Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

Remember in the early days of COVID, Marc Andreessen published his It's Time to Build essay? How America needs to start solving housing, education, transportation, manufacturing?

I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.

Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.

https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

Well, it's been less than a year, and it looks like a16z is now big on NFTs.

https://a16z.com/2021/02/27/nfts-and-a-thousand-true-fans/

“Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have organizations behind them let alone marketing budgets, yet are used, owned, and loved by tens of millions of people.”

Uh, what? This is written on basically a marketing blog for one of the most well known VC firms in the world. Which will invest millions of dollars in organizations that will go on to market an ever increasing amount of blockchain companies that will do... something. Which will be written about endlessly by news outlets because prices go up crazy amounts.

This whole NFT thing has actually made me want to shut off my computer, stop programming, and start farming or something. Either all these people are idiots or I am. I can only make sense of it if I assume most of it is actual money laundering.

Im literally with you on both your reason to leave tech and to go do farming. As a tip, permaculture is more sustainable than monoculture. Make sure to pick a good, warm environment to make your life easier. Dont name your chickens... makes it harder to kill them for harvest.

Haha thanks, as long as I’m not alone on the sentiment. And I appreciate the advice on permaculture — I just read Masanobu Fukuoka and would like to do more research on these methods. Also, I’m vegetarian and am not so sure I could even kill those unnamed chickens!

At the very least, dont underestimate the benefit of all nature chicken fertilizer (poo and compost processing). They make great passive tillers and pest control too. I fell in love with the idea of farming when I visited (often) my ex's parents farm. Saw a bunch of the permaculture/homesteading stuff in action long before it became "cool".

Absolutely, one of the features of Masanobu Fukuoka‘s farming method basically let the chickens wander the land and to provide fertilizer. I’d be down to keep them, just not eat them!

>“Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have organizations behind them let alone marketing budgets, yet are used, owned, and loved by tens of millions of people.”

This is an extremely inaccurate statement by them, wow. I feel like if nothing else it's impossible to have anything to do with Ethereum without hearing about the Ethereum Foundation. The majority of projects built on top also have their own organizations. There's also most definitely marketing.

I even like the idea of NFTs and think there's a lot of cool things to be built on the blockchain, some of which already have working early versions. This, however, is clearly a puff piece by a16z that doesn't even try to present an accurate picture.

It's them shilling - propaganda.

Some of the new DeFi projects don't reveal the names of team members. The market is just that frothy that people buying the tokens don't care about the CEO.

It's just a symptom of the pandemic and upper-middle class people having too much money and time. Everything about decentralized, blockchain, token, are just made-up words like you see around stock analysis. They do not exist, people just want to gamble. It'll go away when everyone can go to bars again.

This is what floored me when he wrote that essay. For years, a16z has been poring millions into pointless crypto related companies. And they just keep doing it. Yet Andreessen has the audacity to tell us all to build while he chases the decades most trivial investments and asset classes.

Think of it this way:

As a VC, he bets on what makes money in the current system.

As a citizen, he calls for a change to a better system.

That makes him a talker.

His actions as a VC make it more difficult to accomplish what he's calling for as a citizen.

That’s your opinion. What if others disagree and view their investments in cryptocurrency tech to be investments in a future where individuals are liberated from banks and legacy money systems? That’s how I view it. Personally, it’s enough to remember how these people exploited the system to crash the economy during the “housing bubble” to sign up for that future. Disparage it all you want.

From the second link: "Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins"

Fortnite skins are different from NFTs - you're not supposed to sell them on. I just checked this with a quick Google search just in case the developer had changed how they work since I last played. They haven't, the way to sell skins is to sell your account details via an external market. Some games companies ban players from online matches who are caught buying or selling like that. I also found a site for buying /selling useful in game items, and the way that the item handover works is literally by making players meet up in game and the seller dropping the item on the floor.

VBucks are just tokens that can only be spent in Fortnite and make it slightly harder for spenders to know how much they are spending on each thing. You get them slowly in game, and can also buy them with real money. You can only use them to buy different appearances and gestures, and only from the developer.

I'd therefore argue Fortnite does not have a sophisticated economy, nor uses NFTs. It has a clever business model, using free download of the game as a whole but paid customisation, to help make it very shareable and very effective at gradually warming players up to the idea of making a purchase or five. It has become much like a shopping mall for modern teenagers - they willingly hang out there for hours for free, right next to places tempting then to purchase.

so instead of building useful things like bridges or infrastructure, we decided to gamble on useless greater fool theory “assets”

To be fair, it's not like Twitter is useful to society. You cant expect people who got a positive feedback loop for building useless to switch to building a bridge, water treatment plant or a mosquito net.

Instead? As though some VCs allocating a couple billions of dollars of private capital to crypto investments gets in the way of the government properly allocating ~$7.8 trillion in tax revenue every year.

Venture capitalists don't build bridges or infrastructure, fortunately (although they could hardly do worse than the various governments in the US). Government does that by and large. It's the responsibility of government to allocate its tax revenue to infrastructure.

The US has among the least responsible governments that has ever existed in world history. That's on the shoulders of the voters and the politicians they elect. It's not the VCs or politicians (insert scapegoat here) that are the primary problem (they're all secondary), it's down to the American people that have behaved like absentee sloven bastards for half a century now.

I think the opportunity costs here aren't financial capital as much as is it human capital. The amount of STEM talent that goes to work for these crypto shops or hedge funds instead of picking up a nuclear or civil engineering degree and rebuilding the power grid in Texas or California probably has some bad effects.

The UK has to increasingly rely on Chinese nuclear expertise because over the last ten to twenty years a lot of engineers have retired and you don't just stagnate but decline because there's just not enough people and also state capacity to keep that process knowledge alive.

Musk says a lot of crap but on this he was right when he talked about the real loss of knowledge in spaceflight. It takes a very long time to get an engineering culture back once you lose it.

We are not lacking for the capacity to build infrastructure. We have both a plentiful supply of engineering talent and labor.

We're presently bombing Syria because Biden is a continuation of the Obama war hawk stance on toppling everything in the Middle East (which is a program that goes back decades now and fully crosses the political aisle from side to side, they're all doing the same thing when given power).

That's the kind of thing we do in the US instead of properly investing into our infrastructure. And we've been doing it across the whole of the post WW2 era. A minimum of $10-$15 trillion has been spent that way by the US just since the late 1960s. That's where our infrastructure money went.

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