtaking land, where a flag is staked that contains all flags and yet contains no flags at all. And from that fresh soil, a shout is heard across the plains for all to hear. It says, “Here it is, now come and build the rest.”

This is not to make profits, but to give profits back. This is not to cling to every last cent of revenue, dodging every legal obstacle in the way, but to cling to the vision of a country where you own what makes you valuable. You exchange. You, and the person you want to exchange with, exchange. It is quite simple. The entire Elastos vision may seem complicated, but this part is simple. You interact with the application directly while the application interacts with the internet indirectly. You get the immediacy to interact safely with the dapp, and the dapp gets the non immediacy with the internet to keep you safe. It is the same for your things — your router or your smart devices. The device interacts with the Elastos OS software and the software interacts with the internet. This magical buffer, between you and potential attacks, written in C, a nearly ubiquitous coding language, can be installed on almost any device or thing. Are you getting it? Remember that national security warning about the ease with which our walls are breached through the internet? This would stop that — and it was created to help you, to help the world, not some corporation, by a man who actually thinks differently.

The Elastos Runtime is an impenetrable fortress, perfectly hidden behind the current OS already on your phone. You don’t even need to switch what you already have. It runs as a virtual machine, which is just like any other app, except it protects your data and prevents dapps running via the runtime from ever touching the internet. It is the filter of malware, of viruses, of dos attacks, and when those malicious little bugs do come after you, the Elastos virtual machine acts as a sandbox, a place of no escape, that impenetrable fortress that contains the virus and eliminates its spread. Let’s put it another way by painting a picture. It’s like a giant roach motel, but instead of a cockroach, it’s someone trying to steal your data, your identity, your money. The roach enters the motel/VM through one door and into one room. But for the roach, there is no second door. Once it is determined that a roach has entered, the room is sealed, and the roach/virus is defenseless, rendered useless, dead. It can still “steal” your data, but it cannot leave, it cannot access the internet to send it anywhere. This c++ virtual machine is a checkpoint, a holding center, that only allows what is safe to pass through. Malicious content is contained, and then removed. Why would you want to allow roaches to breeze in and out of your devices? Viruses shouldn’t be like Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence. Trap them with Elastos!

Picture an internet where you are free — where you are safe. Go ahead and picture it right now, because you can’t go online and see it, and if things stay as they are today, you won’t see it. But that is why Elastos is so important to the world right now. That is why Rong Chen has been working on this for 34 years, the last 18 of which have been on Elastos. He wasn’t just taking his time — he’s been building something groundbreaking, something we actually need. How many people can actually say that? Now, how many people need to actually hear about it?

So ask yourself — have I taught anyone about the wonders of Elastos this week?

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

In a week that saw a man-in-the-middle attack result in the theft of over a hundred thousand dollars of cryptocurrency by users of MyEtherWallet (MEW), Elastos continues to stand in plain sight while the fragility of the internet is exposed on a weekly basis.

The hackers rerouted DNS traffic by hijacking a protocol called BGP which is used to route internet traffic. These attacks are commonplace at this point — let’s examine why.

In the early 1980’s, the internet was merely a series of networks that needed the ability to route data from one network to another. After the development of the Gateway to Gateway Protocol and the Exterior Gateway Protocol, the internet was still in desperate need of expansion.

In January of 1989, two men at an engineering conference tried to come up with a short term solution to routing the growing data that was swelling an internet that was on the brink of exploding. They needed to keep data flowing while the internet exponentially grew.

Kirk Lougheed of Cisco and Yakov Rekhter of IBM sat down for lunch and started to sketch ideas for a new protocol on the back of a few napkins. The idea was to create a kludge, a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster assemblage of parts that would fix the problems of routing until a better solution came along. The idea was merely to get something in place to temporarily patch the problems they saw with the internet. As for the idea of security at the time of their lunch, Rekhter has said it “wasn’t even on the table.”

The lunch produced what became the Boarder Gateway Protocol (BGP), or the “three-napkin protocol,” still one of the most widely used routing protocols in the world today.

Hacking itself was still relatively rare at the time. Lougheed has said, “In the early days of the internet, getting stuff to work was the primary goal. There was no concept that people would use this to do malicious things…Security was not a big issue.”

“We needed to sell routers. And we had a strong economic motive to make sure this party would continue. When Yakov and I showed up with a solution and it seemed to work, people were quite willing to accept it because they didn’t have anything else.”

Their protocol was embraced by the world — and because technological change can be incredibly daunting once there is mass adoption — today, in 2018, this same protocol produced over a lunch while George H. W. Bush was president, still reigns globally — allowing hackers embarrassingly easy access to our data.

The main problem with the way data is routed internationally is that BGP and other internet systems were designed to automatically trust users. When these hijackings occur, data can be routed, or redirected all over the world with no system of verification in place. These vulnerabilities are quickly becoming one of the key global issues of the 21st Century. This is not an understatement.

Looking back, Rekhter said,

“Short-term solutions tend to stay with us for a very long time. And long-term solutions tend to never happen. That’s what I learned from this experience.”

He’s not wrong. The internet is broken and long term solutions tend to never happen. But should this just be the accepted status quo? A quick fix technology from 1989? Allowing the entire world’s data to be exposed while we simultaneously increase the amount of things connected to the internet?

While Rong Chen took 18 years and over 4 million lines of original code to create his vision of fixing the internet, the designers of the BGP took one lunch to design their fix on the back of a few ketchup stained napkins.

And they found mass adoption.

But it was not their fault. They never tried to come up with a long term solution, and sadly, they now believe that long-term solutions “never happen.” In this assessment, they are wrong. Wrong about Rong.

Enter Elastos.

Rong Chen has designed a long term solution. In fact, he has affectionately called it the last OS. The man-in-the-middle attack that happened this week could have been prevented with Elastos. The unverified honor code of routing and trust that allows people to have their data routed anywhere a hacker wants, could be prevented with Elastos. The inherent flaws of an internet that grew too fast and was “fixed” with solutions too small can be transformed into a new SmartWeb.

It is time we start thinking long term.

This is not an idea written on the back of a napkin. Or an OS that puts security in the background. This is a big idea, and as Steve Jobs would say, people need to be seduced into using it. Slowly, gradually, and in a very human way, the more one learns about Elastos, the more they feel comfortable allowing themselves to fall in love with its vistas of open-ended potential. There are several features to this vision. OS in devices, OS Runtime on a phone, a peer to peer platform for dapps, an economic zone for ownership of digital assets, and a blockchain that ties it all together by issuing decentralized digital IDs for people and things alike. That’s a lot of vision. But like James Joyce’s Ulysses, once you do start to understand it, it’s like a domino effect, it all comes rushing at you in waves of brilliance. The curtain parts and the stage is set, there in the spotlight. You understand. This really is an eco-system. This really is security on the internet. This really is the dawn of data ownership. This really might be the last OS. Or to put it another way, this might be the first and last OS. This is not just another blockchain project, this is the internet, redecentralized, returned to its glorious conception, and finally safe.

Rong Chen is the OG of the OS.

He’s a classic. He’s always in style — and he’s about to have his day in the sun.

His vision is the definition of long term and long term is the definition of the answer we desperately need.

Some people think a project needs a clear and precise short term vision — Elastos has one — but while clear short term visions can be progressive, they produce short term solutions. A mere point of concentration is limiting. When we limit our vision to a point, a “What does it do?” question, we may produce an answer, but we obscure the totality of where the vision can go. A better question is, “In what direction can we start moving?”

We are about to start moving not toward the short term fix that will extend far beyond its life span and become a relic of antiquity that we accept out of laziness, out of lack of vision, but towards a long term fix that will extend itself into perpetual modernity.

If there is one thing that can be surmised from the past, it’s this: what is coming started long ago.

It started in 1984 — the year the founding fathers of the internet were at once stepping into their vision of what could be while Rong Chen was stepping off of a plane from China into America. It would seem that the winds of momentum, that carry us technologically in the direction of where we can go, were blowing that day.

Those winds were also blowing while he studied operating systems at the University of Illinois, and in 1992 when he started at Microsoft developing their operating systems of the 90s.

And they were blowing again in 2000 when he went back to China to begin work on what he saw to be the operating system of the future, the solution that would solve the inherent design deficiencies of the internet. Those gusts of momentum howled again, and again, and they are howling now.

Leonard Bernstein said, “I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen a statue of a critic.” In this evolving revolution, it will not be the critics on the sidelines or the short term visionaries that will be remembered, but those who actually dared to build something that should last. Who has been as daring as Rong Chen? Who has put their entire life’s work on the line? He has built a truly safe operating system for the world and a vast and modern ecosystem for the internet to go with it. He has not thought small, but so large that we currently need the experts among us to pull his vision down from the stratosphere so we can get a long enough glimpse to examine its dream-like textures. When we do, we end up like Kevin Zhang when he first comprehended this vision: our minds are blown. That which is ahead of its time, absolutely modern, is always incomprehensible to the masses, and even many “insiders.” That is not a weakness; that is how you know it is visionary. What visionary idea, technology, or artistic movement was ever pondered early on by the critics and the masses with the unified response, yeah, I totally get it, that makes total sense. If that were the case it would not be revolutionary. Big ideas and big visions need big comprehensive powers. They need bigger canvases than napkins. You believe in this project because you have those or you have enough to understand the feeling it evokes. You do not need to be a technical wizard like Kevin to feel this project. Intuition is built into us. Just become still enough to hear its call.

So many projects have empty words attached to them. Words most of the public do not even understand. But how many projects have human beings like Rong Chen attached to them? Not a hyped up pitchman, but someone who tirelessly worked his entire career to become the incarnation of the operating system of the future. A humble man who wants to release his life’s work into the world for the betterment and safety of the internet that we all use.

So how about this word: Security. Because we need it — we have a situation — a big one. Ice Cube said, “The worst thing you can do about a situation is nothing.” We need to do something, because all of our short term fixes are essentially nothing. We need to stop setting our sights low and achieving our mark and instead set our sights high up in the stratosphere where Rong set them 18 years ago. We need to fix the way we access the internet.

We need the OG of the OS.

We need Rong Chen.

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

“Blunt is simplicity. Meandering is complexity.” Ken Segall, Former Creative Director of Apple

This week Elastos announced the direction of its new logo and rebranding. It was revealed that the community engagement of creating logos, and the subsequent voting and discussion on this process, was a preliminary event to lead to a professional design firm creating an original logo from that inspiration. This unique combination of community engagement and professionalism, as Elastos begins its journey into the public eye, is worth thinking about in terms of another projects unique beginnings — early Apple.

Rong is Rong. There is no reason to compare him to someone else, but if one were to try, Bill Gates seems logical, if for no other reason than Rong worked alongside him for years. But when you really lift the rock of Rong’s vision, things under the surface are a lot more “far out” than Microsoft ever was. This is why the comparison to early Apple is so interesting.

In the 1970’s, Steve Jobs stood at the intersection of the counterculture movement of the 60’s and the coming technology of personal computers. It was this free spirited, Eastern philosophy laden, anti-establishment mindset that primed him for taking technology to a place of mass interconnectivity.

Rong Chen now stands at the intersection of a new kind of counterculture: decentralization, and a new kind of coming technology: blockchain. But he is not just creating something new. He is also fixing an internet that was never built correctly in the first place.

And yet, at first glance, Rong doesn’t seem anything like a San Fransisco hippie — he really doesn’t. But then he opens his mouth — and he begins talking about cyber republics, and about not thinking about profits, and about doing what’s best for the citizens of a country instead of central needs, and what he says about the internet is more in line with that same intersection than anyone may give him credit for. We start to see beyond his physical image and into the dream-like image he is elucidating for us so easily and yet so revolutionarily. Rong Chen has more in common with Thomas Jefferson than Mark Zuckerberg. He is talking about building a decentralized country online. This has never been done. His vision is very cyberdelic. When he talks about taking down walled gardens, and fenced institutions, and direct contact with the good stuff and no contact with the bad stuff…you kind of hear a little hippie vibe in him. One might even think a young Steve Jobs would dig it, you dig?

Say what you want about early Apple, but their vision was, well, visionary, far out. But even in their conception they used the word customer, not community member, because they were a company and buying their products was the extent of a users participation in the experience of their vision. Elastos, however, is not calling you a customer, but a community member. This is, ironically, what makes Rong Chen more of a hippie than Steve Jobs ever was. In fact, someone recently posted about an experience of asking Rong about his vision after a meetup, and when Rong responded by asking what hethought, what was his advice, not threatened because he is the only genius, but curious because someone else might have a good idea too, he enabled another mini-Rong in the process, leaving him a bit shocked and flattered. Asking another their opinion, and a non-employee no less, is not very Jobs-like at all. But it is Rong-like, and two Rong’s do make a right.

It would seem that there is something extraordinarily not egotistical and controlling happening with Elastos. Taking the important tenets of successful tech projects and then going even further in combining them with the important tenets of co-habiting the planet and working together for the betterment of all is not just the next evolution of the internet, but the next evolution of globalization. This is not about Rong Chen’s ego. This is about a better internet that we all build together.

Kevin Zhang said this week, “Elastos’ mission is to decentralize the internet. Our organization is decentralized too. It is very different than a traditional software company. In the future, the majority of work will be done not by company employees, but by community members. Elastos will eventually become a developer community, the world’s largest working space, no walls, no ceilings, no desks, with everyone working remotely and contributing to the community.”

Woah, sounds like Kevin Zhang is pretty cyberdelic himself.

But how do you express that vision? How do you tell that complex story in a simple way?

Steve Jobs knew nothing about marketing until he met Mike Markkula in 1976, a retired 33 year old from Intel who was an expert in it. Markkula would become an equal partner with Jobs and Wozniak and teach Jobs how to take Apple mainstream. When Markkula started, Apple was valued at $5,309. Within three years it was worth 1.79 billion.

Jobs said of him then, “Mike really took me under his wing. His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

That will last. Something you believe in, that will last. Elastos is marketing itself, and believes itself to be, the last OS. A universal and revolutionary system of security for the exploding industry of IoT, the global phenomenon of the smart phone, and by extension, a new smart web that will empower wealth generation and data ownership for the individual. No one wanted to give Steve Jobs the several hundred thousand dollars he needed to put the Apple II into production, even with offers of huge equity (they probably regretted that). Markkula gave him 250k because what he saw fit his definition of something you believe in that will last.

In 1977, Markkula wrote a one page document entitled, “The Apple Marketing Philosophy.” It listed three simple objectives: empathy, focus, and impute.

Empathy was to understand what their customers needed. To have an intimate connection with their feelings. Focus was to ignore what was unimportant to the vision so they could succeed at what was. Finally, impute was to deliver marketing that was clear, because even with a superior product, people do judge a book by its cover, and they form opinions based on what they perceive. Therefore, if they are presented with a creative and professional image they will impute those qualities onto the project. They will impute what you present them with onto what you have actually created.

Apple once had what was described as “an ornate Victorian woodcut-style logo.” When they first started to market the Apple II, Regis McKenna, a publicist Jobs hired after seeing his ad campaign for Intel, went to work on brochures that would include a new logo. An art director named Rob Janoff was put in charge of the design, and Jobs told him, “Don’t make it cute.”

Janoff produced two versions. One, a simple apple, the other, a simple apple with a bite out of it. The simple apple was said to look more like a cherry, so Jobs picked the second — and thus the Apple logo contest ended.

Apple was not interested in gimmicks. Their hype was part of what they were actually doing.

They did revolutionize the personal computer and we continue to use their products but it’s not because of a commercial from 1984. They knew how to tell the story of what they were doing in simple, elegant, and edgy ways. They chose revolutionaries as their icons, as their visionaries. They looked to people who had changed society, not to people who had changed technology; they would be the one’s to do that. They superseded their industry by appealing to what unites us as people, not what unites us as customers of technology. They went after the dystopias, and yet, we are again faced with another one right now, the current internet.

Let’s talk about Elastos.

Empathy. Elastos has it. People want to feel safe on the internet. They do not want to feel vulnerable. Rong has spent over half his life getting to the point where that is about to be possible. Given the option, most people would choose to create wealth from the data they already produce and are basically forced to allow corporations to profit from. They do not want to be second-class citizens renting the internet from centralized oligarchs — they want to own it for themselves. Elastos understands these feelings maybe even before most people realize they have them. It’s not about Elastos profiting. It’s about the community profiting.

Focus. Elastos has focused all of its efforts thus far on its groundbreaking technology (18 years of it) and they have succeeded. No one else has created what Rong Chen and his team have. His focus has been exactly where it needed to be and now our focus will be to deliver this vision to the public.

Impute. Elastos is now working on an image that will live up to its tech. We are not a company like Apple, but by presenting the vision of our foundation in clear, creative, and professional ways, we will help people impute those same qualities onto what Rong has given the world.

But no matter what marketing a company chooses, the best way to spread a vision is with evangelists. People truly passionate about something, that tell other people why, is always better than an advertisement. If you really care and love a product or a vision, and explain that to someone else, and they can see your honesty, your transparency, they will more likely buy it or use it than if they are told by a campaign or an ad or a slogan. But why not have both? Clear and simple marketing and a community of evangelists that actually believe in Elastos. That is where the community comes in again. We are working on a rebrand that will deliver our vision in a simple, creative, and professional way. As community members, as evangelists, talking about, writing about, making videos about, and building demos and applications, are ways in which you can market as well. First think about how many people started using Apple products because of an ad they saw, then think about how many people started using them because a friend told them how much they loved using theirs.

We have imagined a cyberdelic fusion of freedom and direct connectivity with advanced computing: a peer to peer platform, on a totally secure OS, with its own economy, all on your phone or device. We are building a new society, a country, a republic where flower power meets coding power, whose aim is not greed but wealth for anyone, and we should be proud.

We are inspired by a lot of visionary ideas, including early Apple, and we plan on delivering our own unique vision in the coming months with a new website, a new logo, and new marketing.

If anyone has thought differently, Rong Chen has. He’s been doing it since 1984, when he came to America, and when Apple launched their famous Super Bowl ad decrying the end of the totalitarian state and the dawning of the Macintosh. Now, let us let Elastos decry the end of the totalitarian internet, and the dawn of the Cyber Republic.

Let us not toast to an Orwellian future, but to just maybe, a Rongian one.

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

There is something…in the air, a current blowing in the winds that whip across the entire globe. A palpable electricity. A levy is about to burst, not a literal one, but a symbolic one that has stopped the river of progress and equality from flowing in far too many areas of our world. Power has always been held by the few, and in all of these areas, the equality of power is now at stake.

People are starting to move from centralized power models to decentralized ones. Moving from the few holding all of the power to the many sharing in it. When this dam bursts, or even begins to leak, there will be a mass shift where everyone involved will become more powerful while the most powerful among us will start to becomes less so. That leak has already begun and we are already seeing it happen in certain areas of society. It is the dawning of the new power.

This week Rong Chen stopped by the Elastos Telegram group and was greeted much like Mick Jagger at a Rolling Stones concert. While Rong answered many questions about Elastos, one particular statement seemed to, once again, stand out and exemplify his unique leadership style.

“The Elastos community doesn’t really have a boss. It will be autonomous driving.”

This statement may not seem revolutionary at first glance, but put into the proper context, one will see that Rong is the definition of the new power.

The contex can be found best in a remarkable new book entitled, “New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World — and How to Make it Work for You,” by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. The book, a national bestseller and suggested reading, focuses on the shifting movement from what the authors term “old power” to “new power.”

Here is how these two terms are defined.

“Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.” “New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.”

Old power terms are: centralized, exclusive, confidential, institutionalized, traditional corporate style professionalism, non-participatory. New power terms are: decentralized, open sourced collaboration, radically transparent, do-it-yourself crowd culture, very participatory.

New power is not political. Both ends of the political spectrum are old power, and both ends are now employing new power tactics. New power merely enables movements to mobilize with technology and decentralize power.

New power is already becoming possibly the defining movement of the 21st century thus far. It is a movement that is technology-centric, but is certainly not limited to areas of technology. Instead, its effects span across most areas of human society.

Old power has always dominated society and examples can be found everywhere. But as our lives become more technology-driven, new power is being ushered in more and more because interconnectivity is the forerunner to decentralized power.

Old power is a top down power model. The top creates, controls, and hoards the power and whatever is left trickles down to everyone else. New power is a sideways power model. Participants or community members co-create their new world together and power moves laterally. The power is shared and our active participation is what generates more power. As we build, we all get stronger, not just the top. Many are starting to believe in what economist and social thinker Jeremy Rifkin has stated for years: that power moving from a hierarchical to a lateral model will be the major factor for creating a sustainable planet on and offline.

Let’s take a look at a recent example of an old power model shifting to a new power model, in a place one might not think to look at in this context: the MeToo movement.

Harvey Weinstein held such a significant amount of power in Hollywood, that in a 40 year span ending in 2016, he had been thanked at the Oscars 34 times, the same number of times as “God.” He was the definition of old power. Yet when his power began to become decentralized, and his accusers came forward, he had so much stored up, that countless women across the globe were energized and enabled to step into their own power in a way that left reverberations for both men and women everywhere.

One of the main reasons that the MeToo movement spread with such speed and intensity is because in a new power system, people are not relying on the old power ways, but purposely rebelling against them, in many cases because the old power is the source of the problem in the first place. In this case, powerful men, protected within their centralized power structure, were able to hold that power and abuse rampantly. They had the control, they got the profits, they could do what they wanted. But when power was shifted, women began speaking out peer-to-peer, not with a centralized leadership, but on consensus, thereby beginning to deflate that old centralized power. The effects were global, massive, and very fast. The fact that the movement was ownerless was what gave it the ability to flourish rapidly. Power was given back to the people of the movement and they became immensely more powerful than the people that kept them silent. This is one example of many movements exposing how centralized power comes all too often with an abuse of it. When movements seek to shift power back to average people, without a third party intermediary, there is a new freedom that circumvents the abuses old power so easily gets away with. Peer-to peer platforms, with decentralized power structures, and the ability for people who were previously powerless to now participate in the distribution of power, are going to continue all over the world and change society.

Now let’s look at a one of the platforms that helped that movement spread, a new power model with old power values: Facebook. The authors write, “Those who are building and stewarding vast platforms that run on new power have become our new elites. These leaders often use the language of the crowd — “sharing,” “open,” “connected” — but their actions tell a different story. Think of Facebook, like the new power platform that most of us know best. For all those likes and smiley faces we create using what the company calls our “power to share,” the two billion users of Facebook get no share of the vast economic value created by the platform. Nor any say in how it is governed. And not a peek into the algorithm that has proven to shape our moods, our self-esteem, and even some elections. Far from the organic free-roaming paradise the early internet pioneers imagined, there is a growing sense that we are living in a world of participation farms, where a small number of big platforms have fenced, and harvest for their own gain, the daily activity of billions.”

Yes, Facebook likes “sharing” your data, being “open” to making money off of you, and being “connected” to the control of all the power.

The Facebooks of the internet were a step in the right direction: an evolution to a new power system but with old power values. But now we need to evolve further to a new power system with new power values. We need someone who can walk the walk with the gait of a tiger. How about something where value is distributed, data is owned, governing is decentralized, the code is open-sourced, and the ecosystem is actually safe? That sounds like the next evolution of new power.

It is important to note, though, that not all old power models are bad and not all new ones are good. It’s not binary. In fact, some of the best models to emerge recently employ a combination of the two. The results are always determined by the people involved and their goal for how to use this power.

Elastos is one of these hybrids: centralized and decentralized in design, with the goal of an eventual decentralized self-driving sustainable ecosystem. Rong Chen’s world-class expertise in operating systems is very old power (which in this case is exactly what you want) but his vision for his creation is very new power.

Turning power over to the crowd will be a major trend and marker of success in the future. We are starting to see it with things like Kickstarter, Lyft, Airbnb, Wikipedia and most notably, blockchain. But to create an entire internet ecosystem that has fixed the enormous security flaws of the old internet, and combines that with the new power values of a new internet, Elastos is at the absolute cutting edge of this shift that has already started to happen.

Take NASA for example. After facing large budget cuts in 2010, NASA began a program of “open innovation.” The idea was to open up their workload to the public and actually crowd solve problems at NASA. The concept was met with distain from the old power thinkers who employed an “us and them” mentality. They believed only the exclusive white lab coat wearing PhD’s of NASA should be allowed to have this power, and they planned on hoarding it for themselves. Yet others at NASA liked the idea of enabling a new power model. NASA selected fourteen R&D challenges and opened them to the public. 3000 people in eighty countries participated and helped solve some problems better than NASA had previously done themselves. One solution included a heliophysics problem that was solved by a retired engineer from New Hampshire who was in fact not a heliophysicist. In 2017, NASA hosted a “Space Apps hackathon” that assembled 25,000 people from 69 countries to help solve some of their toughest challenges. It was a success. The key difference in mentality can be seen in two versions of the same idea. The old power thought, “the lab is my world.” The new power thought, “the world is my lab.”

Does any of this sounds familiar yet? If you watched the Developer’s Meetup on Tuesday night, this story is very similar to what Kevin Zhang said he plans to do with the Elastos. He stated that he does not see borders. That we are building the largest workspace in the world. Kevin believes in the crowd wisdom and will not only open up solving Elasots problems to the world, he will pay people in ELA for helping to solve them. We will also be hosting our own hackathons.

Kevin is not hoarding the power he has, he does not believe his team is the world, he believes the world is his team. To put it simply, new power models do things differently, and if it’s good enough for the rocket scientists at NASA, then it’s good enough for the rocket scientists at Elastos. In fact, we plan to do a lot of things differently.

We are not hoarding profits but will actually pay you to build this world with us. Our bounty program is the picture of bountiful design utilizing the new power. This is the opposite of the current/old model of intended income inequality.

People today, especially young people, want to participate and be a part of the world. They want to contribute and have the ability to be compensated accordingly, and the world is full of talented people with a computer who are looking for a way to express what they believe in. Our phones are now gateways to doors, but thus far these doors lead to single worlds of centralized power. But Elastos is a door to many worlds, where universes upon universes could exist one day. In these worlds power is given to people, on people to people exchanges. Think of Elastos as a button on your phone that opens up to a realm where you have a power that you never had before. When you really let yourself imagine this, something happens…a blissful moment drapes over you…an intuitive feeling that you know is right because its makes sense emotionally. It’s a place where you won’t get hacked. Where no one can watch you. Where you can participate in creating value for yourself and the betterment of the world. Elastos is not a utopia — its goal is not unreasonable and unrealistic — it’s simply giving power back — and that’s what makes it powerful.

Someday this new power model internet could be exponentially more powerful than the internet currently is. Think of those centralized titans as hoarding our power as their currency. Then think of the floodgates opening and it being distributed out among billions world wide like a current, an electricity that will shock the very system it overturns and in doing so shock the world. This tech, is physical, corporeal — but it is also symbolic, incorporeal, and formless. It represents unity. Instant connection. In physics terms, non-locality. Space and time can no longer separate us — and with Elastos — neither can cyber oligarchs. We are free — to talk, to share, to own, to be safe, to co-create together. We can finally own our internet. This is power.

People have forgotten, and many are not even aware, that there is an entire undiscovered landscape of potential on the internet. We have settled for a broken, vulnerable, corporate owned monopoly internet. As if we can only eat at a few chain restaurants at some strip mall, and while we are eating we are being watched by the owners and we may even get robbed. Somehow, this type of internet is what we are addicted to and in awe of. That has to change. We have to build a new internet and extend an invitation to the globe to build it with us.

Economic advisors to President Obama, Peter Osrzag and Jason Furman, have made the argument that the monopoly income made by the internet giants has contributed to income inequality maybe more than any other factor. We are being taken advantage of by an old power system and it is hurting society. As Obama said about this issue, “a capitalism shaped by the few and unaccountable to the many is a threat to us all.’

If the Macintosh was a “bicycle for the mind,” then Elastos will be wings for the internet. So let us fly freely, safely, and dazzlingly through the skies above the old power and off into a new world. Let us fly high above the Amazons, and the Googles, and the Facebooks, and high above the hackers and the viruses and the DDoS attacks, and let us look down at the grander picture of what we have accepted as our internet from that view on high, and see just how in need it is of a great overhaul, of a great healing, of a great and new vision of power — because from up there, we can see ourselves like ants marching in lock-step towards our homes at one of the monstrous centralized internet giants on our little hackable highway we call the internet. We have so little of the power in this image, and most of us don’t even know it, like we are merely sleepwalking though our lives online. Here, take my money, take my data, take my privacy, because I need you and your addictive algorithms that give me just enough satisfaction to stay addicted…But from up high, with our new wings, we can see something starting to appear on the horizon with a clarity and a brightness so intense that we know it is the heralding of something better. It’s a place where we are safe and free and power is decentralized. A place where Rong Chen is just like one of us — if not slightly cooler in a Mick Jagger kind of way.

While Bill Gates is talking about how he would like to short Bitcoin, Rong Chen has merged mining with it. This is a clear display of the old verses the new. Not to mention that Bill did not believe in Rong’s idea enough to pursue it when he shared it with him in the 90’s, and now Microsoft has dismantled its Windows 10 team while Rong is launching the last OS. This is not to disrespect Microsoft or many who represent the old power, but it shows the dichotomy of the then and the now.

Bitcoin is certainly part of the new power, and several other projects in this space. But no other project is fundamentally fixing how we use the internet the way Elastos is. No one else has developed an OS like this. In fact, Rong Chen was riding the winds of the new power all the way back in 2000. Elastos actually precedes Bitcoin and blockchain. While blockchain is a singular manifestation of the new power, Elastos is part of a much bigger context than any mere cryptocurrency. It is a project to make the internet smart, and without it, anything built on top of the internet will only be building on a broken stretch of dark road. While the internet is full of companies who will gladly sell you a matchstick — Elastos is ready to give you a lightbulb.

Bob Dylan famously sang, “I shall know my song well before I start singing.”

So ask yourself this: who has prepared for this change of power on the internet as much as Rong Chen? Who has known their song so well before they started singing it? Because singing…we shall do. This is not just a weekly report, this is a song, and we are singing. Singing the gospel, not of a man, but of a vision of a new internet that we all share, that we all build together.

Now can I get an Amen?!

Rong Chen is the new power. Kevin Zhang is the new power. Fay Li is the new power. They are not our bosses, they are not self-important, they are not going to control us and take all of the profits for themselves. But they just might be prophets of what is to come on this new internet where we have leaders but they do not lead us. We lead ourselves. We will take the internet from the clutches of the greedy and the possessive and the unwilling to share — and we will share it.

Because we are the new power.

We’re not making a device, or a centralized platform, we’re making a world. A world of liberty and opportunity that is safe and can encompass other projects within our spheric embrace. Other blockchains can actually join our ecosystem, not compete with it, thus growing this new internet into a colossus of new power.

We are all building it — and they will all come.

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

Sitting in the crowd of the New York meetup last Saturday, mere blocks from Lincoln Center, home to The New York City Ballet, The New York Philharmonic, The Metropolitan Opera, and The New York Film Society, one could easily feel a certain vibe begin to radiate the room while listening to Rong Chen and Feng Han speak about their passionate vision —

Elastos…is a work of art.

We’re making…art.

Art starts with a dream. A dream to reveal a hidden truth. A symbol that is closer to this truth. Art is that symbol. It represents something about ourselves that we know to be true and because we think it is beyond ourselves we need the artist to express it. It says, “Show me myself.”

Not unlike a master artist, Rong Chen has worked on his masterpiece for 18 years, and his journey to get there started long before that. What Rong has envisioned is this: Elastos is collective work of art. A collective dream. An inherently unifying experience. Elastos, is a mirror.

We are about to enter a collective dream.

We are the cyber dreamers, waking the world out of the illusion of interconnectedness we are told we already have. Will you dare with us to dream a better dream?

Rong spoke to the crowd,

“The internet of information is the internet of data. The new internet, the value internet is the internet of code. If we share data between each other, can we really pass assets, can we really pass value to each other, other than a number? Bitcoin has numbers, there is a ledger we can trust with no central agency, yet I can send one Bitcoin to someone. That’s just sharing a number through a ledger. If you want to share anything other than a number, a digital asset, say an ebook, movies, games, any other digital asset, we share between peer-to-peer. If we share a blob, a bunch of zero’s and one’s, can we really share assets?” “We have no control of our data. Let’s say I make a short video and I share it with you. If I don’t control the code, which interprets the data I share with you, then I don’t really share anything. Without controlling the data, I don’t control anything at all. By sharing data on social networks, we are not really sharing assets. We are sharing information that can be copied and there is no value to that. If we can copy data infinitely, there is no value, there is piracy everywhere, and people cannot make profit from the data. Then, only the cartels, the big ones like Alibaba, Google, Facebook, they make money off of the data, not us, because they own the channel, they own the player. So the real issue is, who owns the media player, owns the data. So to achieve the goal of building a value internet and to share digital assets peer to peer, we have to be able to share code peer to peer. That’s a very big leap forward…Sharing code is easy, it’s just that we can’t because all current operating systems are vulnerable to viruses. So if we are going to share code, we need a way to quarantine viruses, and currently the technology is there, it is very mature now.”

Then it was Feng’s turn to speak.

For all of the profundities that Rong spoke of, Feng Han parted the seas of the universe itself and put them back together. But in that brief opening, what you saw, if you paid close attention, was enlightening.

Feng began to discuss the concept of quantum wealth. He explained that he originally studied quantum physics when he got his bachelor’s degree but could not really believe what he was learning and went on to start a business after college. Years later, after finally understanding it, he got his PhD. from Tshinghua University.

He found the quantum world to be literally unbelievable.

But what was it that he could not believe?

There are unseen realities. Entire worlds that operate in radical and baffling ways to our normal everyday experience. These worlds are shocking, revolutionary, and for some, life changing upon learning about their existence. Stranger still, we have known about them for well over 100 years. These sub-atomic realities paint a very different picture of our everyday life. How matter behaves at the smallest levels is quite unreal, even illusory. When one tries to reconcile these discoveries with the world at large and with its predecessor, classical or Newtonian physics, they are left with more philosophy than science sometimes.

The macro world is a world of lack and extreme competition. The quantum world is a world of abundance and wild collaboration.

It seems that what happens in the invisible realm may be of even more value to us than what happens in the visible one. If only we could understand it.

Physicist Niels Bohr famously said, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”

So what does this radical and hidden world have to do with Elastos?

Think of the current internet like the world of classical physics, where people only direct their attention to the big picture, the visible. On this internet it would appear that capitalism exists in many forms. We can buy and sell physical things, we can make money in what appear to be free markets, and we seem to have freedom and self-determination. It appears that the internet is much like the real world, and maybe, that’s Feng’s point.

But what if the wealth online, the native currency, the natural resource of the internet, is not money? What if it is something invisible? Something most people are not even aware exists? Something that behaves mysteriously to the average person? Then, without this knowledge, would we really be participating in a free market at all?

In quantum wealth, like quantum physics, it is all about the invisible world. Until you can see the quantum, the micro, you really are only seeing illusions. Because under the surface, things are very, very different. Quantum wealth is another world…beyond the illusion that the internet giants have draped over our eyes like a veil. And in this other world…it’s not about money, it’s all about something else —

Data.

Code.

This is the true wealth on the internet.

Whoever owns it, whoever controls it, controls the wealth.

Think of data as the sub-atomic particle of this online world. We don’t see it. It’s invisible. It’s mysterious and unknown to most of us. But if one can control the subatomic world then they could in theory control the macro world, the world we see. The internet giants control this hidden world and therefore control the larger world we all see. We know they are controlling all of the wealth, but we don’t see how they are doing it. They are doing it with an illusion.

What is beyond this illusion?

Ourselves.

We have to understand that we don’t really exist online. The internet is not a physical place. We exist there as our data. Our data represents us. It is who we are and the value we create for ourselves. Yet, because we do not even know this, because we have not been taught that our data is ours, we have given it away so easily and wondered why the tech giants are so rich while so much of the online world is so poor. We exist as data and someone else owns it. This system that the tech giants have hid from us, this system they have profited so massively from, the current internet itself, is not really capitalist at all.

All this time, the internet has not really been capitalist when it comes to the free market of its inherent and unique currency. A very small number of companies control all of the data online. If the average person cannot own their own data, cannot own the code, and their only job is to produce the data and push it around to other people for the big companies to own and profit from, then the internet is something far worse than monopoly capitalism.

We do not have real identities and real ownership of our wealth online but are more like amorphous, miasma-like creatures ripe for disenfranchisement as the data of our online selves is funneled into the data of others bank accounts. Put simply, we don’t own ourselves on the internet. We thought we were profiles and pictures and videos but we’re really code. We don’t own the code — therefore, we do not own ourselves. Regular people are not even in the game. We produce the natural resource, we do all of the work, and we get nothing. Instead, we get distracted by the macro. By the illusion of the internet and the satisfaction these giants promise. It’s all a giant form of smoke and mirrors. You look at the visible and stay addicted, while they take all of the invisible oil you are producing out from under you and profit off of it without you even knowing. And this is all while spinning a narrative that never even mentions how valuable your data is.

We essentially pay for the services of Facebook or Google by agreeing to give over our data. These companies know what we search for, what we share, what we buy, and use this information to make money. They also use this data to buy out the competition which they can see coming from a long way off because of data, stifling competition and cementing their monopolies. They say their services help the world. But how can we know if this tradeoff is equal when no other option exists?

Data is the oil of the 21st century. But unlike oil, we don’t need to look for this natural resource. It is a commodity and a good that we produce and we should be able to own it and profit from it and make it scarce. We deserve a real capitalist system online that involves the internet’s native currency. We need to own ourselves online.

Elastos will be the first truly capitalist society on the internet, ever.

In fact, Rong Chen has said about Elastos,

“Everyone is an entrepreneur here.”

Yes. We are all now entrepreneurs because we are all going to be playing with the same currency. So away with the idea that someone else owns “you” on the internet, and they sell “you” on the internet, and they make money off of “you” on the internet.

We say: Own yourself! Own the internet! Join the internet of actual capitalism!

Elastos is not about sharing equally in the internet economy, but about being able to share at all. We are not redistributing the wealth, we are allowing the wealth to actually be distributed and accessible to the people creating it in the first place.

We all understand how to give value to our car, to our house, to our bank account. But now we need to understand how to give value to our thoughts, our ideas, our data. Feng Han says, “Our knowledge can become our asset.” This is innovation capitalism. This is when we learn to be like Einstein, and Heisenberg, and Schrodinger, and find out that the invisible world is where the value is; our minds are where the value is. Rong Chen has built a work of art to allow us to incubate what makes us so valuable in the first place — our uniqueness, our individuality, our freedom, our thoughts, our ideas and our representative for all of this on the internet — our code. The internet has been totalitarian this whole time, and most of us never even realized it. So let us start a new one — let us take the power back and be self-reliant.

Rong Chen said on Saturday,

“The internet of code will be a much bigger tidal wave than 1995.”

A tidal wave. A much bigger one. That is possible now. Up until now data has either been worthless because it can be copied or it has not been able to be owned at all. This is going to change. In 1995, the internet ushered in a new capitalism that connected people to each other all over the world 24 hours a day. Now, with digital ownership and the ability to profit from it, a new age of data will reinvent capitalism online.

1995 was not that long ago, and yet Bill Gates said in an interview that year, “It’s very hip to be on the internet right now.” Wow. People were not aware what was about to happen, and most are unaware again. People are going to profit from their own data. If it is an option, many are going to take it. This is part of the tidal wave Rong speaks of.

The internet is symbolic of the unified field, a place without separation. Non-locality is a principle that shows that particles even billions of lightyears apart can be instantaneously influenced by each other, defying all rules of time and space and painting a portrait of the universe as a smart ecosystem of oneness. We are getting closer and closer to that universe online, and it is becoming seamless with the physical world. For the internet is not just symbolic of the universe, but a part of it too.

Everyone in technology is so obsessed with creating the new, that we forget that what we are creating can symbolize something very old. Something…ancient even. A sort of nostalgia. A memory, or a feeling, or even just a faint impression of a world where we are actually connected. A safe world. A place where we don’t worry as much about being taken advantage of. Of our freedom being taken away. Where we are actually ourselves and yet in harmony with others.

The blockchain, this trust machine, this ledger, is as old as humans. The primordial account of who did what, of who is who. We may be building the new internet, but we are really building the first world, or the first idea of a world. A safe place where we are all connected and power is shared. It’s not about the unknown, but about what is known so well that it has been forgotten. We have become so used to the chaos and the attacks and the monopolies and the lack of trust that we have forgotten that no one in their right mind would dream up such an internet. But what if in the right state of mind, a better internet was dreamed up? This is what we are building. It is not like any other project. It is not trying to evolve out of the current internet, for why would one want to evolve out of what is broken? This is starting over. Going back to the beginning. What is the internet? How do we access the internet? How do we make sure the internet is safe? How do we make sure we know who is who and what is what that is connected to the internet? How do we take the internet’s inherent natural resource, its unique value, and allow the people who produce it to own it and decide what to do with it? How do we build an internet that makes sense?

That’s what happened all those years ago. Someone started asking and answering those questions. Now, you come in. Because this world is for you. It’s for you to have a haven that makes sense in the senseless world of the internet.

Coming out of the Manhattan rain on Saturday afternoon, one might have imagined Rong Chen as a character in a Bob Dylan song, “I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form, come in she said I’ll give ya, shelter from the storm.” We are all that creature void of form, this data, out in the wilderness, this internet, and we are being invited into a world that is a true shelter from it.

Art reveals what is hidden, just like quantum physics, and just like Elastos. So let’s reveal to the world what is hidden on the internet. Let’s be artists, and scientists, and human beings that can reimagine something that has become far too unimaginative.

Dylan goes on to sing, “Try imagining a place that’s always safe and warm.” So go ahead, imagine it. Then help us build it.

Then…

Come in.

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

Today marks a day that may be remembered as a historic turning point in internet history. On May 25th, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect in 28 nations in the European Union.

The GDPR is a law that aims to protect the more than 500 million citizens of the EU online when it comes to their data privacy. It allows citizens to request easy to understand documents about what information companies hold about them and allows citizens to request the information be restricted or deleted. Internet giants, retailers, banks, even grocery stores must comply with this transparency-centric law, the most dramatic data privacy law anywhere in the world.

Citizens can now also download their data and take it with them to a competitor. You could leave one bank for another, or leave one streaming service for a rival, bringing your data along. You may have received one or more emails recently from a company ensuring you that they will protect your data and want you to continue trusting them with it. These emails are in compliance with the new law, and companies have every reason to comply, as the maximum fine for non-compliance is up to 4% of annual revenue. For a company like Google or Facebook, the fine could be in the billions.

The GDPR is a complicated issue, and it will take years to sort out if it’s a positive or less than positive law for individual privacy and protection. It will come down to a combination of how the law is enforced, and how individuals use these protections to their advantage. Many people may simply agree to continue allowing their data to be beyond their control because they feel it is overwhelming, or an inconvenience to try to sort it out. These are legitimate reasons as much of society feels inundated online when agreeing or not agreeing to terms that allow them to access the sites and apps that are now part of their daily lives. It is a sort of panopticon bargain that is made so easily because no other easy to use option exists — or, did not exist.

One of the main concerns with the intersection of blockchain data storage and these new privacy laws is that blockchain is immutable. If personal data is stored on a permanent ledger, then a person could not have the information deleted. Is this true for all blockchains? Is it true for Elastos?

Before that is answered, it must be said that the real issue, far beyond the what ifs of data and blockchain and government regulations and citizens taking their online rights back, is that most people, including most politicians, do not understand technology. What your data is, how it is stored, how it is shared, what blockchain is, if it is a positive or a negative to this problem, all of these questions are barely understood and even fewer able to be answered by the masses including our democratically elected representatives. What the world needs now, especially The United States, is education on technology.

That’s what Elastos intends to do, not try to merely benefit themselves, but educate society on the important technologies they know so little about.

Let’s look at data storage on Elastos.

On Elastos, a user will receive a decentralized ID issued by the main chain. Data itself will not be stored on the Elastos main chain, but instead, on an inter planetary file system (IPFS) that will be spread across thousands of severs, all encrypted. When someone wants to access this data, the Elastos Carrier, without knowing where the data is stored, will retrieve it. This is decentralization at work.

Elastos will not store your personal data. We are merely a platform to write decentralized applications on top of. Each dapp itself will be responsible for being in compliance with whatever data laws apply to them. However, dapps on Elastos will also store data in a decentralized manner. Even if personal data is stored somewhere, the dapps themselves will not control the storage hardware. In addition to all of this, Elastos will let users save their personal data onto their own private cloud storage drive in their home. This is real data privacy. This is real data control. This needs to be taught to the public and the government.

Fay Li and Feng Han traveled to Washington DC this week to meet with a politician, Ro Khanna, about this very issue: education.

So who is he?

Ro Khanna began his Washington Post Op-Ed from last October, “Walt Whitman wrote in his poem, “Passage to India,” that the Suez Canal would enable “the earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work, the people to become brothers and sisters. . . . the lands to be welded together.” Today, this passage captures the spirit of Silicon Valley: a conviction that technology will help spread knowledge, improve connectivity and create jobs.”

Ro Khanna is a first term Democratic Representative from California’s 17th Congressional District. That makes him the representative of Silicon Valley. Ro has a vision for a more egalitarian economy, not just in Silicon Valley itself, but across America. He believes for this to happen, technology jobs have to spread. “Tech companies must offer an aspirational vision of how all Americans, regardless of geography, can benefit from a tech-driven economy.”

Mr. Khanna has a unique vision for a United States Congressman. At 41 years old, he is young among his peers and this clearly is a strength when it comes to understanding how the internet and the founding principles of American society can intersect in a way that they currently do not.

While speaking on CNBC in the wake of the Mark Zuckerberg testimony before Congress, he had this to say:

“In Europe we have a regulatory framework called the General Data Protection Regulation. We need a similar internet Bill of Rights here in the United States. That would give consumers access to data like they have access to their health care data or credit data.” “There are common sense regulations that we can adopt that would protect people’s freedoms. The right to know where your data is going, or where your data is, the right to be able to correct it, the right to be able to move it, and those are simple things.” “What the Congress needs to do is set out the general principles that give people the rights in the cyber world that they have in their ordinary lives.”

…Sounds like something you could have heard in a past issue of this section.

But the parallels continue. Last year Ro co-founded a caucus called the NO PAC Caucus for members of Congress who do not take money from Political Action Committees, and instead, only individual contributions. This ideological step towards removing the centralization of corporate money in our political system is philosophically aligned with Elastos vision of a new internet.

Fay Li and Rong Chen met with Ro Khanna in March to discuss educating Congress on blockchain technology, and now, Fay and Feng have met with him again.

This time, Ro Khanna, who has been asked by House leaders to draft an “Internet Bill of Rights,” asked Fay Li to draft a proposal for what is tentatively being called, “The United States National Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Council.”

The idea for the council is to form a group of educational experts and influencers to help educate the public and The United States Congress so that laws and measures can be taken for the success of this technology and the success of the nation. The council aims to include academics from top universities, economists, blockchain research laboratories, tech companies, exchanges, and other experts in the industry.

The council also intends to hold international conferences and help facilitate cross-border communications between the US and other governments, starting with politicians in the EU and China.

All of these ideas are the beginnings of a wave of national education on blockchain and cryptocurrency that will be fundamental for mass adoption.While there is no guarantee that the US Congress will cooperate, these plans, between Fay and Rep. Khanna, and the eventual members of this council are democracy at work. Citizens with an expertise of national interest forming a council to better society with the help of their democratically elected representative is what makes democracies great. It is also symbolic of what many blockchain projects, including Elastos, are trying to achieve: interconnectivity and cooperation that improves lives.

There is a moment right now, as the public and the government are in desperate need of understanding what many of us reading this piece already do. The tidal wave Rong speaks of. The incoming shift to an ancient idea given a modern expression. Ro has said of technology in general,

“Technology offers us hope for a new prosperity and understanding for this century. But it will take enlightened leadership. More than stock prices or product launches, Silicon Valley’s legacy will be defined by whether tech leaders step up to contribute to the larger American experiment.”

This movement will take leadership — in America and abroad.

Elastos intends to lead.

Ro Khanna does too. “Tech firms should continue expanding its recruitment strategies, looking to state schools and historically black colleges and universities beyond the Ivies, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. The industry has a long way to go in creating workplaces free of misogyny and sexism and to embrace gender equity. The industry also needs to ensure that its contract workers, whether janitors or cafeteria workers, make a decent wage and have some prospect for upward mobility.”

Here is a statistic to illustrate Ro’s last point. It was recently revealed that Jeff Bezos of Amazon makes more than the yearly median income of his employees every 10 seconds.

If Americans want upward mobility, they need to start learning about technology, not necessarily working for the big tech companies, but understanding how they can use it be a part of a globally changing economy.

It is imperative for technology insiders to contextualize this movement with the larger course of human history and equally imperative for those who know nothing of technology to learn and do the same. This movement intersects with the arts, with finances, with individual freedom, with infrastructure, with health care, with supply chain management, with globalization, centralization and decentralization, and with the governments who try to craft laws to shape our future. This is a massive international space — and one cannot take a myopic view that merely involves daily fluctuations and speculative predictions. Someone, if not many, need to think about the big picture. The big, big picture. To do that, they need to be educated.

Without education, there can be no real progress.

Take for example a congressional race in California that has brought this space into the public conversation. Brian Forde, was a senior advisor in the Office of Science and Technology Policy when Barack Obama was president. After his work in the White House he went on to MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and has been a public advocate for blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Forde is now running for a House seat against incumbent Mimi Walters in California’s 45th Congressional District. Here is where it gets interesting.

Forde is accepting Bitcoin as campaign donations, a perfectly legal act as deemed by the Federal Election Commission in 2014. However, a fellow Democrat running for the same seat, Dave Min, has run an attack ad directed at his pro-Bitcoin stance.

The ad features Forde’s face superimposed over an image of a hacker typing on screens of code. A voice over describes, “Brian Forde’s big donors” as “Bitcoin speculators that oppose cracking down on drug deals and human trafficking.”

Forde said of these ads, “These comments about my supporters are sensationalist, wildly inaccurate, and in line with my opponent’s lack of understanding of the technology,”

“While his ad disparages a technology he clearly doesn’t understand, the United Nations uses it to address human trafficking,” Forde was referring to a United Nations project in Moldova that uses blockchain-based IDs to help stop sex-trafficking. “We need more rational scientists and technologists in congress armed with evidence-based policymaking, not politicians making irrational decisions based on their emotions.”

This is a direct example of spreading misinformation about blockchain by a potential congressman trying to win a seat. But what is refreshing about this story is that on the other side is a potential congressman who does understand the technology and believes that the rest of congress should too.

Brian Forde is only 38. After working in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua, he saw the high price of phone calls and started one of the largest phone companies in the country, creating a low-cost phone service for 250,000 people. In the White House, he started a tech initiative in 72 communities to train and hire Americans for high-paying tech jobs. We need politicians who understand technology.

Europe has data privacy laws. The United Kingdom has launched a Crypto Asset Task Force. America needs an Internet Bill of Rights — and it needs a Blockchain Council. The United States needs to begin to lead on these issues before it falls behind.

We need a technologically educated society educated about technology. That includes our schools, it includes our public, and it includes our democratically elected government.

One of the issues that all projects face right now is in explaining what they offer to a layman. If we begin to teach our society about what is happening in this space we will be able to lay the foundation for understanding what each project can or cannot offer.

Elastos itself is not merely a blockchain project. As Rong says, the blockchain can only do so much. It is the idea of a decentralized and actually safe internet that could have an even bigger impact than blockchain alone. It is a massive idea, and we intend to share it and the vision of the entire blockchain industry, by helping to form a council of the best and the brightest in the space.

We must not assume to know everything, but constantly learn, and constantly teach each other.

If our governments will not lead, then we must lead for ourselves.

Let’s share the knowledge that pays the best interest. Let’s share this knowledge with other Americans and let’s share it with the world. There is a moment here, before the knowledge spreads. In filmmaking, the hour before the sun sets, and the hour after it rises, is called magic hour. Some films spend an entire day preparing for a single shot of that perfect blend of colors in the sky. Almost…alive.

The sun is now setting on one era of technology while rising on another.

But let’s not bask in this magic hour.

Let’s have the audacity to share our knowledge with the world.

Onward! Upward! Elastos!

This week Elastos announced partnerships with BIT.GAME, HashWorld, and Weatherblock, three very different projects, all with ambitious goals. While BIT.GAME and HashWorld may appear more comprehensible and even more logical on the surface, a deeper look at Weatherblock and the future of shared economic models reveals an equally interesting landscape and yet most people are completely unaware of its existence.

To do this, a little background is needed.

Jeremy Rifkin is an economic and social theorist. He taught at The Wharton School Of Business for 15 years. He is now known mainly as the author of “The Third Industrial Revolution, How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, The Economy, And The World.”

Rifkin proposes that the GDP has slowed internationally and will continue to for decades. To combat this, society must change its energy sources, its communications, and its transportation systems to a sustainable model if we are to succeed as a species in the coming century. The Internet of Things and renewable energy are at the heart of his proposal. His platform for the future was officially endorsed by the European Union in 2007 in a vision called Smart Europe, now a $744 billion dollar initiative. That same initiative in now in China. To quote Rifkin,

“When President Xi and Premier Li came into office, Premier Li published his official biography, which mentioned that he had read my book The Third Industrial Revolution and had instructed the central government to pay close attention to the narrative and proposals outlined in the book. President Xi and Premier Li realized that their country had been locked out of the first Industrial Revolution and much of the second, and they didn’t want to lose out on the third. Shortly after the first of several formal visits I had with Chinese leaders, the chairman of the national electric power grid announced an [US]$82 billion commitment to digitize the state electric power grid in the current Five-Year Plan. Millions of Chinese people can produce their own solar and wind power, and use it locally or sell it back to the grid. With the Belt and Road project, they’re moving the same technologies to other countries. China calls this digital transformation the Internet Plus revolution, which is similar to the Smart Europe initiative.”

Just this week President Xi Jinping said in a speech,

“A new generation of technology represented by artificial intelligence, quantum information, mobile communications, internet of things and blockchain is accelerating breakthrough applications.”

He went on to say,

“A new round of scientific and industrial revolution is reconstructing the global innovation map and reshaping the global economic structure.”

Mr. Rifkin’s vision is far too large and meticulously researched to cover here. But the basics will illustrate how Elastos fits in with nothing less than the future of our society’s success.

Here is Rifkin’s definition of a technology platform.

“At a certain moment in time, three technologies emerge and converge to create in what we call in engineering a general-purpose technology platform. That’s a fancy way of saying ‘a new infrastructure’ that fundamentally changes the way we manage power and move economic life. What are those three technologies? First, new communication technologies to allow us to more efficiently manage our economic activity. Second, new sources of energy, to allow us to more efficiently power our economic activity. And third, new modes of mobility, transportation logistics, to allow us to more efficiently move the economic activity. So when communication revolutions join with new energy regimes it does change the way we manage power and move economic life.”

The first industrial revolution began in the 19th century. It started in England as a communications revolution combining the new technologies of steam powered printing and the telegraph, with the new energy of coal. This led to the steam engine, and then, to the railroads.

The second industrial revolution began in the 20th century. It started in The United States when centralized electricity and the new technologies of the telephone, the radio, and then the television, combined with the new energy of oil.

According to Rifkin, the one important factor that economists have not historically included in economic models is called ‘aggregate efficiency.’“Aggregate efficiency is the ratio of potential work to the actual useful work that gets embedded into a product or service. The higher the aggregate efficiency of a good or service, the less waste is produced in every single conversion in its journey across the value chain.” He makes it clearer with this example. If a lion hunting an antelope chases the antelope down and then kills it and eats it for energy, about 10–20% of the antelope’s energy then becomes ‘embedded’ into the lion. The rest of the energy is lost in the conversion. This percentage that the lion gets is the ‘aggregate efficiency.’

In 1905, when the 2nd industrial revolution began in The United States, there was a 3% aggregate efficiency. By the 1990’s, The United States hit its ceiling on that ratio with an aggregate efficiency of 14%. But the ceiling was also hit worldwide. The economic model of the 2nd Industrial revolution plateaued everywhere. Even Japan, which hit a 20% ratio, never went any higher.

This second industrial revolution took society all the way into the 21st century, where it finally peaked in July of 2008. It was a month that saw oil hit a record price of $147 per barrel that simultaneously stalled global economies. This was the economic earthquake. 60 days later, the world financial markets collapsed…this was the aftershock. The financial collapse of 2008, the worst since the Great Depression, caused by the downward pinnacle of an outdated fossil fuel infrastructure, signaled the coming end of an unsustainable era, and yet… a new beginning.

Because something else happened in that same aftershock…as if the script of history is penned by more than one trajectory at a time, perhaps a narrative with a pendulum-like balance. On Halloween of 2008, amidst the peak price in the history of oil and the global financial markets epic collapse, amidst actual international doom and demise, an anonymous figure released an essay of sorts about a new technology…it was a whitepaper for something called Bitcoin…it’s author, Satoshi Nakamoto.

These events occurring together is no mere coincidence and looking back decades from now it will not be seen as one.

One giant door may have been shut on human progress, but another door was opened, and it remains open today.

The question after 2008 became, for those willing to look forward with a realistic view of the future and its specific challenges was, how do we create a new sustainable economy with new energy sources and new technologies to support it?

Rifkin puts it this way,

“Communication internet is converging with a nascent, digitalized, renewable-energy internet. And now both of these internets are converging with a fledgling, automated, GPS, and very soon driverless, road, rail, water, and air transport, to create three internets: communication internet, renewable energy internet, automated transportation-logistic internet. One super internet to manage power and move economic life.”

This is a vision of smart agriculture, smart homes, smarts cars, smart roads, smart sensors all collecting data and creating immense efficiency and economic opportunity for everyone. Rifkin predicts this internet will be ubiquitous by 2030. He calls it, “A distributed nervous system,” that will allow citizens of the Earth to directly engage each other at minimum cost and circumvent middle men that before, separated us. He states, “This is the revolution. This evens the playing field.”

“This new platform is really radical, because the third industrial revolution platform is designed to be distributed, not centralized. It works best when it is collaborative, and open, and transparent, rather than closed and proprietary. And benefits come when more and more people join the network, and each contributes their talents, which benefit the network and then benefits us. This is what moves us from the 1% and the 99% to a vast, vast expansion of social entrepreneurialism and global networks.”

…if the above quote is not a definition of the goal of Elastos…what is?

Here is where it gets very interesting and very important. We can have an interconnected society with sensors that enable data to flow and create efficiency, renewable energy, and economic growth for individuals instead of only corporations…but Rifkin raises some serious concerns after stating, “I am not a techno-determinist. I am not a utopian.”

Here the real-world concerns raised by Rifkin as we head towards this new model.

How do we ensure that everyone has access to this new platform?

How do we ensure governments don’t steal this platform?

How do we ensure the giant monopolies, many on the internet, don’t use the data for their own commercial purposes at our expense?

How do we ensure privacy when everyone’s connected?

How do we ensure data security when everyone’s connected?

How do we prevent cyber crime and cyber terrorism that could disrupt the system and take it down when everyone’s connected?

He says about these concerns, “The DarkNet is as impressive as an opportunity as the BrightNet. This is an uphill battle. This is not a cakewalk.”

Elastos is the BrightNet.

The prospect of the DarkNet is one of the most serious challenges in the coming decades. There is no doubt that the more connected we become, the more security issues we face. There is also no doubt that we must drastically change our ways in the world and online if we are to succeed as a global family.

Elastos is the definition of a new technology platform, providing a new infrastructure for the convergence of new communications, new sources of energy, and new modes of transportation. But most importantly, every one of Rifkin’s concerns can be addressed with the potential of Elastos. Access. Decentralization. Privacy. Data ownership. Revolutionary security for people and smart devices. A global economic platform for person to person exchange of digital assets and data, including new energy sources. Who else can say that?

“Our society, especially our young people are going to be heavily engaged in a new political movement and that movement is going to ensure against the DarkNet prevailing and making sure that we all have equal access, so that the human family can engage in a distributed nervous system to begin to have a vast expansion of social entrepreneurialism.” “The 62 richest people on Earth now have the combined wealth of half the population of Earth, over 3.5 billion people. There is something really dysfunctional about the way the human family is organizing its economic relationships on this Earth.”

Human family….what a very particular way of looking at society. It is a view that Elastos shares.

This is an immense and global family we are building — and you reading this are a unique part of it. This is a movement. Rong is not our leader nor is he our boss, and this is not his project. It is ours and he is one of us. We are all modern entrepreneurs here. We are the future of this Earth and the stakes are extremely high.

What is interesting about Rifkin’s ideas is that at their core is the concept of zero-marginal cost, meaning that some goods and services will become nearly free to produce and will be able to be shared with one another for free. While this concept is hard to imagine for many, what is even more interesting than sharing things that are limitless like solar and wind, is being able to make things that were limitless, scarce.

While being agreeable with Rifkin’s theories is certainly a contextualization that is much needed to understand the massive scope of Elastos, throwing a wrench in them is fun too.

Rifkin is not, or was not before, familiar with the idea of scarcity of digital assets. In fact, he frequently mentions Napster as the dawn of zero-marginal cost economies on the internet where one can very cheaply produce music and videos and books and then share them for free. While this is true, this is one area where margins would actually help the individual. Content does not pour out of us like cosmic energy from the sun. Those who take the time to produce it, even for near zero cost, deserve a platform to be paid for it and create some margin for their time and effort. Elastos is marvelously part of the future of the modern economy and yet floating above it because of its unique technological vision.

But back to sharing limitless goods that will help to heal our economies and our planet.

If we can monetize the value of art, of music, of literature, of cinema, and even of time…why can we no