What if anyone in the world could publish digital content, anyone else in the world could access it (for free or for payment), and that entire system worked without any centralized authority or point of control?
That's a fancy sentence, so here's a plainer one: we just thought it'd be really damn cool if there was a system that made it easy to discover and distribute as much of the world's information as possible but was owned and controlled by no one.
^5(#footnote-5)^ In the Pareto sense, with regards to the production and distribution of information (i.e. digital information is both created and distributed in a way that could not be any more efficient from the perspectives of information producers and consumers).