On-Chain Freedom is the New Freedom

Ten new on-chain rights for parity in power, control, money, and health

We're all fed up with how tech platforms control our lives and dig deeper into our pockets. That is about to change—for the better. Going on-chain gives everyone a fair shot—by restoring rights and rewards to the people who create value. Working on-chain engages a world of new freedoms and incentives. Here are some ways to think about the new possibilities—for parity in power, control, money, and health.

You say you want a Revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world.—Lennon–McCartney | 1968

Web3 Restores Parity Through Bargaining Power

Parity means equality—in power, status, or share—and it's the foundation of a level playing field. Platforms, buyers, and institutions used to control the rules. Web3 changes legacy advantages by embedding greater individual choice throughout the economy. On-chain, you will be able to walk away from business and personal relationships that no longer serve you. You can duplicate current technology services and “fork” into new communities that create value on terms you set. Put simply, Web3 delivers bargaining power parity. Parity means a level playing field, which is how systems finally start working better for people who create value, and less well for those who control or distribute value.

Web3 Rewards Value Creation, Not Attention Capture

In Web2, outrage and disruption win attention, likes and engagement. In Web3, reputation and regard arise from what you build, contribute, or solve—and treat others—not how loud you are. What does online look like when destructive advantages dissolve? When incentives shift from destruction to value creation? From rewards to be a jerk, to rewards for being useful? One change is that trolls won't get likes and TV contracts—they’ll get voted off the island.

Web3 Embeds Ethics and the Consent of the Governed

Web3 systems reward coordination over control—and cooperation over coercion. Today, platforms change the rules without asking. In the future—you’ll give consent to change even the smallest of things. Permissions move us from unilateral platform rule to transparent consent of the governed. Think of the change as Terms and Conditions you co-author.

Incentives. Ethics. Responsibilities.

What happens when your identity, data, assets, and work can move with you? How do incentives and bargaining power shift when you can walk away and start something new—without losing what you’ve built? These possibilities are the antidote for dismay.

Systems designed to keep promises—around people, data, and money—will change the world, especially for very poor people who live with fragility, unpredictability, and structural unreliability. Vague, unenforceable promises will become reliable agreements, which means most of us will prefer to work on-chain. If a smart contract promises that when A happens, B transacts—it does.

Incentives change when everyone has parity power, transparent rights, and plays by the same rules—rules that can’t be changed without the consent of the governed. When outcomes are consistent, rights are enforceable, and systems can’t be rigged, exploitation incentives dissolve. Web3 creates a different world.

On-chain Rights and Owning Your Value

Clarification: The following are true for Digital Public Infrastructure and technologies like Holochain. Not every right here will attach to Ethereum and some other types of blockchains.

One. Control Your Money

Zero gatekeepers. Your assets can’t be frozen, seized, reversed, manipulated or de-banked.

What it means: Because you’ll control on-chain assets directly, transactions no longer require banks, brokers, or middlemen. On-chain systems let you trade and access global markets without asking permission from anyone other than maybe, your customers. Removing traditional trust mechanisms lowers costs, increases efficiency, and unlocks trapped value.

Why it’s powerful: Your assets can’t be frozen, seized, or reversed. Transactions are transparent and hard to manipulate. You can’t be de-banked.

The tradeoff: Transactions are programmed to execute automatically. You’re responsible for your cryptographic key. Lose it, and you lose access to your assets. There’s no reset, no one to call, no recovery.

Two. A Private Digital Life

Decentralized networks create privacy, safety and resilience by neutering algorithms and surveillance capitalism.

Privacy and control are possible now because Web3 systems run on decentralized protocols. Decentralization means that services operate on servers distributed across multiple countries and devices, reducing reliance on any single point of control. In practice, distributed computation spreads across regions and devices so services keep running—even if there are regional disasters or other disruptions. The most decentralized, lowest cost tech uses the spare computing power of community phones and laptops.

There are lots of reasons to prefer decentralized networks, but the two most important are privacy and resilience. The Telegram messaging app decentralized to resist censorship. When Russia tried to block Telegram in 2018, the company used decentralization evasively. Even with extreme measures—like blocking large swaths of the internet—Russia couldn’t completely shut down Telegram.

When technology experts say "no single authority controls your services," they mean you’re not forced through a centralized platform that can control what you see, block what you say, cut off your access, censor your speech, restrict your participation, or monitor your behavior. Protocol systems that avoid those chokepoints keep power with users—and make state-sponsored surveillance and disinformation much harder to carry out.

What it means: Your online activity and personal data stay private. You decide who has access—and you can revoke that access at any time.

Why it matters: Strong privacy blocks authoritarian drift, surveillance capitalism, and algorithmic control. It becomes much, much harder to steal, coerce, or manipulate your health, identity, or financial data.

Example: Recent legal changes in the US around bodily autonomy caused many women of childbearing age to stop wearing health monitors. Why? Almost any centralized health record is not private. Cirdia is a privacy-first wearable that stores health data in a decentralized way, across the devices you already use

In practice that means breaking health data into small pieces—called shards, that sit on the phones and laptops in your network. To access decentralized health data, a legal proceeding would have to subpoena multiple people in your network, and even then, health records would be difficult to reassemble without your explicit consent.

Three. Speak Your Mind

In decentralized systems, community standards matter, but gatekeepers don’t.

In decentralized systems, speech doesn’t flow through gatekeepers. The rules are transparent. Moderation is community-based. You can speak your mind, but you won't have to look at algorithmic content optimized for the worst in us. The incentives for yelling, performance and fake outrage quiet down.

Why it matters:

• You can’t be shadow-banned or silenced without a community-agreed process.

• Moderation happens in the open, under rules you know.

• You'll choose the communities you join based, in part, on how they self-govern.

• Your identity and content move with you—across platforms and communities, which means you can go anywhere life takes you.

• Your contributions persist. Leaving a platform doesn’t mean starting over.

Four. Unlock Lock-In

Move your data, connections, and value anywhere.

In Web2, Big Tech built walled gardens—trapping users inside closed ecosystems to maximize shareholder value. Leaving meant starting over and losing your data, connections, and the value of your contributions. Web3 breaks that pattern. It dissolves lock-in and restores self-ownership and control.

Ownership and Portability

In Web3, the economic value of your online activity—your data, assets, work, identity, and connections—belongs to you. You can move your property anywhere.

Self-ownership and the right to exit dissolve both technical and social barriers. We’ve already seen the effects in the migration from X to Bluesky. Open systems like Bluesky engender the remergence of trust in relationships.

Dissolving Moats with Open Standards

Decentralized protocols break down the barriers that trapped users on centralized platforms. Open standards allow data and value to move freely between apps and networks. This means users can choose better tools without losing their digital lives. It also means developers can build without paying high platform access fees.

The Fediverse

The Fediverse is a growing ecosystem of platforms that "talk" to each other via open protocols. Think of the Fediverse like email: Open standards let you send messages from Gmail to Yahoo and Outlook. No one owns the system, but everyone can use it. Your identity, content, and connections move freely—anywhere that fits your values. Communities can control their memberships, but anything that is potentially controversial is governed democratically.

Protocols Replace Platforms

For example, Holochain is a protocol network that handles freedom and control a little differently. Unlike systems that put everything on a public ledger, Holochain is controlled by you directly, on your phone. It is like having your own secure digital space where you decide exactly what to share and with whom.

Five. Self-Direction and Federated Freedom

Move between platforms, communities, services—anywhere that reflects your values.

What it means: Your digital life—identity, creations, connections, and assets—lives (federates) inside a network of independently operated, interconnected spaces, called the Fediverse. Federated architecture lets you move freely between platforms, communities and services that reflect your values.

How Federation unlocks control:

• Federated models don’t lock you into any long-term obligations. You own your relationships and creations. If federation partnerships no longer align with your values, you can go elsewhere and take your digital life with you.

• "Exit" becomes a powerful form of leverage and negotiation that lets you bargain for better. Bargaining power moves away from extraction models by driving your ecosystem to create community value.

• In the Fediverse, open protocols mean freedom, and freedome fuels connection. Interoperability turns fragmentation into flow—and gives people control over how and where their digital lives unfold.

• Federation helps you find your people. It lets you build your own digital ecosystem, aligned with your values and grounded in earned trust. The result is a self-directed online life—not controlled by centralized platforms.

Six. The Right to Enhanced Agency

Parity becomes power when you move through digital systems freely and fairly.

You become a potent economic agent when you can move through digital systems without losing your assets, reputation, social standing, or data. Parity is power.

You can act, negotiate, and participate as an equal—across networks, sectors, and borders. Customers will still want things from you. But if you work in value chains, Web3’s structure means you can claim a greater share of your work’s value. When your contributions are no longer locked to a single platform or controlled by intermediaries, your value travels with you. So does your leverage. Enhanced agency expands your ability to create, prosper, and bargain on fair terms.

Why it matters: Interoperability means everything moves freely across systems. Reduced friction expands participation and turns coordination into a powerful force that flips incentives. Markets grow when information flows and trust is high—but growth is only part of the story. When incentives shift from extraction to quality, markets realign. Commerce begins valuing contribution instead of control. Web3’s magic uses market-based solutions and everyday on-chain actions to solve global challenges.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations argued that trust and complete information unlock trapped value. In the old economy, that value was captured by firms profiting from opacity, asymmetry, and low-trust transactions. Interoperability means trapped value could be distributed more broadly across society.

Most small farmers, craft workers, and creators in global supply chains are paid commodity prices despite producing distinctive goods. When producers can't verify quality or compliance, their work is treated as interchangeable—even when it's exceptional. Here, strategy and marketing failures to signal quality cause market failure. Entrenched interests exploit the information mismatch.

Economic agency changes that. When you can show how your work is different, valuable, and rare—like Web3 does—and when systems are built to reward differentiation, creators can negotiate for a better deal. Web3 doesn’t guarantee power. But it gives people at the bottom the structural footing of a level playing field.

This is how systemic change happens. Daily interactions on a level playing field bubble-up as positive change. When quality matters, the ability to command premium pricing increases. When trust and verification are embedded in infrastructure, systems migrate from gatekeeping to coordination. We can all create without giving up control. New forms of trade emerge that are fairer, more circular, and more aligned with your community's standards. In the age of interoperable systems, on-chain freedom is the new freedom.

"Be water, my friend." —Bruce Lee

Seven. The Right to Simplicity and Clarity

Transparent, consistent, accountable agreements.

Now that most people are online, Big Tech's revenue model is enshittification. Simplicity and clarity help you avoid that.

What it means: Simplicity and clarity are how agreements become accountable. Contracts, governance processes, and platform rules will be simple, understandable, transparent, and consistently applied. Over time, consistency becomes reliability—and reliability becomes trust.

Why it matters: Computer code is still written in zeros and ones, which don't play favorites. Something is true, or it is false. When agreements are translated into open-source code, it means transactions run the same way for everyone. Web3 makes that kind of consistency normal. It changes the stakes—especially for people who have spent their lives navigating unstable, unpredictable systems. Extractors will hate it. Creators will love it.

In Web2, Terms of Service are vague, buried in fine print, and subject to change. These days, when you get a notice about terms changing, it isn’t because you're getting lower prices or better service.

In Web3, smart contracts are beginning to replace Terms with precision code that doesn’t change without a democratic process. The difference between open-source code and published policy is that code doesn’t rely on interpretation. It runs exactly as written, for everyone, every time.

Visibility creates accountability, measurement, and recourse. On-chain agreements mean knowing how rules are applied, how often complaints are upheld, and whether outcomes match stated values. That's a significant, structural shift—especially for low-income communities. Poor people live in uncertainty by default. Promises fall through. Prices change. Go-betweens lie. In that context, reliability and accountability become real power.

I've met cotton farmers and textile handweavers in India who prioritize reliable payment over maximizing income. At the bottom, kept promises are the tradeoff between subsistence, survival, and prosperity.

When systems behave predictably, people begin to plan. Save. Invest. Organize. The cultural shifts from short-term survival to long-term plans. Geert Hofstede observed that long-term orientation is foundational to a society's growth. Simplicity and clarity don’t just reduce confusion—they lay the groundwork for progress.

Eight. Democratic Governance in Digital Communities

Consent-based, community rules—written by the governed.

On-chain entities work less like traditional corporations and more like community management systems. Owners and communities write, negotiate, and vote on the rules they want—on systems they choose. Nothing changes without a defined consent process. On-chain projects may be company bylaws and different forms of legal ownership, but governance will be structurally driven by the network’s protocol code.

What it means: Rules that define consent and enforce accountability will be written by those they govern.

Why it matters: By removing the barriers to large-scale coordination, on-chain community governance shifts power from executives to stakeholders . More people, from more places, can participate at low cost. These systems are still early. Some will stall. Some will fail. But the shift has already begun—and it's changing how commerce works,

Nine. The Right to Trust Transactions

Rights. Responsibilities. Risks. Recomposed Trust.

Agreements have clear, visible, universal terms—without fear, favor, bias, or manipulation.

What it means: Anyone can make reliable on-chain agreements. Because these agreements are written in code, transactions happen automatically when the terms are met.

Rights

Agreements will have clear, visible terms that apply the same way to everyone—without fear, favor, bias, or manipulation.

Responsibilities

You need to understand what the agreement says. On-chain actions are less forgiving of human mistakes and can’t interpret intent. If you don’t think an agreement is fair, don’t sign it. Because you have the right to walk away and take your assets with you, you’ll solve fairness challenges by choosing partners who offer better terms based on how you define value.

Recomposed Trust

Historically, rich people benefit from laws without being bound by them. Poor people are bound by laws but don’t always benefit from them. Smart contracts flip that dynamic. Transaction trust, available to anyone, becomes a new foundation for how communities function and cooperate.

Why It Matters

Higher transaction trust is available to anyone on-chain. This universal access enables broader cooperation, collaboration, and social trust. Reliable agreements foster a stronger sense of individual security—and systems become dependable by design.

Geert Hofstede’s research found that when people can trust agreements will be honored and exchanges will be fair, they are more likely to invest in their future—in health, education, and community. Trust shifts orientation—from short-term survival to long-term growth.

Ten. The Right to Expect Honesty

On-chain transparency accountability, & proof drives value-aligned choices.

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." — Marshall McLuhan

Marketing

Big changes are coming to marketing. On-chain information about a company's products, policies, and performance—origin, composition, and impact—will be evident, truthful, and provable. This data, akin to a "digital nutrition label," will be available to anyone and owned by no one.

Why it matters: Business transparency marks a permanent power shift, arming you with the knowledge to shape the world through your choices. When you can see how a product is made, by whom, and at what cost to people and the planet, you’ll drive demand for what you value.

New Consumer Power

Expect accountability: When everything is transparent, it becomes harder for companies to hide exploitation, waste, or harm. The flip side: it becomes easier for consumers to find—and reward—fair, healthy, and sustainable options.

Trust Drifts Towards Revenue

Ethical producers will gain a competitive edge. Waste, or its absence, becomes a key product attribute, driving innovation toward circular systems where resources are valued, not discarded. Inherent product merits—its positive social and environmental impact—becomes a selling point. Visibility allows products to showcase responsible practices and command price premiums for differentiated approaches to quality.

The "Why" for Businesses (Beyond Ethics): In an on-chain world, transparency can become comparative/competitive advantage—with impact beyond ethical obligations. Transparency builds long-term customer loyalty, reduces the risk of scandal or regulatory fallout, and opens new data-driven insights into operations, demand, and differentiation.

Marketing Shifts to Telling Real Product Stories

When products carry their own facts, and they do on-chain, trust shifts. You will still want to rely on brands as proxies for quality, ethics, or sustainability. But, you won't need to do that if you can verify anything on public blockchains. Marketing becomes less about persuasion and more about telling real product stories—already written in the product's traceable journey.

Note: If you have anything to add to this evolving list, please write me: Scott@Weave3.org.

• One. Control Your Money
  Zero gatekeepers. Your assets can’t be frozen, seized, reversed, manipulated or de-banked.

• Two. A Private Digital Life
  Decentralized networks create privacy, safety and resilience by neutering algorithms and surveillance capitalism.

• Three. Speak Your Mind
  In decentralized systems, community standards matter, but gatekeepers don’t.

• Four. Unlock Lock-In
  Move your data, connections, and value anywhere.

• Five: Self-Direction and Federated Freedom
  Move between platforms, communities, services—anywhere that reflects your values.

• Six. The Right to Enhanced Agency
  Parity becomes power when you move through digital systems freely and fairly.

• Seven. The Right to Simplicity and Clarity
  Transparent, consistent, accountable agreements.

• Eight. Democratic Governance in Digital Communities
  Consent-based, community rules written by the governed.

• Nine. The Right to Trust Transactions
  Agreements have clear, visible, universal terms—without fear, favor, bias, or manipulation.

• Ten. The Right to Expect Honesty
  On-chain transparency demands accountability, proof & drives value-aligned choices.