You can build business and infrastructure without VC involvement. Sometimes it will be healthier for it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utility_cooperatives]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co-operative_federatio...]
I am interested in learning what that liberty it might bring to those projects.
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
And even if they missed one, they'll get in later anyway by simply buying the token. Big capital always wins.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. No, I'm not trying to defend profit-extracting VCs or whatever; just trying to defend this place from burning itself to a crisp. Comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 are just what we don't need in that regard.
I always thought that "web3" meant everything was on the blockchain. In other words, you could theoretically re-invent Twitter as an Ethereum Smart Contract.
In doing so, every "Tweet" would be on the Eth block chain. You'd probably want a web page that interacts with the block chain to read/post tweets, but even a static HTML file on your local hard drive that interacts with Metamask could achieve that. You wouldn't need to run a site.
Of course, therein lies a new problem: Scale. A quick Google says that there are 6,000 tweets sent per second. Meanwhile, the Eth block chain handles what, 10-20 transactions per second, and ends up with fees that are several dollars worth of Eth? Nobody other than political figures and spammers are going to want to pay $5 to send a Tweet.
Then why are VCs pouring money into web3 projects every chance they can get?
Web3 has been pitched as a sort of idealized, democratic, community-owned concept, but the reality is mostly a bunch of projects pitching token sales to speculators who think they can sell those tokens to someone else in the future. Investors are cashing in by using their publicity to hype the token in exchange for some of those tokens to re-sell to other speculators. The actual service doesn't actually have to work because it's all speculation at this point.
When I look at projects like ethereum, I see a lot of excitement and innovation around how cooperative game theory can innovate new business models and ways of coordination.
The way Twitter repeatedly rugpulled devs is a perfect example of how broken the web2 model can be. And now the founder of Twitter wants to criticize crypto projects for taking VC money, as if Twitter somehow didn't take VC money and enrich those VCs in its rise to power? The hypocrisy is astounding.
As far as the services, the goal posts keep moving. First there's no application, then store of value is an application, then art collection, then decentralize automatic market makers, then social tokens, then decentralized autonomous organizations. These are young, immature ideas but clearly stuff is happening. Whether it will live up to the grandiose promises, we can't say. But if you want to complain about the web3 advocates making grandiose promises about how their code is going to change the world, well, they stole that playbook directly from the likes of the Google and Twitter founders.
When Dorsey and Google execs complain about crypto, I'm reminded of a quote from HBO's Silicon Valley:
"I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are."
This is just nonsense. The fact that GOOG doesn't pay dividends is not important or meaningful. Buying back shares is more tax efficient for shareholders. Google spent $30 billion on share buybacks in 2020, and authorized $50 billion for share buybacks in 2021. You don't have to trick a "greater fool" into buying your GOOG shares, Google will happily buy them from you with their giant free cash flow. This is just how tax-efficient companies return money to shareholders these days.
I actually agree with you here. The thing is, the fact that Bitcoin or Ethereum doesn't have "intrinsic value" is not important or meaningful either. Obviously GOOG is valuable and obviously BTC is valuable, and obviously ETH is valuable, but in both cases you can play semantic games to toss around economic terms like "greater fool theory", without understanding where the fundamental value actually emerges from, to pretend like they're worthless.
If you actually follow the activity around Bitcoin and Ethereum, the idea that these coins are suddenly going to drop to $0 and nobody will want one is about as absurd as that happening to GOOG.
No, that's not correct. When you buy a share of a publicly traded company (or a private one, for that matter), you are literally buying a fraction of their cash on hand, a fraction of their business operations, a fraction of their trademarks, a fraction of their inventory, and so on. You own part of the company.
The difference with cryptocurrency is that people ditched the entire ownership of anything and replaced it with just a token. It's like if you took a company, hollowed out every single thing that made it valuable, and sold the shares as novelty stock.
Anyone suggesting that stocks are just fun tokens that people trade back and forth doesn't understand what stock actually means. I think this misconception is very popular in the cryptocurrency world because it justifies the existence of tokens and crypto coins that aren't actually backed by anything of value. If you're convinced that nothing matters and it's all just tokens anyway, you're more likely to be persuaded to invest in crypto tokens and shun the stock market.
In fact you don’t even get voting rights, unlike traditional stock. GOOG is the one that’s been “hollowed out “.
Likewise, owning a share of GOOG in no way gives you access to their cash.
There is one and only one thing you can do with a share of GOOG - hope to sell it to someone else for more money.
On the flip side, owning ETH gives you a stake which actually does give you governance rights, either via your own validator or a staking pool. And it gives you access to many other ways to participate in the network such as DeFi.
If you want to compete with YouTube in the traditional way, better have a CDN, and if it becomes popular even though you're not taking in any revenue, the bandwidth bill is getting paid with VC money or you're going out of business.
If you can more easily build it on top of something like BitTorrent, you don't need the VC money as much. Now what you need is a payment system so your creators can get paid.
The more of these pieces get built and work decentralized, the less capital it takes to compete without relying on or yourself being a centralized service.
It's similar to how if someone doesn't like Chrome, they can fork Chromium and make their own version of it and keep complete compatibility with Chromium. The decentralized web does a similar thing except it does it for services instead of strictly software. It's a fully transparent and accessible ecosystem of services whose entire history is immutable and available for anyone to access.
That said, no blockchain technology is remotely close to the point where a massive system like Facebook could possibly hope to run and it may never get to that point either, it's hard enough getting even trivial services to be cost effective on Ethereum... but in principle that's the idea.
Isn't in the opposite? Web3 is a decentralized app that runs on top of distributed web2 and centralized infrastructure.
I see this kind of take all the time but people don't seem to realize that distributed computing doesn't imply decentralized services. Nobody can take away your internet access (well technically someone can) but that doesn't help you when you're stuck on Facebook. You can always send http over a wire.
Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure, just like companies right now sit on top of the internet. People who don't want to be censored or any third parties can already do this on the internet by running their own site.
People aren't going to interact with ethereum at the protocol level (except for enthusiasts) for the same reason they're now on Twitter and not on Mastodon. Also if "web3" was disintermediated VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own.