I'm curious what you're trying to get at here, and your intent for posting this. Can you elaborate?
Molly White writes a very one sided blog which any anti-Web3 person can point to. It is like, say, Electronic Intifada or MondoWeiss that anti-zionists can point to.
The point was to relate my experience with trying to reach out and welcome Molly on our show and discuss her thesis vs projects in the web3 space. Believe it or not, most scammers don’t work for 5 years and go $200K into personal debt after the initial money ran out to build an open source platform. Which we released for free on the blockchain and GitHub.
Most scammers take your money to enrich themselves and run.
Spare me your racist bullshit please. It's just a bit funny that this is the same thread where you desperately try to portray yourself as the reasonable person who will talk to all sides.
And btw, I have engaged with both zionists and anti-zionists in good faith.
I wanted to show that Molly White doesn’t seem to be open to a discussion about the broader issues, and her blog is certainly very one-sided, which I actually appreciate (I love one sided stuff, because it tends to go out of its way to find the best arguments for its side, as long as you balance it with the other side). We are in a unique position to share our experience with her.
We spent years quietly building open technology to help people around the world stop relying on centralized entities which clearly is a problem.
We have been seeking out and engaging well-known people in substantive discussions around issues that really matter, — sociopolitical, economic, regulatory — etc.
There are tons of people around the world who engage with us. They would like to see things solved. Both on the left and the right. Here are just a few:
David Harvey
Noam Chomsky
Patri Friedman
Robert Murphy
Sarah Hanks
Richard Heart
The original inventors of
Freenet
Kademlia DHT
Ripple
etc.
This crowd loves someone like Molly White to highlight everything wrong. I was inviting Molly White to come and have a real conversation about real issues, that I highlighted. She refused.
I see the same in, say, rabid democrats vs republicans, left vs right, with their and purity tests and shouting down of opposing views. I respect when the people who speak for them are willing to come and engage in a real discussion, and explore ideas. A few people, like Molly, would rather not.
For years, we have been rather welcoming and eager to find out the pitfalls and responsible solutions. I wish AI shops were like that. But on HN, there are a ton of activists who want to bury anything that is in favor of Web3 even slightly. They do it silently and avoid discussion. And if AI is criticized, they downvote that too.
The activists in the HN ”overton window” these days seem to think that there are no people that n tech working on real Web3 and Web5 projects outside their bubble. They will be proven wrong in 2024 but these trends on HN seems to drown out real substance.
Your implication that Molly is uninterested in "real conversations about real issues" because she turned down your podcast is, ultimately, a projection that confirms your priors.
Take it for what it is: a biased one-sided blog. As I said, I find those to be more valuable than middle-of-the-road ones, because they do more hard-hitting arguments and research. But you have to balance it out by reading other blogs, such as at least CoinDesk or CoinTelegraph or watching CoinBureau. And many people on HN don't. They're happy to be in a bubble.
PS: All those other people I mentioned are likely far more busy than Molly. Noam Chomsky is for sure, I know that. And he's been on my show multiple times:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/mqfbzk/noam_chomsk...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc
http://davidharvey.org/2023/02/noam-chomsky-and-david-harvey...
In fact, if ANYONE on HN would like to come on our show and discuss why Web3 is not needed, full of scams and is stupid, email me (greg) at intercoin.org. I will make an episode with you and put it up on our YouTube channel.
I am pretty humble but when it comes to engaging on substance, I am rather bold. I am not a professional podcaster and I don’t have millions of dollars or followers. But I have met and had real discussions everyone from Andrew Yang to Tim Berners-Lee to the guys from Stable Diffusion, to top Christian apologists etc. If a topic matters to me, I will go and try to speak with the people who have something major to say.
Sometimes you have to punch above your weight to get quality discussions. I am probably the least well known guy who had all those people on my show and subsequently developed friendships.
I tend to be very polite, try to focus on issues instead of the person. But I do remain intellectually honest, say what I really think, and if that means going against the orthodoxy and braving downvotes then so be it. My HN history is clear going back years. As I said I am open to taking people on HN who aren’t well-known, as long as they sincerely believe the opposite and can argue it well. Because I care about the issues, not celebrities. (Molly isn’t really that famous, if we had to be honest.)
Entitlement? Simply refusal to acknowledge “my place” in this capitalist society and exercising my right to “free association” instead. If someone is publicly putting out biased, one-sided narratives, I could very well reach out and welcome them to discuss. I have said NOTHING about her refusal for many months, to anyone, and totally forgot about it … until this very post where I shared my experience because it was relevant. Basically I think we need better platforms for public discourse.
I went on the Bankless podcast six months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Itd3g23QI. I debated Charles Hoskinson on a panel about "the future of crypto": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5p2gt7htDM&t=998s. I went on the Unusual Whales crypto podcast/Twitter space: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unusual-whales-pod-13-.... I've repeatedly gone on CoinDesk's show — sometimes for more adversarial conversations than others. I provided "The Bear Case for Crypto" on a two-part series by Scott Galloway https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh... (Michael Saylor provided the bull case; unfortunately we were not in conversation directly). I went on the crypto podcast Digitally Rare a year ago: https://anchor.fm/digitallyrare/episodes/web3-could-be-going....
I apologize for upsetting you when I politely declined the invitation to come on your podcast, but it's simply not accurate to say that I don't "engage with the issues or opposing views".
My reason for declining was largely as drewbeck suggested. I also try to avoid coming on shows where I feel I am simply being used to draw engagement and interest in a specific crypto project, which was part of my concern with your specific invitation.
Please don’t think I was upset. I did not think more of it until this thread simply reminded me of it, and I posted it because I thought it was very relevant, and 99% of the text was written by me so I didn’t feel I was revealing anything truly private.
I totally understand this concern, and why someone like yourself might be very sensitive not to seem like they are endorsing a specific project — and it is exactly the concern that Robert Murphy expressed to me this past week, until we spoke. Now he is coming on my show. Because I only care about discussing the substance.
You couldn’t have known this, but frankly, I reached out simply because I wanted to have a conversation. I believe that a blog which exclusively lists everything bad in web3 is useful, because it does one part of the job. But also, people who put together such things are exactly the best people to have a conversation with because I truly do believe that if the crypto and web3 industry doesn’t step up, the much worse centralized ecosystem of Big Tech, Big Government will keep encroaching with their National IDs and CBDCs and centrally controlled financial systems (just like they have in countries from China to Sweden). As a libertarian, I see things getting a lot worse and I have spent over a decade of my life and a ton of my own money building solutions, so naturally, having discussions with people in the space something I do. To be honest, it is my guilty pleasure - I enjoy being able to engage with people and battle-test my views, and actually realize that they have blind spots too.
It is the same feeling, I suppose, as a chessplayer who gets to play games with people rated higher than them. From a purely market point of view, I guess I am engaging people who are “out of my league” in terms of the size of their audience — disregarding this has worked well for me, thankfully, but I guess it comes up in some ways, like this.
I have another channel, https://youtube.com/QbixPlatform which has nothing to do with crypto and is about an open source Web2 platform. The invitation still stands, of course. To me the issues are more about decentralization vs centralization, capitalism vs gift economies, smart contracts vs trusting specific humans, open source vs walled gardens, funding projects with equity vs utility, etc.
Let me know if you’d like to engage in any way that would scrub any mention of Intercoin (company, project etc) and if so I’ll email you and we can set it up.
More or less of a problem than out and out scams?
> Web5
Did I miss web4?
Overall your complaint would be similar to if I complained that Bryan Krebs was one-sided in his coverage of cybercrime, in that he's never pro-crime.
Jack Dorsey was the reason we went back and renamed everything to Web5. I was always thinking how 2 + 3 = 4, but then Dorsey went full 5 and we wanted to make sure when people google "Web5" they find us. Our soft goal is to have Intercoin rank higher than Bluesky for "Web5".
> relying on centralized entities which clearly is a problem >More or less of a problem than out and out scams?
Probably more. The societal impact and problems from centralized social networks are documented in many places, including the Social Dilemma documentary, the breakdown of society, record levels of sadness in teenagers, having social network addiction be classified as a disease in many countries including China and now USA, states like Utah trying to protect children from it, and much more more.
I have been documenting just the loneliness part here for a decade: https://qbix.com/investors/articles
https://rational.app goes further into the breakdown of society due to these centralized, closed-source Big Tech oligopolies
I guess you like having public forums being privately owned by tiny groups of people, but the world needs open, decentralized alternatives. Sorry if HN doesn't think so anymore, but they should embrace the "hacker ethos" instead of stockholm syndrome shilling for the corporate VC world.
But hold up now, is a decentralized social network dependent on a decentralized currency/token/Blockchain? Mastodon for example is a robust decentralized social network has absolutely nothing to do with whatever web2+n you're touting. The idea that you need to rebuild currency in order to build a new kind of social network reminds me of the common gamedev trap of writing a game engine in order to write a game (and shipping neither.)
> I guess you like having public forums being privately owned by tiny groups of people
When you said centralization I didn't think you meant social networks specifically since generally crypto talks about disrupting banks and governments and I think (with some obvious exceptions) I prefer those to, what would you call it... the anarcho-kleptocracy represented by the Crypto space.
Also, micropayments are essential for a truly decentralized market. I suggest you read this: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
Xanadu used to have the idea of micropayments. You can do those with trustlines which settle eventually on a decentralized ledger.
We're not the only ones working on this. Stefan Thomas (I met him when he was CTO of Ripple) left Ripple to work on his true love, Interledger Protocol, and started Coil. A few years back, Mozilla joined forces with Coil to offer a $100 Million dollar fund for Web Payments (that don't need the banking system): https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/100-million-investmen...
The creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, left and started Brave Browser, which had a currency for monetizing people's attention, instead of the Surveillance Capitalism economy that's pervasive in all the centralized walled gardens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
BitTorrent (the largest decentralized network by traffic) launched the BTT token, to help incentivize traffic.
The IPFS folks (who are helping decentralize the Web and ) did a $200M ICO for their coin, which helps pay for storage.
The guy who started AngelList, Naval Ravikant, launched CoinList and helped them do it, in a legal way, and involved many Web2 VCs participating in that ICO.
You're going to have to hate a lot of Web2 greats in order to carry out the hate of Web3 to its logical conclusion. Perhaps HN is wrong to simply hate the idea of decentralized currencies?
Karma isn't a currency, it's formalized reputation to surface good content and gamify writing good content.
> If Wikipedia operated its own currency, it could reward helpful contributions and make vandalism costly
The transaction scale (Wikipedia has two edits oer second) required would put it out of the reach of a crypto though. A centralized Wikipedia-buck would work just fine. Wikipedia itself is centralized.
> (you'd lose 10-50% of your currency if you were found to have vandalized a page, etc.)
This is exactly the type of thing that Crypto was built to avoid!
> micropayments
Due to scalability problems (ie gas fees) aren't cryptos much better suited to macro payments?
> Perhaps HN is wrong to simply hate the idea of decentralized currencies?
You haven't really shown that decentralized currencies are required for a decentralized social network.
You also haven't shown how your preferred networks will avoid the misaligned incentives that have created human misery out of existing social networks if they're still going to be for-profit (and the presence of a coin certainly suggests a profit motive.)
Who decides what "vandalized" means or how helpful any given contribution is and why wouldn't such a system be gamed if money is involved? This seems like a great way to turn Wikipedia completely toxic since now there's a potential financial incentive to engaging in bad faith. Even on Reddit - where Karma is not exchangeable for money - this is a problem[1].
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ox8ptp/what_is_k...
You want to bring her on the show to generate your own clout under the guise or maybe honestly finding solutions and are airing personal emails to tarnish their reputation.
I don't think that's the greatest way to treat potential guests.
As I said, I care about substance. The people who publicly espouse one view day in and day out are some of the best people to discuss with.
It’s sad that you think everything is about grift. It’s like how many Russians cynically think everything US does has no goodwill behind it and must be about power politics and screwing others. Certainly a lot of it is, but I guess it is easier to assume that all the time when you have a cynical view.
By the way if you think Molly White would give me clout then I am a little bit surprised. I had no idea she was that famous or well-known.
Richard Heart got us the most views of any video on our channel. And so what?
Oh yeah… here is proof that you’re wrong. Most of my Noam Chomsky videos were posted on youtube as UNLISTED and got maybe a couple hundred views over the years. If I was chasing subscribers I’d post them publicly !
1. Airing private conversations in an attempt to make someone look bad isn't the best look especially if you are trying to get other people on your podcast.
2. There are a million reasons not to engage on a podcast - because someone doesn't does not imply any of your viewpoints or mean that they can't have an engaging conversation about it.
3. When I read your comments it looks to me like you wanted to duke it out in a battle about Web3 - someone who doesn't like conflict probably wouldn't want to spend their time doing that.
4. Just saw that Molly responded directly to your claims. As someone who hosts a podcast do your Due Diligence FFS before you spout off.
She didn’t “just post something”. She literally runs a blog where that is all she posts.
It is reasonable to reach out to someone running a systematically anti-zionist blog and invite them to discuss things at any time of their convenience. They are doing the equivalent of standing on a street corner with a megaphone, for all the public to hear their thoughts, so of course they should expect someone to politely approach them and engage them.
> They are doing the equivalent of standing on a street corner with a megaphone
It's revealing you find it that in your face. Most people discover it via a link on hn, read, have a chuckle, move on.
> expect someone to politely approach them
Well indeed. And hopefully not see them splurge all over the place when they refuse to engage.