I generally enjoy reading Chris' writing and listening to him on podcast interviews, but I do feel like he tries really hard to pattern match and force crypto to fit into his idealized future based on his clearly well-read and well-informed view of technological history. He's also probably made at least a hundred million dollars in the past couple of years based on his Coinbase investment and myriad crypto token investments, so he's most likely viewing all of this through rose colored glasses.
Axie Infinity is given as a "good" case? Axie Infinity is a Ponzi scheme.[1]<p>Matt Levine, Bloomberg: <i>Doesn’t it feel like the dystopian future we deserve? Like in a decade everyone will make their living by steering colorful blob-like creatures around to acquire coins in a virtual world, but ownership of the colorful blob-like virtual creatures will be concentrated among a hereditary elite of people who, like, bought Dogecoin in 2014, and in order to scrape together enough to live on you will need to indenture yourself to a member of that elite, steering their blob-like virtual creatures around to earn coins for them and getting a few crumbs for yourself. And you’ll work 16-hour days in the Smooth Love Potions mines just to feed your children, but every once in a while in a rare free moment you will stop and ask yourself “wait why do our overlords want all these Smooth Love Potions anyway?”</i><p><i>Meanwhile the overlords will form a leisure class and devote themselves to philosophy and philanthropy. They’ll keep busy collecting non-fungible-token art and putting their names on virtual library buildings in the metaverse and writing manifestos about how cryptocurrency enhances human freedom and levels the playing field for everyone.</i><p><i>And maybe in some virtual library in the metaverse a disaffected philosopher of the overlord class will be busy creating a new theory, a theory about how the relentless accumulation of Axies in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite will lead to an increasingly disaffected proletariat of colorful-blob-like-virtual-creature steerers, who will one day, through the inexorable logic of metaversal history, rise up to throw off their chains and steer their colorful blob-like virtual creatures to tear down the virtual palaces of their virtual oppressors. Blob-like-creature steerers of the world unite, this new prophet will tell them, you have nothing to lose but your Axie Infinity Shards.</i><p>[1] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-26/money-stuff-accused-ponzi-schemer-kept-busy" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-26/money-...</a>
The author's interpretations of Chris's points (the Spotify example is a clear one) keep trying to reinterpret Web3 as a set of incremental improvements ("let's cut the take rate") rather than create a new set of opportunities to replace (and sometimes invert) the old business models.<p>Here's my example for Spotify: music shouldn't be monetized by taxing distribution; instead, let artists directly monetize through myriad new ways where they don't take platform risk — ever. NFTs, social/community tokens, direct ticketing + access to secondary sales, and so many more methods are all being explored now.<p>It's great to dig in here and continue the dialogue, but most crypto critiques on HN feel like tourism.
I'm endlessly amused by some people in the crypto sphere attempting to force Web 3 / Web 3.0 onto crypto. It's an absurd hype attempt.<p>That term was already used for the semantic Web and what it was supposed to unleash, beginning over a decade ago. It was still being used for that as recently as a few years ago (although increasingly being shifted to include AI/ML, since the old premise of a semantic Web is no longer considered cool). For example:<p><a href="https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Web-30" rel="nofollow">https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Web-30</a>
He left out that NFTs hardly have a low take rate. OpenSea is the number one earner of fees every time I look at Etherscan. They have taken 18% of the fees in the last 24 hours for 1,065 ether (which they immediately turn into dollars, because they view ether so highly), and 24% in the last 3 hrs