We accidentally built the wrong internet

Summary

Imagine a simple tool for the internet, built from scratch for today's world. One app. One thing you own. It proves who you are and lets you pay for things all in one place. Something only you control. No middlemen. No passwords. No credit cards.When a website wants to know it's really you, you don't type anything. You just tap "Yes", like unlocking your phone with your face. That tap is a silent, secure confirmation that you're you, but no one learns anything about you, and nothing gets stored or stolen.When you want to buy something? Same thing. One tap. It's like handing over cash, but digital, no forms, no card numbers to fill out, no companies keeping your payment info forever.One tool. One tap. Works everywhere. Secure by design. Built for people, not corporations.Now, let's engage in a thought experiment. Imagine this elegant system doesn't exist and we're gathered in a conference room in the late 1990s, designing the identity layer for the web. A rogue engineer stands up and says: "I've got a better idea.""Okay, instead of giving users a tool they control, we'll make them rely on a centralized third-party account: an email address, hosted by some company somewhere. Those companies could read your messages, shut you out anytime, and track where you go online. That email will be your username for everything because it's easy to remember and people get to choose how their email looks.""For proving who you are, we'll use passwords, just some words or symbols people have to remember. But people suck at remembering dozens of strong ones, so they'll reuse the same password everywhere. To fix that, we'll need another app called a password manager, just to survive our own bad idea.""Is it more secure?" someone asks."No. It's worse. Every website will now store millions of passwords or hashes of these in giant databases. Hackers will constantly break in and steal them. These leaks will happen weekly. We'll just accept it as normal and have websites to look up if you w...