mhendric

Thanks for noticing that detail!

Author here. There's real overlap with that comparison, and I wouldn't dismiss it entirely. The receding horizon and community dynamics around belief reinforcement do look similar. Where I'd draw the line is the specific organizational failure mode: a product team whose feedback loops get hijacked by token economics. Bitcoin doesn't have a product team in the same sense. But the broader point (that a financial instrument can make belief liquid and self-reinforcing) applies more broadly than just token-funded ventures. I'm less certain where Bitcoin falls on that spectrum than I am about chains driven by ecosystems funded primarily by their tokens.

Author here. Agreed that overfunding of any kind can break feedback loops. When you have more money than signal, narrative fills the gap.

The structural difference with tokens is liquidity and breadth of exposure. In a VC-funded startup, equity is illiquid and held by a small number of employees and investors with board seats. There's still a corrective mechanism, even if it's slow.

With a token, the instrument is liquid and held by thousands of retail participants with no effective governance rights. Everyone (treasury, employees, community) shares a direct financial interest in maintaining the story, and there's no board meeting where someone says "the numbers don't work."

Author here. The essay's argument is actually the opposite of that. The team was talented. Proof-of-Transfer was a real technical contribution. The SEC qualification was historic. What I'm describing is how structural incentives bent a legitimate effort toward narrative optimization over time. That's a harder problem than fraud. There's no villain, just a system that rewards the wrong things. Reducing it to "scams" makes it too easy and misses the lesson for anyone building with a financial instrument attached.

Author here. I felt the same way when I joined. Gaia and the decentralized identity work were genuinely interesting, and the early developer community was real, with people building things and giving honest feedback. That's what made the shift frustrating to watch from the inside.

I'd refine "lost their way" slightly: the incentive structure was always going to produce this outcome once the token became the primary funding mechanism. The team didn't lose direction; the path was bent by the economics.

Author here. I do use AI tools in my writing process. I build AI agent tooling, so that's how I work now.

But the ideas, analysis and seven years of firsthand experience are mine. And I write "with" AI very closely, not handing anything over blindly.

If you read past the title you'll find lots of personal details I lived through. It would be hard to prompt-engineer that from the outside.

Author here. Neotoma has nothing to do with blockchain, at least for any foreseeable future. It's a structured memory layer for AI agents. Think: entity storage with relationships, provenance, and queryable state. No token, no chain, no crypto.

The whole point of the essay's ending is that I chose not to issue a token and instead shipped a developer release to collect real feedback from real testers.

The takeaway wasn't "blockchain bad," it was "feedback loops matter and token economics break them." Neotoma is built around the opposite approach: short cycles, real users, and no financial instrument that makes belief liquid.

User IDs and URLs to where users store their data with apps such as DPAGE are on chain to guarantee self-sovereign control of identity and data.

I did indeed receive a liberal arts education, and I'm confident it helped broaden my mind. But I'm not sure it's required or sufficient to find one's passion.

Many people graduate with liberals arts degrees and find themselves utterly directionless, perhaps because they've spent so much time avoiding specialization. It's truly important to get exposed to a range of disciplines but it's just as important to sort through which of those resonate with you and which don't. Many people don't go through the latter process very effectively and they end up with indecisiveness.

I'm honestly not sure what the "answer" is here to helping people find their passions; I think it's worthy of an ongoing discussion. But I will say, I doubt hanging out on HN will help to inspire your passion unless it's creating something for technical people.

Oops -- fixed!

Thanks! It's a custom theme, as is the site in general, so unfortunately there's no link available to download for WordPress or whatnot. Feel free to copy the HTML and CSS, though.

Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan deserve the bulk of the credit for today's CrunchBase, IMO. They (re)coded the guts of it in early 2008 and put in place the API. Others also deserve props for improving it over the years (Andy Brett comes to mind but there are others with whom I'm less familiar such as Ben Schaechter). Not to mention those who have led efforts to maintain and improve its content, such as Gene Teare.

Like others in this thread, I'd love to see CrunchBase get more developer attention, and accordingly, I agree that talented RoR developers who are interested in big data should consider applying. There's a lot of great stuff that can be done with CrunchBase's data and for its audience.

congrats mark!