The Internet was necessary in the context of a Cold War.
What exactly is this reference too?
We have many trillions actually. The amount of wealth we have which goes untapped is primarily due to the fact that 1) we aren't currently able to sell our unused computation resources, 2) we aren't currently able to sell our unused storage resources, 3) we aren't currently able to sell our unused bandwidth, 4) we aren't currently able to auction our attention
The interesting development is all of this is changing as we speak. A year from now we will have DACs which take full advantage of micropayments and once you bring micropayments operational, combined with the other elements I mentioned, there are easily trillions of dollars of wealth there. So I don't think there is any sort of wealth shortage, just the misdirection and centralization of that wealth, or in some cases people don't even recognize that what they have is a form of wealth. Attention is wealth, spare computing resources are wealth, knowledge is wealth, all can be turned into cryptocurrency.
This really amounts to trillions? If sold, to who exactly? In the context of my statement I suggested that trillions going towards a whole new physical infrastructure. At what point does it become worth trillions? So far we only had the biggest boy grow to $3 billion.. and where all that wealth has gone certainly doesn't appear to be of any major good.. especially if you agree with John Underwoods assessment of all Bitcoin is used for.
Computation is a commodity and is immensely valuable. Easily worth trillions when you think about the fact that all businesses and all people rely on it. HPC is immensely valuable as well.
Protein folding? Searching for aliens? Decentralized search engines? All possible. Google's market cap alone is almost 400 billion. Yes there are trillions of dollars available in untapped resources.
The attention economy? Micropayments? That is completely untapped, it's hundreds of billions or perhaps trillions of dollars of monetization. Attention was enough to give people free TV, to power the entire advertising industry, Google and Facebook are advertising companies. Auctioning your attention gives you the money.
Honestly it's not easy to calculate exactly how much money but considering there would be billions of people involved, and considering the US economy alone is over 10 trillion, and global economy over 100 trillion? I would say trillions is reasonable.
That doesn't mean it's a guarantee. During the dot com bubble a lot of people made money and lost money, and many people avoided using the web entirely. I would say what we are talking about here is the birth of a different kind of blockchain web which can decentralize everything, computation, storage, and bandwidth.
The money earned from automation, from attention, from computation, from storage, can be used by each person to pay for bandwidth. So if you easily get say $400 a year just for your attention, that is easily enough money to pay for bandwidth for the whole year. 400 times 500 million? 20,000,000,000 a year.
1% of the world economy is around 1 trillion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy