Ask HN: What did Marc Andreessen mean by this? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What did Marc Andreessen mean by this?

44 pointslabrador92 comments

Yesterday on Twitter:

Marc Andreessen: Let's try an open Twitter Q & A -- ask away!

Sriram Krishnan: What do you find people in tech (our outside) missing about web3 the most

Marc Andreessen: The enormous payoff from decentralization and permissionless innovation. I cannot believe more people don't understand this. It's so obvious.

It's not obvious to me so I'm asking Hacker News what he means

Forgot the link: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1493464162340532225

View on HN

Open platforms, where anyone can build anything without asking a central authority (with their own financial incentives) for permission, allow for much more innovation. As an easy example, take a look at the App Store and Apple's 30% tax, banning apps which are too "similar" to others, and compare it to the web, where anyone can try most any new idea and potentially disrupt incumbents. Should be noted that before pmarca was a VC, he was an entrepreneur at Netscape, so he knows the benefits here and has lived through opening and closing of the web.

web3, to steelman it, has the potential to get us back to that permisionless world, and in fact go even further, by allowing data to travel with users. At 10K feet I like to think of web3 as "what if instead of one central Facebook with everyone's data, there was a global shared DB of everyone's social content, people logged in with the keys to their specific rows of the DB" In theory, this could bring about a golden new era of social apps - instead of counting on FB to provide the right API endpoints that you needed for your app, and then not banning or copying you, you could build true first-class clients to people's existing social data, with the exact same DB access that the original platform builders had. This would allow for all sorts of new social apps that users would love but aren't themselves viral or funded enough to re-create the whole social graph from scratch. Incidentally, it would also be very disruptive to the FANG giants and put much more control directly in users' hands.

I think it's important to take this upside case seriously, even though I am actually a big web3 skeptic. I think, in particular:

a) the scalability concerns are inherent to the tech (and PoS etc have their own issues)

b) introducing so much financial speculation on top of the space is discouraging people from doing the hard work of building real useful apps when you have these liquid tokens and can cash out just for hyping up a project, before you have product-market fit.

c) a global shared DB means the data model will advance and iterate at the speed of eg, the HTML standard, not at the speed of a startup; this means ambitious apps will just build their proprietary side data models to give users the features that aren't approved by the core spec, and if they capture enough of the mindshare, those features then become expected by all users, and apps that don't have them become second class - the third party has now taken an open data model and turned it into something proprietary. (this is basically the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy we saw Microsoft use against open standards in Web 1.0) You are already seeing signs of this with eg OpenSea adding other metadata on top of NFTs

d) most fundamentally - I think we're kidding ourselves how much the average user likes having a centralized authority to appeal to. Central authorities can ban the person harassing you from the site, reverse a credit card transaction that you authorized under false pretenses, stop supposedly-academic organizations from getting your permission for your data and then giving it to Russian propagandists, even censor ideas you don't like. Crypto early adopters are individualist libertarian types who think of all these features as unnecessary or even outright harmful, but I think a lot of ordinary people would rather be on central platforms with these things.

You're in the middle of a much longer, larger back and forth.

Web3 -- roughly blockchain enabled technologies -- have been both promoted and questioned and there is a debate right now with Dorsey (Twitter fame), Levie (Box fame), Srinivasan (Web3), Dixon (also AZ16) and so on about what the benefits are of web3.

The debate seems to have coalesced around this idea of centralization and decentralization not of the product (the web is already decentralized) or the distribution or production (web 2.0) but of the ownership of the product.

I won't opine on it myself, but Andreessen's on the side that people will want to use products from which they derive an economic benefit.

There are many counter arguments, and counter-counter arguments and so forth.

I would like to highlight Moxie Marlinspike's counterargument [1] in particular. Ostensibly web3 allows you to truly own digital assets, with ownership records being stored on an immutable distributed blockchain, verifiable by anyone. In practice, however, the seller (i.e. the person who created the digital asset) or distributor (e.g. OpenSea) can swap out what you own, at any time, for any reason, with little or no legal recourse on your behalf. That was borne out by the experiment that Moxie did, where he minted an NFT that linked to a site which displayed a certain abstract art image when viewed on OpenSea, but displayed a poop emoji when viewed in a crypto wallet (thus demonstrating creator control). When OpenSea discovered this misrepresentation, they removed the NFT from their service, rendering it inaccessible not only to new purchasers, but also to everyone who had purchased it in the past (thus demonstrating custodian control). And what legal recourse does a buyer have to combat either of these moves? Nothing.

Web 3 takes us from a world where "possession is nine-tenths of the law" to a world where possession is the only thing that matters. Having a title to a particular (digital) good is worthless when you have no way to enforce that title against repossession. Having a title to a digital good is worthless when a seller can deliver something completely different and you have no recourse to get your money back.

Can Web 3 solve these problems? Yes, but the problem is that the solutions will require interacting with existing messy real world legal systems and social norms. The initial promise of Web 3, a world governed entirely by immutable smart contracts, where "code is law" seems as far away as ever.

[1]: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

And, honestly, any hacker with more than a few months' experience ought to find the concept "code is law" implicitly horrifying.

There's a reason the human legal system is messy and full of human intervention: the alternative is worse. Imagine the least-buggy code you've ever written; would you want it, immutably, in charge of some key aspect of your life that the law currently manages?

There are plenty of "obvious" benefits to permissionless innovation, i.e. people can act on new ideas very quickly and easily. DAOs theoretically allow for very easily managed crowdsourced investment.

What I do not see web3 addressing are the obvious downsides. Society had permissionless trade. Then people scammed others. Society had permissionless investment. Bad actors then scammed people. Permissionless is very vulnerable to code mistakes, as you cannot then go to a judge and get something reversed like with a regular contract.

Can you talk about what permissionless innovation means and why it's possible with web3 (and why it's missing from the non web3 world)?

I'm a massive skeptic and I'd like to understand their perspective. Totally agree on all the downsides.

I thought about this for a few minutes, and I think it might refer to how you need to go through an app store for iOS and Android apps, and that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, own so much of the web "property".

The best general example of the value of permissionless I can think of is when you compare the working environment in some corporation, vs the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem.

In the former there can be multiple layers of approvals needed to move forward with anything, and if your manager or their manager doesn’t immediately grok the value of some new idea, you can’t move forward with it. It can be a frustrating and draining environment.

It’s the main reason some of the best people in the world leave that environment and do a startup instead. They can move forward with building innovative new ideas with little or no corporate bureaucratic impediments. That’s where the energy and drive is.

MA and others are implying that cryptocurrencies provide a similar permissionless platform for rapidly experimenting with new financial products and services. And they’re not wrong, for better or worse.

So it's "permissionless" in the regulatory sense? No pesky SEC breathing down their necks?

Well the SEC is definitely breathing down the necks of any org that sold secur… er, tokens, without properly registering with the SEC. But for the platforms that did that properly, building services on top of them is mostly permissionless.

In theory it is time consuming and expensive and full of legal issues if you try to operate a LLC with 200 owners with 20 different roles and rights between those 200 owners.

In theory if those roles and rights and shares of ownership were enforced as code and owned as private keys, the LLC would be much easier and cheaper to operate. And any anyone could buy in using crypto.

While it is true that today's best practices of corporate governance and regulations around corporate governance could be improved, It isn't clear why a Corporate Governance SaaS application would be unable to make those improvements unless the goal of your improvements is to circumvent laws and regulations.

I just can't keep up with this stuff but I did see a thing about a DAO being taken over by a majority of its voting block belonging to one person: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/134180/build-finance-dao...

Well... Like you don't need permission to make something like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. You just need somebody to buy it.

Of course it's not different from "didn't need permission to make salesforce.com", "didn't need permission to make Uber", "didn't need permission to make Danbooru", etc.

I hope this does not get lost in all the dirt being spilled onto "web3". But these are the things that make me excited:

* I really _love_ the Argent wallet. It is essentially a fully non-custodial bank in my pocket. As scalability and stablecoins improve I can see myself abandoning my usual bank altogether. Sending money to my friend over it just feels right - no middlemen, truly peer-to-peer and safe.

* I love logging in with an Ethereum wallet. It's the best login experience I have had. It shifts the responsibility of protecting keys onto the user but that has been improving.

* I do not buy NFTs but I really like them. If you are a user in a multiplayer game I think you should truly own your items, not the server you are on. That idea excites me. NFTs have allowed digital artists and musician even from Iran to make money. Sorare, the European football collecting game, is doing very well at using NFTs for trading cards.

* ZK proofs are enabling a few very interesting use cases. For example where a few people participate in mechanisms with privacy. For example you can have companies bid on a contract with the winning contract being revealed but nobody else's bids. Cryptography proves that all was carried out according to the rules of the bidding process. This can safely put things on-chain that are otherwise very privacy dependent. For a very interesting example of such private inter-company communication protocol check out Baseline[1].

* As digital identity improves and so does ZK research one could even more interesting things. For example prove to services something about their identity data without giving the actual data away. Here is an interesting proof of concept of this[2].

* Decentralized storage is still in its infancy in my opinion but can do lots of cool things. For example Mirror is a blogging platform that stores data on-chain and on decentralized storage platforms[3].

* Decentralized finance. From my crypto-wallet I can lend out or borrow stablecoins and get an OK return on it. But there is a myriad of systems emerging of options, bons, derivatives, synthetic assets, etc. Automatic market maker systems work super well for trading. Basically what humans do in banks the machines do more efficiently. I know people say that the "coins" passed around on-chain are bullshit. I don't want to argue with that cause its a quagmire, but the systems themselves are sound.

EDIT: * DAOs. I know its a buzzword nowadays. But having the on-chain communal bank and voting has made ye olde co-ops more streamlined and people are doing cool things. 1Hive is pretty much a company of builders. CityDAO buying and managing real estate together. Cabin DAO organizing creative retreats (and doing excellent research on organization procedures). OlympusDAO is a defi building collective that is ever creative with their products. ENS runs a domain registration system. And many more.

[1] https://www.ey.com/en_gl/news/2020/03/ey-launches-baseline-p... [2] https://github.com/kevinz917/zk-NFT [3] https://creators.mirror.xyz/

I was a crypto skeptic, and for the most part still am, but I also own a bunch of NFTs, and I see the value in it. What I own are tokens that represent ownership in a bunch of LLCs that own houses in the USA. Now you might say, "but shared ownership of houses has existed forever!" and you'd be right, but the NFTs have some advantages:

1. I can trade them on the blockchain any time I want to, I don't need permission for any entity to do so.

2. Anyone in the world can buy and sell these assets -- they don't have to US citizens or even hold any US currency.

3. Decisions about governance are made via the token holders having a vote.

4. Rent is paid out daily in crypto using smart contracts. Although this gets complicated because the rent comes in once a month as USD so it goes into the company bank account which then distributes it daily in equivalent crypto. So you can trade the crypto, or you can trade your crypto with the company for USD, but then you run into US banking regulations where you have to give up your identity and follow all the usual KYC rules and all the other requirements for foreign holders.

Overall it's been a positive experience so far, and I'm making good returns (about 9% annual return on my cash).

It's definitely made me slightly less skeptical of the promises of Web3 and crypto, but it also has shown me that a purely permissionless system probably won't work -- this only works because we own a stake in an LLC that follows US law and is subject to US courts.

This sounds like owning voting shares in a traditional LLC but with extra steps. Especially (4) where an awkward USD->crypto->USD transaction has to happen instead of the LLC just paying a dividend.

The novelty seems in 1 & 2 being open to everyone. But one could argue that this is just unwinding the last 150 years of financial regulation and will lead to the same kind of scams and instability that this regulation was meant to curb.

Part 4 is only necessary because there isn't good infrastructure for working directly in crypto. I can see a future where say a food vendor could take the crypto tokens directly so that you don't have to convert to USD, and a future where the rent is paid in tokens.

And you're right there is a danger about unwinding financial regulation, some of which is there for good reason. Which is why I think it only works because the LLC is still subject to US law.

> Part 4 is only necessary because there isn't good infrastructure for working directly in crypto

> Overall it's been a positive experience so far, and I'm making good returns (about 9% annual return on my cash).

Just to be sure - both of these that you said are concurrently true?

Yes, I have actually taken money back out to test it, and it is running at a 9% annual return rate in USD (and I put in USD to get the tokens to start).

I am planning to rebut all your 4 points one by one but first:

i. Are you actually using NFTs at this very moment the way you write here without a parallel system of property title management that's independent of NFTs?

ii. Please show me where I can access and view these NFTs then because I will (attempt) a transaction into this ownership today. If I am not allowed to do that right now, explain to me why not?

I see you all over this thread accusing Marc Andressen of engaging in massive fraud, so I don't feel like you are debating in good faith. That being said:

> Are you actually using NFTs at this very moment the way you write here without a parallel system of property title management that's independent of NFTs?

Of course not, I specifically said that they represent ownership in an LLC, which participates in the normal real estate market in the normal way.

> Please show me where I can access and view these NFTs then because I will (attempt) a transaction into this ownership today. If I am not allowed to do that right now, explain to me why not?

Start here: https://www.lofty.ai

> I see you all over this thread accusing Marc Andressen of engaging in massive fraud, so I don't feel like you are debating in good faith.

If:

i. We know that consumer electronics depreciate rapidly over time eventually to become obsolete

ii. I were you tell you that "Assets gain value over time so I will sell you this CD player from Walmart today for $10 that you will be able to sell for $100 in the future" and you said "No, it's untrue that a CD player is an asset likely to gain value over time, so you wont even get $10 leave alone $100 in the future", than you arn't debating in bad faith.

What you are doing is using the system and logic and inferences. High school stuff

> https://www.lofty.ai/

Do you have any stake in this venture (or exclusively a fee paying user)?

Here are 3 red flags about https://www.lofty.ai/ right off their homepage:

> Investing in real estate is now easier than buying stocks

> Become a direct owner of A.I. vetted real estate in 5 minutes and sell anytime.

> Invest in tokenized real estate for only $50

This company will make a lot of people loose money. I am glad to see you're making 9% in a market that's currently averaging ~15+% Net IRR.

Using deep neural networks in real estate? Wasn't Zillow's iBuying massacre enough educational experience?

You have been around a long time to form an quality opinion: you think this is a good solution to a hyperlocalized, human scale problem?

No actual RE investor in the real world gives a hoot about $10 avocado toasts and Tesla charging stations as prominently shown on the website. It's all about cashflow, tenant rolls and contracts.

Anyways, I wish you and the current users there, luck. We need even more ~speculation~ investors in RE in the U.S.

> Of course not, I specifically said that they represent ownership in an LLC, which participates in the normal real estate market in the normal way.

So instead of NFTs, you could have used a shared, versioned, auditable Excel spreadsheet/AirTable to get the exact same effect without losing any functionality?

What additional gain does NFTs bring over this AirTable solution (and I am aware of the DropBox comment)?

What am I missing?

> What you are doing is using the system and logic and inferences. High school stuff

And yet, used cars are now selling for more than new cars. I actually have equity in my car. So even in a market with a long history, it can still be wrong. And NFTs don't have a long history to go on. So accusing someone of fraud is a bit of a stretch.

> Do you have any stake in this venture (or exclusively a fee paying user)?

If I did I would have disclosed it when I linked it.

> I am glad to see you're making 9% in a market that's currently averaging ~15+% Net IRR.

Then 9% I'm making is just on the rent, it doesn't include appreciation. The IRR on my properties is closer to 20% when you include appreciation.

> Using deep neural networks in real estate? Wasn't Zillow's iBuying massacre enough educational experience?

Unlike Zillow, this company only uses the AI as a tool to identify potential properties. There is still a human that vets it and buys it, and then I get to personally vet it and choose if I want to buy it. This is the right way to use AI -- as a tool to augment your own capabilities.

> It's all about cashflow, tenant rolls and contracts.

And that's all I look at. Their website is a marketing tool, they are trying to get millennials/genZ into the real estate market by making it cheap enough to be affordable to them, so their website uses those things in their marketing. I don't care, I look at the cash flow and tenant rolls and they look good.

> We need even more ~speculation~ investors in RE in the U.S.

Speculation is not what is damaging the real estate market. It's local zoning boards preventing construction. It's simple supply and demand -- demand for housing far outstrips supply. Me not investing will not make any difference. In fact what I'm doing is providing liquidity to the market, so I'm actually making it better. I'm not buying real estate and sitting on it -- I'm helping turn homes into rentals for people to live in.

> So instead of NFTs, you could have used a shared, versioned, auditable Excel spreadsheet/AirTable to get the exact same effect without losing any functionality? ... What am I missing?

Not at all. You lack vision if you think that is the case.

First off, lofty would need to continue to exist to use Airtable/SQL/whatever. With the NFTs, lofty can go away and I still own my share of the LLC.

Secondly, a shared spreadsheet with audibility is what a blockchain is.

Thirdly, I don't need permission from anyone the sell my shares. A shared table run by lofty would require me to ask them for permission to make the transaction. Which means it's subject to US law. So anyone else around the world who doesn't want to onus of filing US tax paperwork can't buy these assets.

The permissionless part and the governance part are key. We (the other owners of the LLC and myself) don't have to rely on a gatekeeper (lofty in this case) to transact business with each other.

But also lofty provides a service, making it easier for us to transact business, so they take a fee for that and make money. We don't need them but they provide a benefit, so everyone wins.

I thank you for this reply. You think deeply and your use of lofty as augmentation is very well placed.

I am unsure if most people there behave so, I can hope it is.

> Thirdly, I don't need permission from anyone the sell my shares

I believe you do and that's lofty. I don't believe you can transact outside and independent of lofty - i.e., if you built a replica of lofty tomorrow that transacted using the underlying blockchain, you couldn't.

> We (the other owners of the LLC and myself) don't have to rely on a gatekeeper (lofty in this case) to transact business with each other

Untrue - there's significant external process that relies on U.S. contract and property law that lofty handles that's undocumented and will need to be re-implemented from scratch if lofty were to close doors.

That said, again, I thank you for this reply and you have given me thoughts to consider.

I just want to pick on this point a little -

> Speculation is not what is damaging the real estate market. It's local zoning boards preventing construction. It's simple supply and demand -- demand for housing far outstrips supply.

At the most technical/fundamental level you are correct. However, it glosses over how a lot of that demand is sort of artificial and certainly temporary. A lot of the increase in demand is wealthy people buying up housing to feed AirBNB/VRBO/etc. As areas move to increase supply to match demand we will end up with multiple instances of, essentially, Detroit or Italy. As family numbers dwindle, reproduction rates drop, and Boomers die off (they're a very large generation), the demand for housing is going to start falling pretty substantially in the next decade. We'll be left with unwanted housing which leads to vacant properties which leads to crime which leads to devalued property. And we'll be right back to selling homes for $1 or demolishing them just to protect the occupied ones next door.

My speculation: perhaps he means that the potential energy tied up behind financial regulation is enormous, and that web3 is a practical way to tap into that.

(If I'm correct about his intended meaning, you're confused because he's being oblique. It would be clearer for him to say "the enormous payoff of impossible-to-regulate financial products".)

Note that this is a 4chan meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-did-he-mean-by-this

The phrase "What did [a person] mean by this?" seems easy to reinvent. Are you suggesting this post is trolling us or ... ? I'm having trouble guessing your meaning.

I'm not. I never heard of the meme. I'm curious as to why Andreessen sees something obvious and I don't. I want to know what I'm missing.

The meme is used either comedically (look at this funny/confusing thing this person said) or provocatively (look at this dumb/controversial thing this person said), but never simply as a sincere request for clarification. The submitter is asking a sincere question.

It's also a regular sentence one might type out when asking what $someone means by $something without ever having visited that site.

I get the payoff from decentralization and permissionless innovation! That's why I build $5 VPS servers on ${cheap_provider}'s hardware and manage my own DNS records.

So what does web3 give me that's better?

A speculative digital asset that might appreciate to the moon or go to zero.

Remember the .org fiasco [1]? Your domain is not your domain. Web3 aims to fix that. Actually there is like a half-dozen competing projects at the moment (ENS, Unstoppable Domains and Handshake for example).

Yes you did build your own server and you put your data on it. Almost nobody can stomach that UX. Almost everybody will put their data on server that will make money off of that data. Web3's goal is to make it so its easy to share your data in a way where profits go to you. We aren't there yet, but for example mirror.xyz is working hard on making decentralized blogging easier.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/after-nonprofits-prote...

He means to say there is huge potential(hand waving) to change humanity..

It’s a way to say he owns a lot of crypto and no way he’s gonna sht and on it.

It's replicating the things that the early internet based its success on: open protocols and decentralized authority.

Nobody can tell you: "no, you can't build that".

It's the opposite of closed platforms, such as the app/play store, facebook, etc. Where a central authority can set the rules and on a whim, shut you down.

So the internet then?

It means he has a lot of investments in the space that he wants returns on.

What I truly don't understand is the ubiquity of self-validating platitudes in crypto and web3 twitter. It's constant and, to me, unbearable.

Feels like a shadowy handwave keeping you from looking at, or really thinking about, the "join us or else" mentality.

decentralization and permissionless is all fine, but the web3 as envisioned by the blockchain crowd is not decentralized and hence permissionlessness is illusory...

In 2014 he said that Bitcoin was the future of Micropayments. In 2028 he will be saying that some other buzzword is the future.

> In 2014 he said that Bitcoin was the future of Micropayments

I found a reference for anyone interested:

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/

A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. Micropayments have never been feasible, despite 20 years of attempts, because it is not cost effective to run small payments (think $1 and below, down to pennies or fractions of a penny) through the existing credit/debit and banking systems. The fee structure of those systems makes that nonviable.

All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, that’s trivially easy. Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future. So you can specify an arbitrarily small amount of money, like a thousandth of a penny, and send it to anyone in the world for free or near-free.

Guy didn't know about the transaction fees and wait times, I guess?

He has a crypto fund that he needs to make returns on, so he has been shilling crypto / web3 / "decentralized" / blockchain hard with his personal brand.

What he doesn't say, that I find obvious, is that open source has been doing decentralized and permissionless innovation for a long time. Many closed source companies are also building APIs and ecosystems around their products which is much better than in the before times.

He's borderline lying saying that web3 is decentralized. Only its expensive data layer is, and maybe a bit of smart contracts, though those are moving towards permissioned calling, because malice... who thought making your code easily callable with arbitrary inputs and subroutines was a good idea... smh

A quote I saw the other day:

“Decentralized blockchain, hosted on AWS”

You can be "optimistic" with centralized L2 solutions on GCP

So painful because it's true.

That said, I don't fault AWS for jumping on the bandwagon and making money.

I actually hope Amazon Managed Blockchain picks up so that the truth (and the hoax) emerges faster and we can put all this BS behind us.

The very reason a blockchain needs to exist alongwith PoW, consensus is to tackle the inherent risk of Decentralization and bad actors. Amazon Managed Blockchain is just needless complexity where federated databases would have sufficed and been far more efficient (perf., cost, complexity)

I believe central bank digital currencies are mostly built on managed block chains because the data structure works well. The Hamilton Project between the Boston bank and MIT Digital Currencies group are looking at two implementations for a digital dollar and one of those is a ‘classical’ centralized blockchain

Explain to me why banks would need blockchains over federated databases. All these federated databases have strict audit trails and controls.

Banks have been using these for nearly 50 years and the systems are very well understood. Event Sourcing as a concept and WORM drives as an implementation are mathematically proven to work already and don't need the complexity and overhead of a blockchain in a regulated, audited environment.

Look forward to what I'm missing.

I've been asking this question for the last 5 years every time someone pitches "blockchain for X". I have yet to see a satisfactory answer other than handwavy appeals like "but it's immutable".

This inability of advocates to clearly and concisely explain the pros and cons of their own technology is what constantly sets off my bullshit detector when people talk about blockchain.

> This inability of advocates to clearly and concisely explain the pros and cons of their own technology is what constantly sets off my bullshit detector when people talk about blockchain.

I don't think you will be disappointed in your approach. I have mentioned some real problems that I think needs to be addressed in this very unpopular comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349821

Programmable money is the most obvious one. We don’t know each other but say we wanted to bet on a 1v1 video game match. We bet $100 on the outcome of a CoD game. I can write a smart contract that acts as an escrow account that accepts two payees, requires the amount to be $100, and queries the CoD API to check the result of a match ID paying out to the correct payee or pays back in 24 hours if it never happens. This is all within the payment system itself and can be represented in maybe 50 lines of code. Because it’s a blockchain you can see the code for yourself and you know it’s immutable so I can’t rug pull.

My favorite part is when I come along, exploit a bug in the smart contract, and neither of you gets the money, because Code Is Law on the immutable blockchain.

That quote reminds me of the Bo Burnham song “That Funny Feeling.” It would fit nicely alongside lines like “stunning 8k resolution meditation app.”

I really laughed out loud at this

> He's borderline lying saying that web3 is decentralized

The "web3" he is funding is only decentralized in his mind a decade into the future. So either he doesn't understand decentralization or is knowingly lying for monetary gain.

> He has a crypto fund that he needs to make returns on, so he has been shilling crypto / web3 / "decentralized" / blockchain hard with his personal brand.

That's unfair. What if the reason he has a crypto fund in the first place is because he genuinely believes it's the future? That seems to be the case with everything he's said for years and how he makes investment decisions.

Here how you prove the fraud:

The hard problem that needs to be solved in a Decentralized blockchain is the risk and effect of bad actors. None of the current funds, including that of MA, addresses this risk.

Instead, all current plays are about building Managed Blockchains that's just needless complexity where federated databases would have sufficed and been far more efficient (perf., cost, complexity)

There's a fine line between vision and orchestrated fraud. It's always been easier to commit fraud and once you're managing billions of other people's money, it's extremely hard to not take the easy path.

Bottomline: This is a pump and dump speculation play. HN is too smart to fall for it.

Which bad actors? One way MA manages at least some of them is by not investing in them, and instead investing in high quality teams. That’s a large part of the value-add of professional VCs, be it in blockchain/web3 or any other domain, that they have the expertise to discern legit teams from scam ones.

> Which bad actors

actors on the blockchain

> That’s a large part of the value-add of professional VCs, be it in blockchain/web3 or any other domain, that they have the expertise to discern legit teams from scam ones.

That's a tiny part of it and as useful to society as hiring away nuclear physicists to work on ad prediction and tiktok recommendation algorithms.

Vetting early stage ventures is actually a large part of the VC job, not a tiny part. It's the entire reason for the accredited investor laws, to make it more difficult for scammers to scam the public.

I see it as more how do we allocate resources to better causes in society, something blockchain based ecosystems purported to solve, but have this far not, exactly because it is a social problem not a technology one.

Blockchain makes all of these things harder and more complex. I have yet to see something a blockchain can do that we could not with existing technology. The supposedly better incentive structures aren't and are rather the opposite from what I can tell.

What's missing from the open source model is the monetization. The incentives for contributing to open source and using open source products are misaligned - this is why it's been so hard to build businesses around it (with some notable exceptions).

What he's arguing is that web3 solves this problem by aligning incentives for creators and maintainers around the same token system.

why there needs to be a blockchain involved for this tho? Hard problem is who should pay for what work which a blockchain is not solving

> Hard problem is who should pay for what work which a blockchain is not solving

Yes, this is one of the many hard problems.

I would be 100% behind MA if he used his influence, wealth and power to fund solving these hard problems.

Unfortunately, his and most of current funds are building Managed Blockchains that's just needless complexity where federated databases would have sufficed and been far more efficient (perf., cost, complexity)

That said, Decentralization is the future and will happen with or without him. Unfortunately he's going down in history as one of those who slowed down progress to make monetary gains.

Because you can offload much of the logistic behind it onto the chain. Otherwise you need a legal entity willing to work with banks and auditors. It's what gitcoin does.

I disagree. Monetization will ruin open source. The incentives w/o monetization are actually well aligned: the contributors are often the most avid users - whether private or commercial. Adding money into the mix will invite participants whose only interest is earning tokens.

This will probably mean that more OSS code gets written, but - as with the open web - financial incentives will invite bad actors to game the system and the signal to noise ratio in OSS contributions will decrease.

A good case study in this is what happened when Steam tried to add monetization to Skyrim mods[1].

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements...

People keep forgetting that blockchains are decentralized databases. The data is out there on an open database for everybody to use. That’s the feature. The app you build on that can be closed source, private, centralized, decentralized, it’s up to you.

We aren't forgetting it. We just know the database sucks at being a database.

* Transaction volumes are abysmal. Which means I have to build some kind of layer 2 transactional layer over it. (i.e. I have to build a second database to work around the shortcomings of the blockchain database)

* The mechanism of BFT that a blockchain uses is expensive. Proof of work, Proof of Stake, the others. This expense has to escalate in order to retain Fault Tolerance. It is among the least efficient way to achieve fault tolerance that you can imagine. It also exerts a push toward centralization.

* The storage capacity of the database is also terrible See my point above about needing to build a Layer 2 storage mechanism to be at all viable.

All of this is playing out in practice right now in web3 space. Merkle trees make a fantastic version of a public audit log. But blockchain consensus mechanisms all seem to suck. You'd frankly probably be better off going with Raft or something instead. But that would be too centralized for the adherents so they don't. Meanwhile for the exact same reasons that Raft leads to centralized nodes blockchains lead to mining pools at the cost of massive inefficiency.

[EDIT: mis-worded]

> Transaction volumes are abysmal

There are many database engines, some can actually go quite fast.

> The mechanism of BFT that a blockchain uses is expensive. Proof of work, Proof of Stake, the others

Proof of work is not BFT, proof of stake is not always BFT (ouroboros). Proof of stake is not expensive. I’m not sure why you’re saying it forces you towards centralization, these are decentralization technologies, literally.

> The storage capacity of the database is also terrible

How so? It seems like this limitation hasn’t stopped people from creating usecases.

> But blockchain consensus mechanisms all seem to suck. You'd frankly probably be better off going with Raft or something instead

Have you heard of solana, hotstuff, avalanche, algorand, to say a few?

> Meanwhile for the exact same reasons that Raft leads to centralized nodes blockchains lead to mining pools at the cost of massive inefficiency

Mining pools are only a thing in proof of work

If he believes in the technology I imagine he would have some investments in the space. It would be weird if he didn't. Brushing it off as shilling for his fund is not helpful.

If you can't answer the question at face value, you should just not answer it.

Try steelmaning crypto / web3. You should strive to understand thing from the perspective of their biggest advocates. That's a prerequisite to having a solid understanding of the space, unless 100% of people interested or optimistic in the technology and being dishonest.

Investors hack your mind with ambiguity disguised as genius. It's just a guy marketing himself and his investments on social media. Why do you care?

What Marc Andreessen said:

> The enormous payoff from decentralization and permissionless innovation. I cannot believe more people don't understand this. It's so obvious.

What Marc Andreessen meant:

> The enormous payoff for a16z from centralization of our platform and fees from both innovators and users to run on on our platform. I cannot believe more people don't fall for this. It's so frustrating.

The cynicism on this thread shows how far HN has fallen since the time I first visited back in 2008.

MA is clearly talking about products that can be built with the technology. Believe the worth of web3 or not, there is no need to talk about his fund or indulge in bad-faith mind-reading.

This place used to be full of hackers and founders, now it’s full of the grumpy and the jaded. RIP.

> MA is clearly talking about products that can be built with the technology.

That's fine. But what specifically does he mean in this case, then, that makes his technology so useful?

A twitter like product that runs on web3 should be immune to censorship. I guess the way it would work is that people would get paid to host content and pay to express themselves. So pied piper basically.

The closest analogy I can see in the past was UseNet and that might be a bit of a stretch.

It's cynicism on every thread and full of "get-off-my-lawn" comments. It has become toxic. Not sure what happened in the last 10 years.

Accurate reflection of the industry, then.

The community has aged? Younger people are having discussions elsewhere?

Andreessen is the opposite of a hacker and founder these days. He's a shill and a parasite. I'm glad HN criticizes him and questions his motives.

Thank you. You don’t have to like blockchain stuff, but the level of discourse this topic invokes reminds me of TDS.

There's a fine line between vision and orchestrated fraud.

It's always been easier to commit fraud and once you're managing billions of other people's money, it's extremely hard to not take the easy path.

The hard problem that needs to be solved in a Decentralized blockchain is the risk and effect of bad actors. None of the current funds, including that of MA, addresses this risk.

Bottomline: This is a pump and dump speculation play. HN is too smart to fall for it.

I could not agree more with you. Do you have any tips for other places? Even any good subreddits? The only way I can find the old energy now is certain twitter hubs, but I suspect there is a lot on discord.

And on the topic of the post:

"The financial measures bring crowdfunding platforms under terror-finance oversight, authorize Canadian banks to freeze accounts suspected of funding the blockades and suspend insurance on vehicles in the protests, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said."

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-police-respons...

it's still got some hackers and founders, if you're looking for financiers looking to extract value rather than build this may not be the place.

There's a lot of people who don't want to admit (to themselves even) they were wrong about Bitcoin 12 years ago and are still grasping onto that belief for dear life. Hoping that it will fail and prove them right all along. See, I was right Bitcoin wasn't worth $10 and is a useless technology!

So the cognitive dissonance is getting worse the bigger crypto gets and the longer it lasts.

Let me know when BTC succeeds. I still can't walk into the grocery store and trade some BTC for a pack of smokes.

I can buy some BTC and then lose the private key though. But that's already a feature I get from my local fiat currency if I just drop my wallet in the park for three hours (in fairness; this is a bad analogy... Dropping my wallet in the park at least has the pro-social positive that someone else can benefit from my loss, whereas nobody benefits when I lose my BTC private key).

You may not be looking at some change in HN so much as a change in the culture as a whole.

Back in 2008, tech was full on optimism, save the world rah rah. Google's motto was still "Don't be evil". Zuckerberg was sort of fumbling and unthreatening in his public appearances. Etc etc. Everyone adored tech, both inside and outside the industry.

Now the wider world is beginning to despise us. And even within tech, a ton of people are extremely unhappy with how things have gone. A lot of us bought into the optimism and revolutionary hype about how tech would change the world, and the fall from that viewpoint to current realities has been rough. The pandemic, and the massive shift of power into the hands of tech and tech-adjacent companies, only served to drive in the lesson.

Personally, I think tech did improve the world in many, many measurable ways and I'm pretty grumpy about how the wave of hatred at Facebook et al is spilling out to undeserving targets. But as far as this particular thread goes... I think Marc Andreessen doesn't really need the help.

I think it's good and "hacker-like" to question authority and examine possible conflicts of interest driving their statements. I'm not sure what kind of "hacker" defers unquestioningly to the opinion of people with a lot of money.

Web3 isn't bad.

But the Reddit founder is knee deep in NFTs which are basically as close to scam as possible. At least Amway tried to sell you tooth paste. The NFT grifters are selling you nothing.

I think NFT buyers are fully aware of what they are doing. Most of the NFTs sold clearly come with no utility except a subjective feeling of "onwership" and the buyers are aware.

Yes, they are speculating. Shilling the space as the next revolution in the hope of getting rich by dumping the NFT onto the next 'investor'.

This shouldn't stop us from judging the relevant 'thought leaders' which know full well what they are doing: getting rich on hype and letting the final buyer go broke.

Reddit had / has some utility. NFTs are a money grab.

> I cannot believe more people don't understand this. It's so obvious.

In my experience, anytime anyone says something like this without further explanation, they deserve a large amount of scrutiny and a healthy dose of skepticism.

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