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I think this is a pretty astute analysis/taxonomy of analysis. I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: wh

I think this is a pretty astute analysis/taxonomy of analysis. I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies? What is the particular political or economic dynamic that makes the blockchain attractive? Given this, what will it be used for?", or "the culture, values, and especially the backers of the web3 world." These are all things to be investigated that don't have a "yes" or "no" answer, but are instead "what's going on and what might it mean.". The only thing I found myself taking issues with is the author's confidence that the technical issues ("Can the blockchain do anything that other currently existing technology cannot do and/or do anything better or more efficiently than other currently existing technology?") are "difficult to definitively resolve to everyone's satisfaction" but the second category "Will the blockchain form the architecture of the internet of the future" has a simple yes or no answer that will somehow be definitively resolvable. My own thinking-as-an-engineer reaches the opposite conclusion -- the first category are relatively simple technical answers which can be be evaluated on technical merit, while the second category is future-prediction, political dispute, and narrative choice, and that's what's difficult to "resolve to anyone's satisfaction" with a consensus determination somehow. Probably both categories are actually a mixture of both. But what's going on right now is more knowable than predictions of future paradigm shifts, either way. That's actually the main thing I take from OP, let's lessen my interest in arguing about predicting the future, and increase it into looking into "what the hell is going on right now anyway". (Like what are the social and cultural and political factors in the current rise of blockchain interest, and who does it benefit?)

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies? This is the key question that gets overlooked in these discussions. Web3 is a vague term, but it’s difficult to get straight answers about who’s using Web3 technologies because most of the Web3 narrative refers to hypothetical future technologies. But even though these hypothetical future Web3 products don’t exist yet or aren’t actually useful in their current form, there are numerous ways to buy their tokens in preparation for their imagined future usefulness. More specifically: These projects will sell you arbitrary tokens now that supposedly will become more valuable in the future when other future people actually want to use the service. As an early adopter, you will be well positioned to sell your tokens to them at a huge markup! The obvious question is: Why does every new service need a new, unique token to pay for it? Why must these products built on chains like Ethereum go out of their way to not use Ethereum as their payment method? The reason is that they can’t generate huge speculative profits unless they introduce arbitrary new tokens, so of course they must play the new token game. But now the profit comes not from building an actual usable service, but from selling tokens for hypothetical future services. In fact, even the developers understand this and will often jump from one new project to the next, capitalizing on token speculation instead of actually finishing anything because that’s where the money is. If any of the web3 projects want to be taken seriously, they need to stop introducing new arbitrary tokens and just use the existing infrastructure and coins. Build an actual service, not a new currency with a grand idea of a future Web3 service attached to it.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies? This is the key question that gets overlooked in these discussions. Web3 is a vague term, but it’s difficult to get straight answers about who’s using Web3 technologies because most of the Web3 narrative refers to hypothetical future technologies. But even though these hypothetical future Web3 products don’t exist yet or aren’t actually useful in their current form, there are numerous ways to buy their tokens in preparation for their imagined future usefulness. More specifically: These projects will sell you arbitrary tokens now that supposedly will become more valuable in the future when other future people actually want to use the service. As an early adopter, you will be well positioned to sell your tokens to them at a huge markup! The obvious question is: Why does every new service need a new, unique token to pay for it? Why must these products built on chains like Ethereum go out of their way to not use Ethereum as their payment method? The reason is that they can’t generate huge speculative profits unless they introduce arbitrary new tokens, so of course they must play the new token game. But now the profit comes not from building an actual usable service, but from selling tokens for hypothetical future services. In fact, even the developers understand this and will often jump from one new project to the next, capitalizing on token speculation instead of actually finishing anything because that’s where the money is. If any of the web3 projects want to be taken seriously, they need to stop introducing new arbitrary tokens and just use the existing infrastructure and coins. Build an actual service, not a new currency with a grand idea of a future Web3 service attached to it.