Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s
cdixon.mirror.xyz
cdixon.mirror.xyz
> You just need to know where to look. My belief is that the best place to look is crypto and web 3.
I've been around the web2 emergence and seen the meetups/evening/weekend reunions around the excitement. It felt and looked like toys, and the tech was dead easy to comprehend and extend at the time.
Neither crypto or web3 seem to fit in this picture though (overly complex to explain, to implement, no fun factor, and obnoxious people promoting it).
On the other hand, Dall-e kind of AI tools (recreation from textual prompts and/or visual/audio hints) do fit: progress is apparent, people play with it for fun and discovery.
Ad-blocking and privacy techs, also, are still in a toy-like/diy stage but seem to become more crucial.
Human-scale centered stuff (better housing, cities, transporation, care, slow-everything, energy-effiency, etc.) also seem to be in the toy-becoming-crucial stage.
Most engineers thing "Unnecessary privacy risk" or "Boring bloatware" when they see the stuff that would have been big in 2003.
In 10 years, I doubt I'll be using anything that the smartest people are playing with now, the smartest people seem to be more interested in ideas and logic than products and projects.
If there's no real novel idea in it(Or at least new to them), they'll get bored. A lot of stuff is possible and users would love it, but... engineers have no interest, because their idea of tech progress is less software not more.
Human centered stuff is basically impossible to change on a DIY scale, so the transition from toy to practical is a lot harder. A city is inherently almost unchangeable except via million dollar contracts, and any kind of commune/ecovillage/etc has the overhead of trying to do its mission, while also existing within the current economy, so everyone seems to do a lot of work and make a lot of sacrifices as far as I can see from the outside.
There's still smart people playing with stuff that will be everywhere(Like IoT), but not as many.
Or, perhaps it still works that way, and in 10 years the world will find a deep respect for Kackzynski, and my next computer purchase will be a black market laptop when everyone votes to ban them and be done with it!
Meanwhile, there is another area today where $30m is a surprising exit for a weekend project taking off, where hackers eagerly debate on Twitter and show off the latest baffling thing they've just coaxed a new tech into doing and wonder what it could do next, and draw lines on log graphs... And that is indeed AI.
After Filecoin, ICP, BitClout, Basis, ... and so many other scams that blew up, how can you take anything they say seriously?
One example: Chris wrote blog posts for[0] and promoted the "Internet Computer" project everywhere. It launched at >$400, insiders sold, and then it quickly collapsed to under $50 and is now at $5.[1] This was promoted by Chris and other investors, bought by retail (ie, normal people) who thought they were getting in on the ground floor of a big new exciting technology, and then lost almost their whole investment.
Web3/crypto should not be about billionaires making money by pumping and dumping useless tokens on retail investors.
“Where are the users?”
By the 2001 timeframe he’s describing the internet had roughly 500 million users worldwide. I think his descriptions of how most people used and viewed the internet are revisionist history and self serving for criticisms such as the one I’m starting on but the fact remains - half a billion people with a daily average of 30 min.
Let’s look at what it took to get the first half billion on line (starting from 1988):
- You had to buy a computer or device that was capable of accessing the internet. Let’s be very conservative and say this is $1000 (non inflation adjusted). You spent this money knowing the computer would be obsolete and nearly worthless in 1-2 years.
- In many cases dialup was long distance and pay by the minute by the telephone company and ISP. I know it was for me and my family until about 1996 or so. We used it 30 minutes a day because it was double billed by the minute and ridiculously expensive.
- Dial up providers had to deploy massive hardware infrastructure - hundreds of thousands if not millions of modem banks to telephone exchanges throughout the entire country.
- “Backbone providers” had to dig trenches, lay fiber, and dispatch ships to lay fiber across oceans.
- Telephone companies and a variety of other infrastructure providers had to upgrade, repair, etc untold miles of existing copper infrastructure, switches, etc, etc
The first transatlantic telephone cable to use fiber optics was activated in 1988. 1988 to the 2001 period he describes is 13 years.
Bitcoin was released 13 years ago. From an exhaustive analysis I’ve done over the top 20 Coindesk blockchains at best there are MAYBE 100 million users of anything blockchain related worldwide.
As cdixon mentions in the article in 2009 we had the iPhone and App Store. We had Android. The internet had roughly 2 billion users. Ubiquitous broadband, social media, cellular data, etc, etc.
Getting a user on to the internet (and supporting them) in the 13 year period between 1988 and 2001 was a tremendous challenge.
Getting a bitcoin/blockchain user online (and supporting them) for its entire existence is downloading an application on your phone or computer. For the bast majority of blockchains history I could make someone a bitcoin user in five minutes or less in a bar. Or even simpler - they could click a link on a social media post from one of their 500 connections.
Remember the $1000 guaranteed to depreciate computer to get on the internet from the 90s? With bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies the other half of the so called value prop is that it’s virtually guaranteed to “moon” and make you 100x (or whatever).
Yet blockchain user adoption has grown at 1/5 the rate of the web/internet - and this is being very generous to blockchain.
People saw value and utility in the internet and the rate of user adoption reflects that.
I can’t get anyone to answer my simple question:
“Where are the users?”
As we’ve seen with every technology invention of all time if it provides value, utility, quality of life improvements, etc people figure it out and will adopt it - even if it involves jumping through the kinds of hoops, expense, etc we did in the 90s for the internet.
That clearly and plainly isn’t happening with anything related to blockchain.
Why?
When people run around and say things like "you're guaranteed to 100x", the rest of us know it's either a lie or self-delusion. We also know that past 100x examples were only possible because use growth was rapid enough to enable ponzi schemes
I want to be clear: there's value in the ideas underlying web3/crypto/dweb. But nobody has been able to articulate that value clearly to ring out above all the snake oil. The market will go through a major shake out the next few years, and then we'll start seeing value emerge.
It's currently were the web1 was 1999 - lots of completely overlooked promises that clearly cannot be kept, collapse about to happen. This will clean out the market. What remains will likely be staid, boring applications. And people will take what they learned and build more interesting stuff on the side. (in the best case.)
Web3 to date has been great fun from a financier's POV. In the same way that Web1 folks were convinced of the future being "more free information" Web3 tends to host the sentiment of the future being "more liquidity". But as with information going onto web pages turning attention into the value, liquidity is the commodity here; anyone can just issue their own token if they need a trade object, with roughly the same amount of tech savvy that it took to put up a web site in 1999. That's the essence of "be your own bank" - but it's still above the level of skill needed to have a Facebook page or a Tiktok. The differentiation that builds a business model has to come from something else: "tokens with X"(market-making), not "tokens for X"(securitization).