The tech industry is known for constantly bundling and unbundling different services and features to innovate and create new products. For example, Apple bundled various components of the PC market to create their computers and iTunes unbundled CDs by allowing users to purchase individual songs instead of full albums. Opendoor bundled real estate agent services with home selling by acquiring and then selling houses from their inventory. Google bundles various services to increase user time on their platform and sell more ads, while Netflix combines distribution and content creation for movies.
Similarly, ChatGPT is unbundling Google by offering a standalone service that focuses on core business features like search and information procurement. Amazon unbundled retail stores by allowing customers to find specific products without visiting physical stores. Social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter unbundled the Facebook post by offering picture-only or text-only posts, respectively.
Understanding these bundling and unbundling processes is crucial for analyzing technology development. This cyclical behavior of grouping, ungrouping, and regrouping is a fundamental law of tech advancement. Modern cryptography represents a rebundling of core human interaction features that have been lost over time due to technological evolution.
Historically, human communication was inherently private, with interactions happening in person and being confidential and ephemeral in nature. However, as technology advanced, privacy was traded for scalability and persistence. For instance, smoke signals, pen and paper, carrier pigeons, telegraphs, and telephones all offered enhanced communication scale but reduced privacy. The internet, controlled by a few corporations, lacks privacy despite being highly scalable.
The current trend in technology has been sacrificing privacy for scalability and persistence, resulting in decreased security and privacy in communication. This anti-correlation between scalability and privacy indicates that achieving one comes at the expense of the other. Modern cryptography aims to rebundle privacy and communication while maintaining scalability, bringing back elements of privacy, security, and uncensorability in human connections.
DeFi, with its blockchain transparency and privacy-enhancing features like pseudonymity and censorship resistance, serves as an example of rebundling privacy and communication in financial transactions. This marks a significant shift in technology's role in preserving privacy and security while achieving scalability and permanence. However, the future impact of quantum computing on privacy in technology remains uncertain.
