America's emerging crypto interests need to get their heads in the political game and invest in allaying the state's fear of financial disintermediation
Hey Will, have you done a piece about what you see in the crypto ecosystem that has you bullish? I did some dabbling in Solidity two years ago when my company explored a crypto moonshot slash ICO cash grab, and I came away thinking there's mostly no there there: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eHCneQmlbK_Hpovi4MKU87rMuVBn03JgDme2M1_eXHk/edit?usp=sharing (we shut down the Medium blog this was hosted on, but I still have the draft)
If anything I've become even more bearish since about smart contracts and web3 watching the NFT hype cycle blossom. Are there *any* problems solved by blockchains that aren't better handled by a nonprofit org with a good charter and a mysql database?
I haven't done a piece like that, but should. I've been pretty similarly skeptical, but I've started to turn around now that I see the level of mainstream investment going into blockchain/crypto ventures. I don't think they're all getting snookered. I think a lot of the NFT bashing, while jolly good fun, misunderstands the weirdness of art and collectibles markets generally, not to mention the mindbending weirdness of the social ontology of money and property. It really clicked for me when I went through the hassle of getting on Axie Infinity and got a first-hand sense of the experience of owning a digital creature in a game that has an in-game economy that more or less smoothly integrates with the rest of the economy. My kid loves Roblox and collecting avatars and outfits and pets. The second I realized that he would fucking love literally owning that stuff, being able to sell it for cash, bringing it into other games, etc, I feel like it clicked. If this were remotely possible with a good charter and a mysql database, they'd be doing it already and EA and Riot, etc wouldn't be planning around blockchain/token integration. But there's so much ridiculous self-dealing hype out there it's really hard not to be down on the whole thing.
I would look forward to reading it! I'm not persuaded by mainstream investment; there was lots of mainstream investment in Pets.com too. And the market seems much more irrational today, from Gamestop to Dogecoin, than it did in the '90s.
Digital goods in general make a ton of sense to me, and there are tons of those backed by private databases that I can grok. And given the hype, I can totally see the appeal to producers of wrapping their already-exisiting digital goods in a thin layer of blockchain (blockwashing?) to make NFTs. But the NFTs themselves are just pointers; all the value comes from off-chain relationships, and someone has be enforcing the rivalrous-ness of the goods off-chain. Maybe you can bootstrap pure social recognition for some subset of collectibles, especially ones related to the history of the internet itself, but not for digital goods generally. It winds up being mysql all the way down. Are EA and Riot going to implement each others' NFT assets in their games? The NFT assets of new upstart competitors? You only "own" an asset across platforms to the extent that those platform operators allow you to.
And if the platform is fully permissive with some kind of open protocol, then nothing is stopping people from just making deep copies of the original and defeating the rivalrous-ness you're trying to set up. The other '90s tech story I keep coming back to is Napster—what if there was an economy-wide Napster-for-everything that you couldn't sue into oblivion? I know that kid-me didn't care a whit about the social conventions of legitimate ownership as long as I could right-click my own copy of something.
I want to believe, but it still feels like blockchains are a solution in search of a problem, and NFTs aren't it.
Agreed. Blockchain has been around now longer than Google had been when Bitcoin started. Only working application AFAICT, is IBM/Maersk TradeLens which is centrally permissioned and therefore doesn't need proof of work.
Trying to think about this more broadly, thinking maybe I've come upon a bull case that makes sense?
There may not be things that blockchains/smart contracts/DAOs can do _better_ than properly configured existing institutions. But maybe it's a classic story of disruption: programming a DAO is orders of magnitude cheaper, and psychically available to a much larger share of the population, than setting up and endowing a foundation is. Being cheaper gives you much faster iteration cycles, and the reproducibility of code means best practices can spread much more quickly than they could through ordinary institutions.
Oh shit, I think I just talked myself into being a Blockchain Person.
It's not a question of education. You can talk up the brave dissidents worldwide who use it for [insert noble reasons here] all you want. That doesn't matter to the bank or hospital whose files are locked down and ransomed by an untouchable entity whose use of crypto currency makes it impossible to find much less punish. Crypto is widely seen as the currency of either dirtbags or idiots, and everything you like about it is what the dirtbags like about it, too.
Another thing: the provisions aren't really meant to be enforced. They are meant to serve the same purpose as a busted taillight on a car: a reason to justify a stop-and-search that turns up other, worse crimes.
Yeah, that I'm less worried about. Even if proof of stake is the fusion power of Etherium, in the sense that it's 12 months away and has been for years, there are other protocols that could replace it in the same way that the dominant operating system can change. Maybe I should really be buying Solana tokens or something.
Hey Will, have you done a piece about what you see in the crypto ecosystem that has you bullish? I did some dabbling in Solidity two years ago when my company explored a crypto moonshot slash ICO cash grab, and I came away thinking there's mostly no there there: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eHCneQmlbK_Hpovi4MKU87rMuVBn03JgDme2M1_eXHk/edit?usp=sharing (we shut down the Medium blog this was hosted on, but I still have the draft)
If anything I've become even more bearish since about smart contracts and web3 watching the NFT hype cycle blossom. Are there *any* problems solved by blockchains that aren't better handled by a nonprofit org with a good charter and a mysql database?
I haven't done a piece like that, but should. I've been pretty similarly skeptical, but I've started to turn around now that I see the level of mainstream investment going into blockchain/crypto ventures. I don't think they're all getting snookered. I think a lot of the NFT bashing, while jolly good fun, misunderstands the weirdness of art and collectibles markets generally, not to mention the mindbending weirdness of the social ontology of money and property. It really clicked for me when I went through the hassle of getting on Axie Infinity and got a first-hand sense of the experience of owning a digital creature in a game that has an in-game economy that more or less smoothly integrates with the rest of the economy. My kid loves Roblox and collecting avatars and outfits and pets. The second I realized that he would fucking love literally owning that stuff, being able to sell it for cash, bringing it into other games, etc, I feel like it clicked. If this were remotely possible with a good charter and a mysql database, they'd be doing it already and EA and Riot, etc wouldn't be planning around blockchain/token integration. But there's so much ridiculous self-dealing hype out there it's really hard not to be down on the whole thing.
I would look forward to reading it! I'm not persuaded by mainstream investment; there was lots of mainstream investment in Pets.com too. And the market seems much more irrational today, from Gamestop to Dogecoin, than it did in the '90s.
Digital goods in general make a ton of sense to me, and there are tons of those backed by private databases that I can grok. And given the hype, I can totally see the appeal to producers of wrapping their already-exisiting digital goods in a thin layer of blockchain (blockwashing?) to make NFTs. But the NFTs themselves are just pointers; all the value comes from off-chain relationships, and someone has be enforcing the rivalrous-ness of the goods off-chain. Maybe you can bootstrap pure social recognition for some subset of collectibles, especially ones related to the history of the internet itself, but not for digital goods generally. It winds up being mysql all the way down. Are EA and Riot going to implement each others' NFT assets in their games? The NFT assets of new upstart competitors? You only "own" an asset across platforms to the extent that those platform operators allow you to.
And if the platform is fully permissive with some kind of open protocol, then nothing is stopping people from just making deep copies of the original and defeating the rivalrous-ness you're trying to set up. The other '90s tech story I keep coming back to is Napster—what if there was an economy-wide Napster-for-everything that you couldn't sue into oblivion? I know that kid-me didn't care a whit about the social conventions of legitimate ownership as long as I could right-click my own copy of something.
I want to believe, but it still feels like blockchains are a solution in search of a problem, and NFTs aren't it.
Agreed. Blockchain has been around now longer than Google had been when Bitcoin started. Only working application AFAICT, is IBM/Maersk TradeLens which is centrally permissioned and therefore doesn't need proof of work.
Trying to think about this more broadly, thinking maybe I've come upon a bull case that makes sense?
There may not be things that blockchains/smart contracts/DAOs can do _better_ than properly configured existing institutions. But maybe it's a classic story of disruption: programming a DAO is orders of magnitude cheaper, and psychically available to a much larger share of the population, than setting up and endowing a foundation is. Being cheaper gives you much faster iteration cycles, and the reproducibility of code means best practices can spread much more quickly than they could through ordinary institutions.
Oh shit, I think I just talked myself into being a Blockchain Person.
It's not a question of education. You can talk up the brave dissidents worldwide who use it for [insert noble reasons here] all you want. That doesn't matter to the bank or hospital whose files are locked down and ransomed by an untouchable entity whose use of crypto currency makes it impossible to find much less punish. Crypto is widely seen as the currency of either dirtbags or idiots, and everything you like about it is what the dirtbags like about it, too.
Another thing: the provisions aren't really meant to be enforced. They are meant to serve the same purpose as a busted taillight on a car: a reason to justify a stop-and-search that turns up other, worse crimes.
What are your thoughts about Matt Levine's take(s) on crypto?
As long as crypto depends on energy-intensive proof of work, it's an enemy of all life on Earth.
Agreed. Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake can't come soon enough.
Yeah, that I'm less worried about. Even if proof of stake is the fusion power of Etherium, in the sense that it's 12 months away and has been for years, there are other protocols that could replace it in the same way that the dominant operating system can change. Maybe I should really be buying Solana tokens or something.