We accidentally built the wrong internet

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 were hacked lol."

"Okay... Is it more private?"

"Absolutely not. It's a privacy catastrophe. Every login, every action, is logged in a bunch of disconnected data silos, all tied back to a single corporate owned identifier. The user leaves a trail of digital exhaust everywhere they go: an exhaust that is immensely profitable to collect and sell. Your whole digital life gets chopped up and sold. Your identity becomes a product."

"Surely it's simpler to build and use?"

"Not a chance. To patch the glaring security holes, we'll have to bolt on more components. We'll need a two-factor authentication system that sends codes to a completely separate device. We'll need annoying CAPTCHAs to prove users aren't robots. We'll need convoluted 'forgot password' email loops, which themselves become a prime vector for account takeovers. It's a Rube Goldberg machine of trust, with dozens of failure points: the email provider, the service's database, the password manager, the 2FA app, the SMS gateway…"

He pauses. "And here's the worst part: after all that hassle just to log in… you still can't pay for anything!"

The room is silent.

"That whole system & all that complexity does nothing for buying stuff. To pay, you'll still need to find a physical card, type in 16 numbers, an expiry date, a security code, all into a web form. But don't worry we'll ask everyone to use HTTPS so they feel secure. That info gets then passed through banks, payment processors, networks each taking a cut, each adding risk. And if one of them messes up? Your card gets cloned. Your money's at risk."

"So, what is the upside to this… system?" someone finally asks.

"Well", the engineer says, "it lets people sign up for free stuff they'll never use again without needing money upfront."

That's it. That's the grand benefit. For this single, narrow edge case, we created an insecure, privacy-invasive, and breathtakingly complex architecture that divorced identity from commerce and burdened the entire digital world with friction and risk.

Here's the truth though: the gravity of convenience is the most powerful, irrational force in the world. A better system doesn't win by being better, it wins by being lighter because people will trade a pound of their sovereignty for an ounce of convenience, every single time.

So why are we still stuck with this mess?

The honest answer is that the user experience of the alternative has, until now, been a steep cliff rather than a gentle on-ramp. The ethos of "be your own bank" came with the terrifying corollary of "be your own high-stakes security expert". Managing seed phrases, understanding gas fees, and navigating the unforgiving finality of transactions created a barrier to entry that was simply too high for the mainstream user. The comforting safety net of a "forgot password" link remained preferable to the catastrophic potential of a lost hardware wallet or a misplaced 12-word phrase.

That's terrifying. No wonder most people chose the flawed but familiar: a password, a reset link, a bank that might help if things go wrong.

But that's changing.

The new tools aren't asking you to become a tech expert. They're building the power of ownership into things that feel normal like unlocking your phone with your fingerprint, or approving a payment with a tap. Features like social recovery (letting trusted friends help you regain access), smart wallets (that work like apps, not crypto dashboards), and passkeys (using your phone or face instead of passwords) are making secure, self-owned identity actually easy.

The goal is to make the right thing the easy thing, not make everyone a crypto expert.

In any rational design meeting, that engineer would've been laughed out of the room.

Yet here we are, living in the world he described.

The good news? We don't have to stay here.

Of course, many in the mainstream tech world still see this kind of technology as tainted by its association with hype, scams, or volatile cryptocurrencies. They dismiss it all as "blockchain stuff", a knee-jerk reaction that throws the baby out with the bathwater. But the core idea is about ownership, privacy, and finally giving users a secure digital "self" that works as seamlessly as the rest of the web.

The internet was built without a native way to prove who you are and move value securely. But now, for the first time, that missing piece (cryptographic signer, example: Polkadot Vault) finally starts working like the rest of the web, simple, fast, and yours.