Hacker News Reader

Comment by akyu | Hacker News Reader

It seems that nearly every "public good" in the Ethereum ecosystem got gobbled up by VCs and pivoted to for-profit endeavors. I don't mind VCs and I don't mind people seeking profit, but this moral high ground that Ethereum has been trying to build for itself is delusional. In practice it is just a marketing gimmick.

An astute observer may have noticed that Vitalik has a habit of coming up with definitions that only himself and the Ethereum foundation can meet the standards of.

The reality is everyone is just trying to make money. I think we are better off coming to terms with that instead of living in a collective fantasy.

View on HN

Public goods are by definition non-rivalrous and non-excludable. How can they be gobbled?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

(I'm not being pedantic here. The concept of a public good, in this technical sense, is a very important concept to have -- and it's specifically the kind of "public goods" the article was talking about, along with ideas for improving their tendency to be under-supplied. Goods that can be gobbled up by someone tend to be produced at closer to the optimum amount, since there's a less diffuse private incentive for their production.)

Presumably the parent commenter is talking about providers (or potential providers) of public goods being gobbled up, leading to the classic economic problem that public goods tend to be under-produced.

Yea partially that, and also the fact that multiple projects used "public goods" language to bootstrap themselves and then pivoted into VC funded for profits.

Public goods ... Welfare economics ... Social choice theory, Arrow's, Indifference curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indifference_curve

People do collectibles; commemorative plates.

Tragedy of the Commons

Ok show me examples.

From the article pjscott linked:

> Public goods include knowledge, official statistics, national security, and common languages. Additionally, flood control systems, lighthouses, and street lighting are also common social goods.

How do you gobble up street lighting? How do you gobble up national security?

You seem to have misunderstood my point.

Then next time try being clearer

> It seems that nearly every "public good" in the Ethereum ecosystem got gobbled up by VCs and pivoted to for-profit endeavors

And this is because.... we don't have good public goods funding and so once the teams' capital needs get higher they have no choice but to pivot to VC/for-profit. I've talked to many of these teams personally, they are not greedy, but it's just unrealistic to expect people to turn away an opportunity for 100x more money. Turn away 2-5x, sure, but not 100x.

And this lack of public goods funding is exactly what I'm saying the ecosystem needs to focus on solving.

> The reality is everyone is just trying to make money. I think we are better off coming to terms with that instead of living in a collective fantasy.

The reality is that not everyone does the same thing for the same reasons. No, not everyone working in the Ethereum ecosystem does so just to make quick money, just like not everyone is working in the military just to kill people, some try to help make the world better.

Ethereum has promise. At least they are willing to fix the flaws even if they fail at this task. Bitcoin is basically frozen in time. It has nothing going for it other than first move advantage and that first mover advantage is just a bunch of "bag holders" trying to get rid of their MLM product.

Services on a public good, are different than a public good. The blockchain is a public good, the cost to use it is the gas cost.

DEXs are a service, the cost to use them is the gas cost + fee.

Investors who invested in the DEX, and made money, don't take away the utility of the DEX or the blockchain. It's like saying people can't take advantage of Amazon's services because early investors made money from investing in it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com