I’ve been thinking about defensive vs offensive use cases enabled by blockchain. It's been well noted that cryptography is one of the tools that actually gives a defender the advantage. And this is critical for financial use cases:

• You can't seize my assets just because I have different ideologies than you.

• You can’t prevent me from participating in an early stage project capital formation event just because of the country I live in or the fact that I didn’t inherit generational wealth.

• You can’t take a 14% fee when I transfer money to my family overseas.

Each of these examples is highly valuable to an enormous number of users, to the point where a digital first open financial system is so undeniably compelling that it’s inevitable that it disrupts or lives healthily alongside the status quo. But when it comes to the creator economy, and media more broadly, the defensive capabilities feel like theoretical nice-to-haves that actually open the door for more questions than the answers they provide. For example:

• The homepage of a censorship resistant video platform would be a pretty dark place.

• Having full confidence that the video you watched or the photo you are viewing was unmodified, and was signed by the original creator, would be nice. But is anybody actually leaving Youtube and Twitter just because another forward thinking media site adopts a green check mark next to media assets to give users more confidence in them? Are publishers updating their whole tool chain just to get this green check mark?

These sorts of defensive benefits of censorship defense and verifiability of content definitely open up interesting possibilities if applied correctly, but I think in the creator economy and media world, it is more disruptive to think about going on offense, and attracting a user base due to new capabilities that are enabled. Some themes:

• Collaborative content creation, coordinated via smart contracts.

• New collective funding models for content creation, curation, and distribution that incentivize communities to become part of the creator’s team, and share in the rewards of the growth.

• Associating value flows to the remixing and distribution of open content.

New types of media will be formed. New creators will emerge. Existing creators will adapt and complement their existing content and audiences via these platforms, rather than being asked to replace their existing workflows for defense against some theoretical future harm.

I’m thinking it’s more likely that we’ll see a big breakout enabled via aggressively building for these new capabilities, rather than leading with trying to defend society against the fears of harms caused by big tech and future AI.