Chris’ note: As we looked at yesterday, cryptos such as bitcoin (BTC) are changing the world of money. But as you’ll see today, there’s a lot more to crypto and the blockchain technology behind it.

Jeff Brown is best known for his tech stock recommendations. But he’s also been heavily involved in blockchain tech. As an angel investor, he’s backed global payments business Ripple (XRP) as well as one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, Coinbase (COIN).

Below, he details a private meeting about how blockchain tech will shape the future of the internet. And next Wednesday, August 25, at 8 p.m. ET, he’ll reveal his full vision of the next evolution of the internet – Web 3.0. Make sure you sign up for that here.

Now, over to Jeff…

The first thing I noticed about the room were the bookshelves…

The wood-paneled library on the fourth floor of The Yale Club, in Midtown Manhattan, houses an extensive book collection.

Classics of American literature greeted us from floor to ceiling.

The place is reserved for Yale alumni and their guests.

In 2019, I completed an executive leadership program at the Yale School of Management. As a member of the club, I was able to book a meeting room just off the library.

Around the table sat several of my colleagues.

To my left was the guy we were there to meet – an influential executive with a ton of experience in blockchain technology.

For confidentiality reasons, I won’t reveal his name or the company he works for. But I hold him in high regard. He’s a heavy hitter in the world of digital assets – what most folks know as “cryptos.”

The goal of our meeting was to figure out the future of blockchain… and the potentially life-changing returns it offers everyday investors.

More Than Just Another Industry

A lot of folks still have fuzzy views of blockchain tech and the projects that use it.

You often hear people refer to “the blockchain,” as though there were just one of them.

People also commonly refer to the “blockchain industry,” as though it were distinct from other industries.

But blockchain is more than just another industry.

It’s a new way of doing things that will touch virtually every aspect of our lives. It also involves a new model of economic incentives that allows for new ways of working.

An interesting parallel is the rise of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s. Many of us can remember what our lives were like before the internet became ever-present.

We shopped at brick-and-mortar stores. We chatted over landline telephones. And the only file storage we had involved manila envelopes in metal cabinets.

The World Wide Web changed that.

Today, many of us shop at Amazon.com (AMZN). We talk to colleagues and family in Zoom (ZM) meetings. We connect with our friends over Facebook (FB). And we store our files in the cloud using apps such as Dropbox (DBX).

What areas of our lives has the internet not changed? If I made a list, it would probably be a small one.

It will be the same with blockchain. The only difference is the effects will be even more profound.

So we shouldn’t put blockchain technology in a box. Saying we’re investing in the “blockchain industry” is like saying we’re investing in the “internet industry.”

The internet is a game changer for many different industries at once. The same goes for blockchain. This new tech is too far-reaching to think of in such narrow terms.

Introducing Web 3.0

As you may already know, a blockchain is a digital ledger that’s distributed across an online network.

So instead of having one copy of records in one centralized ledger, there are complete and perfect copies of the records across the network.

Because blockchains are decentralized, there’s no single point of failure. So it’s impossible to duplicate or forge records. And there’s no need for a third party, such as a bank, to vouch for the veracity of the records.

Blockchains are also cryptographically protected. This makes for extremely secure transactions.

And once you add the record of a transaction to a blockchain, it’s permanent.

Blockchains can also run “smart contracts” in a decentralized, tamperproof way.

But here’s a better way to think of blockchain: It’s what I call “Web 3.0.”

Web 1.0 was born when British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

He outlined a protocol called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

This allowed a computer screen to display text that would take you to another piece of text using hyperlinks (what we now simply call links).

This protocol – among others – became a building block of the internet.

But Web 1.0 was very basic. It was essentially a collection of static web pages connected to each other via hyperlinks.

Web 2.0 is what we have today. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, companies built on the foundational protocols to offer new products and services online.

Amazon.com, Facebook, Google (GOOG), and Netflix (NFLX) are some of the most well-known Web 2.0 companies. They disrupted legacy industries and offered new and efficient ways to shop, search, connect, and entertain.

This phase of the Web brought streaming audio and video… along with social media.

Now we’re in the early stages of Web 3.0. Blockchain tech powers this next generation of the internet.

This is more than just a new technological architecture. Embedded in Web 3.0 is a new philosophy.

Web 2.0 is centralized. Big Tech firms in Silicon Valley control it. As a result, it’s prone to censorship.

Web 3.0, by contrast, will be open and decentralized. And it will allow the free exchange of ideas.

A Web 3.0 app can support virtually every area of our modern lives:

  • Internet browsers – Chrome → Brave

  • File storage – Google, Dropbox, Box → Filecoin, Storj, Siacoin, IPFS

  • Electronic voting systems – Dominion → Voatz

  • Domain Name Systems – DNS → Handshake

  • Identity – Okta, OneLogin → Civic, uPort

  • Social Media – Facebook, Snapchat → Steemit, AKASHA

  • Video/audio chat – Skype, Zoom → Experty, Status

  • Network computation – AWS, Google → DFINITY, Sonim, Golem

I could go on. Web 3.0 is on target to disrupt nearly every aspect of Web 2.0. And every blockchain-enabled Web 3.0 app can perform the same tasks better, faster, and cheaper.

That’s because, among other things, they prevent censorship… cut out middlemen… and allow for lower transaction fees.

Now Is the Time to Invest

This is what we discussed in that small meeting room on the fourth floor of The Yale Club.

It wasn’t a discussion about a single digital asset. Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s first and most famous cryptocurrency, came up only occasionally during the three-hour meeting.

Rather, our conversation was about a fundamentally different technological architecture for the internet. A “brand-new arena,” as the blockchain executive we met with put it.

For us as investors, now is the time to increase our exposure to this new technology and invest in the companies and projects ushering in Web 3.0.

This has been a long time coming. I’ve been involved in this space as an analyst and private investor for nearly a decade. And I’ve mostly held off on making cryptocurrency recommendations to my subscribers in all that time because of the Wild West-style volatility in the space.

But imagine investing in the protocols that gave rise to Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Netflix. That’s the opportunity we have in front of us right now.

We’re in the middle of creating a new kind of internet that’s decentralized… censorship-resistant… and not based around the for-profit surveillance model it’s based on today.

So I’m inviting you to join me on August 25 at 8:00 p.m. ET for my Click for Crypto event.

There, I’ll share my vision for Web 3.0… and how we’ll begin our journey as investors in blockchain tech and digital assets. Simply go right here to reserve your spot for free.

Regards,

Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge