Read Write Own
Click here to buy the book.🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Read Write Own traces the history of the internet and offers both a vision for a better future and a playbook for building it.
The book shows how the internet has gone through three distinct eras, bringing us to the critical moment we face today.
Read Write Own is for anyone who wants to better understand the potential of blockchains and Web3 and their role in rebuilding a decentralized internet.
🧠 Key Takeaways
Unlike the industrial era, where dominance came from cutting production costs, online it comes from networks that grow stronger with each additional user.
The difference between a protocol network and a corporate network really comes down to centralized power versus decentralized power. Corporate networks, like Twitter or Instagram, are owned outright by the companies behind them. That means the power belongs entirely to the corporation. Protocol networks are the opposite. Take email or the web as examples—nobody owns them, and nobody can unilaterally decide how they should work.
You can think of tokens as digital containers, and you can put just about anything inside one. If it can be written in code, it can live inside a token. Once something is wrapped inside a token, you can move it around however you want. You can buy it, sell it, trade it, store it, or use it to unlock access to something else.
Tokens on decentralized networks usually give their holders some sort of power—whether that’s voting rights, governance input, or influence over how the blockchain evolves. That’s one of the biggest advantages of owning tokens in a blockchain ecosystem. But when tokens are issued by a corporate network, like Google or even Visa (which has been experimenting with tokenization), they lose that main benefit. The company behind them still has all the control, so holding the token is basically meaningless.
For the first time in the history of the internet, users can do more than just consume or publish. Through the possession of tokens, they can also participate as true stakeholders in the networks they use.
One of the biggest tells that a product is going to be disruptive is how fast people adopt it. When something is truly disruptive, it improves at an exponential pace. And when that happens, people feel like they have to use it.
Every time someone uses Ethereum, they pay fees in ETH. A portion of those fees gets burned (taken out of circulation), which reduces supply. If demand for applications on the Ethereum network keeps growing while supply shrinks, the logic is that the price of ETH goes up.
When more money flows directly to creators, the entire ecosystem improves. It lowers the barriers for others to follow a similar path, encourages more independent and original ideas, and ultimately raises the overall level of knowledge being shared.
✍️ Memorable Quotes
“The internet economy turbocharges networks. In an industrial economy, corporations accrue power mainly through economies of scope and scale; that is, ways of decreasing production costs. The diminishing marginal cost of producing more steel, cars, pharmaceutical drugs, fizzy sugar water, or whatever other widget lends an advantage to whoever owns and invests in the means of production. On the internet, the marginal costs of distribution are negligible, so power primarily accrues another way: through network effects.”
Network effects are one of the strongest competitive advantages a business can have. The idea is pretty simple: the more people who join the network, the more valuable it becomes for everyone else.
Take Facebook as an example. Every new user who creates a profile makes the platform more attractive. Friends (and eventually, society as a whole) join because they don’t want to miss out, and advertisers want a piece of the network because that’s where the attention is.
And once you’re on the platform, leaving isn’t easy. You want to be where your friends are, and the more connections you’ve built—and the more content you’ve shared—the harder it is to walk away. That stickiness only intensified once algorithms began tailoring feeds to your interests, giving you a personalized reason to keep coming back.
In a nutshell, that’s the power of the internet economy. Unlike the industrial era, where dominance came from cutting production costs, online it comes from networks that grow stronger with each additional user.
“The difference between a protocol network like email and a corporate network like Twitter is that email’s network effect accrues to a community instead of a company. No company owns or controls email and anyone can access it through software created by independent developers that supports the underlying protocol. It’s up to developers and consumers to decide what to build and use. Decisions that affect the community are made by the community.”
The difference between a protocol network and a corporate network really comes down to centralized power versus decentralized power.
Corporate networks, like Twitter or Instagram, are owned outright by the companies behind them. That means the power belongs entirely to the corporation.
They make the rules, they can change the rules whenever they want, and there isn’t anything users can do about it. If you’re on their platform, you’re playing by their rules.
Protocol networks are the opposite. Take email or the web as examples—nobody owns them, and nobody can unilaterally decide how they should work.
These protocol networks are built on open standards that anyone can use. Developers can build on top of them, but they don’t control the underlying network, which means they don’t own the users.
As an example: I use a company called Kit as my email service provider. They manage my subscriber list, my templates, all of that—but they don’t own any of it. And they don’t own my actual email address (ryne@retirewithryne.com).
If Kit ever started trying to dictate what I could or couldn’t send to my readers, I could just export my list and move to another provider—of which there are plenty. That flexibility exists because email is a protocol network.
Now compare that to Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok. Once again, these are corporate networks. They do own my name (@retirewithryne on those platforms), and they absolutely control my relationship with my audience.
If they don’t like what I post, they can ban or shadowban me, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t export my followers and take them somewhere else since they only exist inside that company’s walled garden.
That’s the key difference here: with protocol networks, power is distributed and users have freedom of choice. With corporate networks, power is centralized, and users are at the mercy of the company.
“Software is an art form, as you’ll remember: just as you wouldn’t expect all great novels or paintings to come from people at established institutions, so you shouldn’t expect all great software to come from them either.”
It would be shortsighted to think that only developers at renowned companies are capable of creating software worth using. The same applies to any craft, really.
It’d be like saying the only people who can make real music are the ones who studied at Berklee. Or that the only people who can be successful investors are the ones who passed a Series 7 exam. It just wouldn’t be true.
In the same way, DIY developers can build incredible software. “Ordinary” people do extraordinary things all the time.
“Tokens can represent the ownership of anything digital, including money, art, photos, music, text, code, game items, voting power, access, or whatever people come up with next. Using some additional building blocks, they can also represent real-world things, like physical goods, real estate, or dollars in a bank account. Anything that can be represented in code can be wrapped inside a token to be bought, sold, used, stored, embedded, transferred, or whatever else a person might want to do with it.”
You can think of tokens as digital containers, and you can put just about anything inside one—money, photos, music, or anything else. If it can be written in code, it can live inside a token.
And tokens aren’t just limited to online stuff. They can represent real-world things too.
For example, think about the deed to your house or the title to your car. Normally, those live as stacks of paperwork at the county clerk’s office or the DMV. But with a token, that ownership could exist as a single digital record that proves you’re the rightful owner.
The blockchain that the token is built on would act like a giant public notary, keeping the record safe, transparent, and tamper-proof.
The point is, once something is wrapped inside a token, you can move it around however you want. You can buy it, sell it, trade it, store it, or use it to unlock access to something else.
In a nutshell, tokens are basically the Swiss Army knife of ownership in the digital age.
“Tokens enable ownership, and ownership means control. Tokens that run on traditional computers, like the hypothetical GoogleCoin example from earlier, can be taken away or changed at will, undermining user control. Tokens that run on computers that can make strong commitments about future behavior namely, blockchains unlock the technology’s true potential.”
Tokens on decentralized networks usually give their holders some sort of power—whether that’s voting rights, governance input, or influence over how the blockchain evolves. That’s one of the biggest advantages of owning tokens in a blockchain ecosystem.
But when tokens are issued by a corporate network, like Google or even Visa (which has been experimenting with tokenization), they lose that main benefit. The company behind them still has all the control, so holding the token is basically meaningless.
“The read era of the internet was defined by the website, which encapsulated information. The read-write era was defined by the post, which encapsulated publishing, making it easy for anyone, not just web developers, to reach broad audiences. The internet’s latest phase the read-write-own era is defined by a new simplifying concept: tokens, which encapsulate ownership.”
This quote lays out the three distinct eras of the internet, and it’s where the book’s title comes from.
In the first era, the read era, you could browse websites and consume information, but creating your own website was difficult and required specialized skills. Most people were limited to being passive readers.
That changed with the rise of the read-write era. Things like blogs and social media democratized publishing, which made it possible for anyone (not just developers) to post content and reach large audiences. In this era, the internet wasn’t just a place to consume information, but also to contribute to it.
With that said, in both of these eras, nobody actually owned the internet itself. You could own your own website on the internet, but those were more like plots of land built on top of the network—not a stake in the network itself.
That’s what makes today’s shift into the read-write-era so significant. This third era introduces tokens, which allow people to actually own part of a decentralized network.
For the first time, users can do more than just consume or publish. Through the possession of tokens, they can also participate as true stakeholders in the networks they use.
“Disruptive products ride exponential forces that cause them to improve at surprising rates. Products that get better incrementally are not disruptive. Bit-by-bit improvements yield weak forces. Exponential growth comes from stronger forces that have compounding effects, including network effects and platform-app feedback loops.”
One of the biggest tells that a product is going to be disruptive is how fast people adopt it.
When something is truly disruptive, it improves at an exponential pace. And when that happens, people feel like they have to use it.
Let’s look at the iPhone, for example. From the time it first came out, it wasn’t just another phone — it was a platform. Every app that got built on top of it made the iPhone itself more valuable, which created a feedback loop that expedited adoption.
Same with Facebook and Instagram. Every new user who joined made the platform more useful to everyone else, to the point where it almost didn’t feel like an option anymore — you had to be there.
We’re seeing the same thing today with ChatGPT. The more people use it, the better it gets. And the more integrations and tools that get built around it, the more valuable it becomes.
That’s what disruptive products do. They spread like a wildfire because their network effects and feedback loops are just so strong.
“Ethereum generates the token equivalent of cash flow. The more applications written for Ethereum, and the more those applications get used, the greater the demand for computing time and for Ethereum’s native token. The supply of ether varies but, generally, after all faucets and sinks are accounted for, has stayed relatively flat (in the past it increased slowly; recently it has been decreasing). This means the price of ether should roughly correlate with the popularity of applications built on the network. By studying the cash flows and burn rates of blockchain networks, you can value tokens like Ethereum’s using traditional financial metrics such as price-to-earnings ratios.”
Since stocks are slivers of actual businesses, you can value them based on their cash flows, profits, dividends, etc. There’s something tangible there that you can use to estimate its intrinsic value.
Obviously, something like Ethereum doesn’t have cash flows or profits, and it doesn’t represent ownership of a company. However, the quote here says that you can treat the network activity like the token equivalent of cash flow.
Every time someone uses Ethereum, they pay fees in ETH. A portion of those fees gets burned (taken out of circulation), which reduces supply. If demand for applications on the Ethereum network keeps growing while supply shrinks, the logic is that the price of ETH goes up.
Still, you’re ultimately betting that network usage will keep growing, and that the supply/demand dynamics will push the price higher over time. To me, it sounds like what the quote is describing is closer to being some sort of pseudo cash flow than it is to being a traditional cash-flowing asset.
“Some blockchain networks will be skeuomorphic, doing what could have been done before, but better. Social networks are an obvious choice. They’re where people spend the most time, they influence billions of users ideas and behaviors, and they’re the primary economic engine for creators. Blockchains can create social networks that eliminate the high take rates and capricious rules that characterize today’s corporate networks.”
One of the biggest problems with most social networks is that creators don’t actually make money from them, with the exception of YouTube who pays out 55% of their ad revenue to creators. But other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok pay almost nothing, if anything.
That’s what the quote means by “high take rates.” These companies keep all of the value because they’re the ones who control the platform, and creators are left with nothing (from ad revenue), even though they’re the ones keeping users on the platform.
Blockchains flip that model on its head. Since they’re open, decentralized systems, creators can be paid directly without a corporate middleman keeping everything for itself.
In practice, it could look like a fraction of a token automatically landing in your wallet every time someone liked, shared, or interacted with your post. The rules are baked into the code, not set by a corporate team that can change policies on a whim.
“Low take rates have a multiplier effect. More money to the edges of the network means more people reach an income level where they can pursue creative work full-time. The two-tier class system that divides creators and users on most social networks would become more permeable. Barriers to social mobility would ease as more users could build sustainable media enterprises of one. Meanwhile, full-time work would result in better-quality content for others to consume, attracting larger audiences and generating more income across the network.”
As a full-time creator myself, I’m very much in favor of this idea. If more people could actually make a living doing what they love, the results would show up not just in the quality of their work but in the happiness and energy they bring to it.
And that creates a ripple effect: better content means better information, which sparks better ideas being shared, which benefits society as a whole.
In other words, when more money flows directly to creators, the entire ecosystem improves. It lowers the barriers for others to follow a similar path, encourages more independent and original ideas, and ultimately raises the overall level of knowledge being shared.
Alchemy is Rory Sutherland’s deep dive into the weird ways people make decisions, and how out-of-the-box thinking can solve problems that reason alone can’t.