The Future of Work Is Not Corporate – It’s DAOs and Crypto Networks
future.a16z.com
future.a16z.com
Who's going to clean up shit off the sidewalk and who will they work for? The janitorial DAO?
Vacuous bullshit that shows zero regard for how crypto in its current manifestation is an ecologically disastrous scam.
Simple! The janitor will be a willing market participant who wears a visible QR code with their wallet address, and passers by can voluntarily tip them if they do a good job. 90% of the tip goes to network processing fees, but that's actually a feature!
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P.S. - I know Y Combinator created and maintains Hacker News, but I am confident that in a post-capitalist world an even better version of Hacker News would blossom in the hands and interests of the public at large, much in the same way that open source would.
Did the same with Substack last year. Post after post about the power of newsletters. If they were so powerful, why does Substack have to offer exclusive publishing deals to well-known reporters and writers?
These people are living in a bubble inside of a niche and are addicted to wishful thinking. They don't understand that their crypto dream is fuelled by by-products of capitalism, aka people too rich for their own good spending their money on virtual casinos in the hope of amassing more. They're so disconnected from reality and the real life of most of earth inhabitants, I'm speechless...
Have you considered that maybe they don’t actually believe this nonsense?
Right from the very first sentence -- absolutely deranged.
How far into the future do we have to go before outdoor roombas proliferate?
I get that Andreesen-Horowitz has a lot of money at stake in this area and would love to make some of it back, but it's been more than 10 years since bitcoin emerged with the promise that the blockchain would have world-changing repercussions and _I still don't see even one meaningful application of the technology_ ?
Please go ahead and tell me how important NFTs are again. Or how Venezuelans are supposed to use bitcoin as an inflation hedge. Or how smart contracts are going to revolutionize... the exchange of goods (?), as soon as developers can figure out how to program them entirely without bugs.
On the basis of all of the applications of blockchains I've seen over the past decade (which I can count on one hand), why should I expect that ANY of the predictions in this piece will come to pass? Let alone something as world-changing as displacing the corporation as the leading organizational form for economic activity.
I see this critique often but I don't get it: bitcoin was essentially an early prototype, the story of crypto since gone through lots of twists and turns. Make it programmable (ETH), try to make it scalable in one chain (lots of failures, now things like Solana), figure out how to split consensus/data/computation (current ETH L2 road map).
The technology is still young and evolving.
There are a lot of other things worth critiquing (PoW is wasteful, permission-less systems are socially bad, &c) but saying "this technology has been here for 10 years" misses that it's a big complex roadmap, a lot of which (like zero knowledge rollup L2s) just showed up this year.
1) registered on a global level instead of a local or national level
2) skirt US securities laws by allowing anyone to buy and sell ownership, whereas companies normally restrict that to accredited investors, unless they register with the SEC
3) often have a more democratic ethos of governance, although many seem to be based on one token = one vote, which sounds almost identical to how companies operate with one stock = one vote.
So, the main thing that I think they do that is quite different is giving people the ability to register a company on a global level, as there isn't a governmental way to do that right now. Other than that, what they seem to offer is a way to organize and collect money that goes around financial and securities laws.
Aren't influencers, contractors, creators, and gig economy participants paid by large corporations?
How many of these types of workers being paid by DAOs?
Lol. Why even bother?
Different strokes for different folks I suppose
It's 100% about this, and more generally evading regulation.
My casual observation of recent economic history is that there's an undying libertarian fervor to pursue things that escape government control. All the major "growth" lately has been in web, crypto, and space. Things that are largely unregulated.
What?
Fewer than 1% will ever earn money this way. Look at the long tail of Twitch, with all the streamers who make nothing at all.
Where is the actual social infrastructure through which people are organized into collective effort? It seems missing from the DAO story. It's like saying a public corporation is its shareholders and hoping some of the step up to actually somehow do some work.
Some kind of social infrastructure will inevitably emerge but given that it's being treated as an afterthought, it will probably be pretty dysfunctional and/or recapitulate lots of known lessons from other social/political realms.
Anyways, this confirms again that the crypto/web3/DAO space is not for me. All of that stuff moves way too fast. Donald Knuth said about email: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.". Crypto is making me realise that my role in life may be to be on the bottom of things.
Anybody else remember Web 1?
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/...
After all, tech giants dominate web2 already which makes it hard to see a trillion dollar investment happening there. But web3 promises us that the tech giants’ days of influence are numbered, and when everyone goes for decentralization that’s a lot of value to capture.
That doesn’t make the hypothesis any more true, of course
HN karma doesn't really matter, because this site is well-moderated and people aren't in the business of selling high-karma accounts to bots like on Reddit.
https://ambcrypto.com/7-7-billion-lost-to-crypto-scams-but-h...
edit: Partially containing my bile
1. People are afraid of their current skills and knowledge becoming obsolete. This is similar to people being hostile to the cloud 10 years ago and serverless 5 years ago.
2. People are bitter because they see others profiting from the current crypto boom/bubble, and they didn't buy into it early enough or at all.
3. People are genuinely worried about the darker aspects (non-renewable energy usage, scams, illegal activities) and for some reason they blame the technology rather than the actors actually engaging in those activities.
4. People are problem/solution-oriented rather than vision-oriented. If they don't see an immedate relationship between an existing problem and a technical solution to it, they don't consider the new technology to have merit.
These are just some theoretical reasons I think might explain people feeling so hostile.
Also, you’re missing another reason: we’re entering an age of techno-pessimism. After the techno optimism of the 90s and aughts, a lot of people were let down by the consequences that this technology had on society. Tracking across the internet, widespread misinformation and post-truth, total dominance by a handful of corporate behemoths, etc. some people are inspired by the anti-corporate message of this article, other people just feel burned from the optimism of the last few decades and what it became
"Crypto" is a wantrepreneur magnet, most projects have no future (or present even). They sound like tobacco CEOs trying to convince you that smoking cigarettes actually is beneficial
Now that SPACs have emerged, tech companies aren't even bothering to go through the regular route because SPACs let them do it with less financial disclosure.
Did you read the article? It's utterly nonsensical, from the very first sentence. It isn't "hostile" to point this out.
bitnikel-and-dimed.
They have $2B allocated to crypto deals. They like to take both coins and equity.