00:00Here at the Web3 Summit in Berlin, conversations over the future of connectivity and the internet have shifted.
00:07The question is no longer how to make money from blockchain.
00:11It is whether blockchain can change who controls the internet itself.
00:16Less trust, but more truth.
00:19That's one of the main messages at Web3 Summit,
00:22where developers, economists, and activists are debating whether decentralized technology can deliver on its original promise to put more power
00:31in the hands of users.
00:33On average, for a person in the world that's over the course of a digital lifetime,
00:38they give about $162,000 worth of value to various companies without knowing it.
00:46The danger in AI often is the data that it gets from you.
00:50However, what we don't want is that it knows your particular information.
00:55And by using Web3 privacy-preserving technology,
00:58we actually can prevent these AIs from getting a hold of that data in the first place to do anything
01:03bad.
01:03Economist Yanis Varoufakis says the debate is ultimately about power.
01:08Who owns the infrastructure that shapes our digital lives?
01:12Every political regime, which is unsustainable because of this clash between what is in the interest of the many
01:22and what is in the interest of the few, can only be ameliorated through democratic action.
01:30Web3 has applications, but it's too expensive and too unwieldy
01:37in order to be able to counter the exorbitant power of big tech, of what I call the techno-feudal
01:45sector.
01:46Others, including blockchain activists, believe that while the technology's original vision
01:51may have been overshadowed by speculation,
01:54there is still opportunity to focus on community ownership and utilizing it for the collective good.
02:00Being inspired from the existing solidarity economy, like cooperative banks, the cooperative movement in general,
02:09we've built a bunch of applications that try to do that,
02:12where we try to bring together something like local currencies and credit unions into one
02:18so that people are able to collectivize their wealth to some degree
02:21and then decide how their money gets distributed.
02:23The idea for us is that you should have a place where you can put your money
02:28and the interest that's being generated from that money is going to the things that you support instead.
02:34From blockchain to artificial intelligence, the race is on to define the next era of the internet.
02:41The biggest question remains, will it belong to the platforms that build it or the people who use it?
02:47Laila Humaira, Euronews, Berlin.
02:53Laila Humaira, Euronews, Berlin.
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