evergrande

Contrarian opinion:

Harvard devaluing their diploma is good because smart people will get off the credential treadmill and do something productive instead.

The number is way low. Housing/rental costs are the largest expense and that's up 20% in many places. Used cars are up 40%.

See also Polygon (MATIC), ZK-STARKs. And ETH 2.0 is due next year.

Granted, but every new technology goes through this and the tools and best practices are improving. The code is open source too. I don't know why people, technologists especially, aren't recognizing this.

It's also worth examining the current system. How happy are you with your bank's 0.01% interest rate? Which is actually negative when you factor in inflation that's eroding the value of our dollars faster than ever, and increasingly transferring wealth to the top 1%? How happy are you about bank CEO compensation and bailouts? No one in crypto is asking for a bailout, even when it crashes 80%. And what about the fact that bank's charge poor people the most or flat out deny service? Or the fact that it's all closed source and behind closed doors.

Anyone want to do a web2isgoinggreat.com version of this?

Web 2 is centralized big tech serving ads. You are the product and you own nothing. They own your content and can change the rules at will (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/technology/instagram-hand...).

Web 3 is nothing like that.

Thanks! Your formulation makes a lot of sense.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs yelled at employees a lot. Whether they did so as an intentional technique or a byproduct of having a short temper, I don't know. Any insight into that?

This chart speaks volumes.

https://www.investors.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/CPIChar...

This is an under appreciated point about web3. We can get away from the ad-based business model. Web2 has an adversarial relationship with the user, web3 is much more aligned with the user.

https://www.jonstokes.com/p/web3-the-rise-of-the-aligned-web

Look at healthcare, college, housing, childcare, equities.

Also look at shrinkflation: https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/

Also look at ingredient swaps in food, like HFCS.

Also look at products that have swapped in cheaper materials.

Also look at artificially cheap labor.

This is in part because they changed how CPI is calculated in the 80s and 90s, which, as luck would have it, lowered the rates. You can see what CPI looks like with the older formulas here to compare:

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

Actually, have they put any emphasis at all in reducing body fat with regard to Covid? Look at the CDC's recommendations:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

Nothing about losing weight, eating healthy, exercising. Nothing about vitamin D either.

Silly title and claim.

Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term. It does not care if you are a bro. It doesn't even know if you are a bro. It doesn't care where you live, what your name is, what your opinions are, what your hair or skin color is, what your credit score is. Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services. Where people get locked out or denied entry every day by central actors.

Furthermore, all activity is transparent. Everyone can see the database. History can't be altered and the rules can't suddenly be changed. We have no real transparency into the stock market, banks, twitter.com. They can and do selectively edit their databases and change the rules at will. The public can't audit what they are doing. They public can audit the blockchain. The more our institutions become corrupt, the more important transparency and full inclusivity is.

What if Buffett just wants to see the world burn and doesn't care about getting the money back out?

Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.

Quite possibly the difference between people who are hostile vs favorably disposed to Web3 is whether or not they think traditional orgs work fine or need improvement. Frustration with traditional organizational pathologies is not universal.

The right comparison may not be with past tech revolutions. It may be to organizational evolutions like monarchy to democracy, women entering the workplace, the invention of the limited liability corporation etc. In each case there were people who thought it was unnecessary.

I suspect what makes Web3 appear extra contentious is that it divides core members of the middle class. Like artists for eg. Artists tend to be reliably anti-tech initially, taking pride in being socially middle class but economically underclass unless supported by other means.

Artists still largely depend on patronage but now are less beholden to institutions/expert tastemakers (museums, grants, commercial art buyers like movies) or potentially tyrannical cohesive crowds based on ideological aesthetics (Patreon style). Web3 loosens the grip of both.

Web3 is Crowds3 too. We focus too much on authority figures and institutions. Crowds evolve too.

Crowd1 = geographic scene in a city that could ostracize you

Crowd2 = filter-bubble online crowd that can cancel you

Crowd3 = skin-in-the-game crowd that doesn’t subsume individuals

[credit to https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1463182365555970049]

That's a Twitter level of undertstanding.

Did you know not all NFTs are just a hyperlink to an image?

Did you know that NFTs can give a % of every sale to the original artist in perpetuity? Without relying on a company that can deplatform you or change the rules at any time. Imagine this use case with other things too, like music. On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script. Artists get 95%, the rest are fees.

Did you know that NFTs have other use cases than art? e.g. https://ens.domains

Did you know that technologies tend to get more efficient over time? Did you know many NFTs are on Solana which is already energy efficient? Ethereum is slated to be there next summer. <insert delay joke here>

"We're just protecting you" is a transparent excuse to rig the game. It's pulling up the ladder. If it was actually in the best interests of the people, you educate and give them tools. You don't lock them out. And you focus on preventing and going after the bad actors, the scammers.

Which is good because accredited investor laws prevent poor people from obtaining wealth in the same way the wealthy do. It's an uneven playing field.

Let me give a concrete example: The first time I used Stripe and Uber, I immediately wanted to invest. But I couldn't because I wasn't wealthy nor well connected enough. If they had been a DAO, I could have invested $100 and paid off my student debt and theoretical mortgage AND probably covered losing investments. One winner covers many losers, which is how VCs play the game. That's the power of early investment.

Those kind of returns are only available to the already wealthy under our current laws. Why should that be? By the time a company IPOs most of the opportunity has already been extracted. How many of us have wanted to invest in Stripe for years now? We still can't. We can only sit and watch as its largest growth years go by and the rich get richer. In the eventual IPO they'll sell their shares to us now that they've appreciated by orders of magnitude. These laws should be abolished, but I wouldn't hold one's breath. So I'm in favor of the cryptoeconomy being an alternative that one can opt into.

Some are and they are overfitting those cases to an entire technology. It's understandable to see that nuance get lost on Twitter, but disappointing to see on a tech forum. It's like discounting email because it enables nigerian prince scams.

Why would an optional feature force you off? That sounds like a purity test an anti-technology cult would come up with.

Let's take music as an example. On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script. Artists get 95%, the rest are fees. So yes, I do think web3-style ownership is desirable.

Because web3 is, in part, about users having ownership and crypto is what enables that in a decentralized, censorship-resistant way.

Instead of big tech companies profiting off your data, you can profit off your data and output. A critical thing that decentralized networks have solved is the alignment of interests between the developers, the users, and the platform creators. They all share in the success of the network and you can build on it. Facebook, Twitter will deplatform you when you get too successful building on their API or for a host of other reasons. They can and do change the rules at will.

Web 1.0 - Read-only.

Web 2.0 - Read & write.

Web 3.0 - Read, write & own.

Will there be enough upside to Solana though when Ethereum 2 rolls out?

Except those companies can decide to change the rules at any time and can kick you off. And that's increasingly on the basis of mob rule and authoritarian governments.

Here's a way to look at it:

Web 1.0 - Permissioned Read-only

Web 2.0 - Permissioned Read & write

Web 3.0 - Permissionless Read, write & own

Try deploying the same contract on a different chain, like Polygon. It's a lot more fun. Super cheap, almost instant and is a preview of the future. If ETH 2.0 is like that it'll be a game changer.

Actually, that's a good point. Inflation would be even worse if that cash was going into physical goods and services. The government now has an incentive to leave crypto alone aside from providing clarity.

Is it possible that Zillow artificially inflated the housing market?

They bought up bunch of houses while having the most popular pricing tool? That's a strong incentive to predict ever increasing prices. Plus it whipped up a frenzy and site traffic. Dangerous incentives all around. You can see how this could be self reinforcing with systems that all want the numbers to go up.

OpenAI takes the Orwellian cake.