andrewxhill

"Dooooes radio ring a bell?" and the crowd all laughs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU

Terrible things on the internet don't make all things built on the internet guilty by association. Just like scammers and grifters finding opportunities in web3 don't make all NFTs bad ideas.

Again, probably true... but to an extent. Take a look at that Chris Burniske talk I posted in the other comment. There are many things that look new in crypto, but in fact, they are just more efficient in crypto. One of them is the speed through which the value that accrues in crypto is redeployed to fund new innovations. So when we see these huge market caps of tokens, it means huge treasuries are also being deployed to fund good (and bad) ideas. This means many founders in the space can find good homes quickly, making it more competitive for external investors to access the founder pipeline. So the strong vested interest you point out is partially just the result of this wild fast loop.

I really don't see coinbase as a contradiction. It solved some pretty big pain points that web3 alone couldn't solve in the early days. Some of that will be replaced, other parts of it probably will not be replaced. It's just one piece of a puzzle.

I guess final thought related to that last point. There is a really easy mistake that founders make all the time. They look at the market or the competitors and they assess the current state, a snapshot. It's really hard to break out of that and assess that outside of us with velocity taken into account. Where will they be in x amount of time? People will sit there and point at centralized opensea as proof of web3 failure, until opensea isn't the dominant player anymore, and they will point to the next thing. But where is it all going? Where is it already that we just cannot see from the outside?

Again, it's definitely true... across the entire economy. In most of the economy, there are pretty much two parties that own the organizations. Those who create the organizations (e.g., founders and some employees) and those who invest in the organizations (wealthy entities). What's different in web3 is that many great projects are working to introduce a 3rd (or more) slice of the pie: the community. Some places to look for this are DAOs working on grants to underrepresented people, Gitcoin Grants & quadratic funding for funding public goods etc, any good token distributions for new tokens, or community-driven networks like Audius or Helium.

It's pretty early days, but I think lots of people _inside_ of web3 are working really hard on this problem.

Two really great Sunday evening links: This one is a fascinating argument to more precisely frame how speculation leads to innovation, so why the belief of investors is a good thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_GNLPniic4. And this one, connecting crypto to a long thread of history (and economic access) https://overcast.fm/+kmaHgw-3s

Your first argument: NFTs are primarily successful because crypto-holding individuals see them as a place to invest without cashing out.

On trend with all my answers, I think this is true to an extent too. But what it misses is a vibrant ecosystem of experimentation that is happening with NFTs below the easily visible surface. The ecosystem is driven by creative people and consumed by people that truly believe these are worthwhile experiments to undertake.

Just a few diverse examples:

- Loot provided NFTs that is simply your inventory in a yet-to-be-made game. The creator essentially said, here, this is an open, ownable, and composable building block. Now, the owners are stakeholders in the development and success of those games. Of course the people that bought these were already holding ETH, but many of those people think something cool is happening here. Otherwise, nothing will get built. https://hackmd.io/@XR/lootwars

- Sam Harris's plans to use the membership/association behind the rise of Pfps to create a community that gives away its wealth and then virtue signals that in ways to encourage others to do the same https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u_YeUyztgJhWgLZ9YJh6eVKZ...

- CryptoVoxels sell parcels of land as NFTs. Taken together, they generate a metaverse of spaces that the owners fill out with their imagination. https://www.cryptovoxels.com/ These people are passionate about something new and different, they are building.

I personally even find the memberships and DAOs driving many of the popular Pfps (e.g. Doodles, Creature World, Coolman's Universe) to be a bit contrary to your main argument. Many of them have highly active communities that you only get to be part of by owning the NFT. So for many, it's not really a place to park or spend their ETH. The economy of those closed communities is pretty fascinating. Recall, the NFT creators (core team) get a cut every time an NFT is sold. But it's not like the 5% is going to some artist's pocket, they are building teams of devs etc to world build. It's worth taking to pen and paper and figuring out the economic game being played between the core teams that build the community and the collectors/traders that want to be part of it. They are revenue generating creative organizations... let's see where they go.

If you are genuinely interested, let's narrow it down. Which of his claims are the strongest/most distressing to you? Maybe some of those folks will stop ghosting and get into real conversation.

I love this paragraph because it outlines just how disconnected from reality people actually building cryptocurrencies really are. They don't understand _anything_ about the ecosystems they're trying to disrupt. They only know that these are things that can be conceptualized as valuable and assume that because they understand one very complicated thing -- programming with cryptography -- that all other complicated things must be lesser in complexity and naturally lower in the hierarchy of reality. Nails easily driven by the hammer that they have created.

There is a lot of garbage in crypto to be sure. But what a dead-end POV.

We're a fully remote startup with hard engineering problems and some really exciting opportunities. We work with IPFS and Filecoin daily, but also do experiments with many other protocols and blockchains.

Skip to the listings: https://textile.breezy.hr/

Help us build better developer tools for Web3. Specifically, infrastructure, APIs, and protocols to connect and extend Filecoin, Libp2p, and IPFS.

Hiring a lead DevOps or SRE position: https://textile.breezy.hr/p/4b3388934752-devops-or-sre

We've been considering a move to Keybase but haven't made the move yet. Matrix is also the jam so we can just be everywhere at once... but we don't have the demand yet.

Where would you like to see us?

A couple of details:

- ThreadsDB is a database and protocol. A lot of our work on Threads (particularly Follower or Service keys was aimed at the problems you bring up exactly). https://blog.textile.io/introducing-textiles-threads-protoco...

- We love the 3box team and product and its probably come a long way since if you haven't poked around recently. We are also working with them to make sure our things are interoperable with theirs. So look out for more updates in this area soon.