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One of the massive capital flows into the crypto and web3 markets has been from family offices and investment firms that sat around and watched VCs and Silicon

by numair 5y ago

One of the massive capital flows into the crypto and web3 markets has been from family offices and investment firms that sat around and watched VCs and Silicon Valley firms (like YC!) make billions from the shift to web and mobile interfaces over the past 20 years. Like, imagine your family got pitched Amazon and said “lol nobody needs this,” and now the next gen is in charge of the wealth; or, imagine you are a hedge fund guy watching Tiger Global’s moves and you’re looking for the next major “entry point.” A lot of activity like this is going on behind the scenes. You also have bleeding-edge innovation in capital through structures like Venture DAOs that will blow up the entire space in ways that people haven’t fully thought through because half of this industry is stuck on the “crypto is a scam” narrative of someone with a 2014 understanding of what’s happening in the space.

cblconfederate 5y ago
but if "where we're going we don't need their money" is true, why is that money useful?
- numair 5y ago
  Not sure where you’re getting that statement from. The most important shift taking place right now is the massive increase in both capital velocity (speed at which it’s moving around) and capital diversity (whose money is being used) within crypto/web3 markets. Capitalist societies use capital — money — to accomplish things, so I’m not sure what someone who says “where we’re going we don’t need their money” is talking about...
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    hm well i m not sure if web1 or web2 needed that much money to take off ...
    - 7steps2much 5y ago
      Remember that the internet was originally developed mostly as a military / university project. It got kick-started by quite a bit of money as well. Web 2.0 was arguably not as expensive, but then again you could also argue that it was not as big a step. If you think about it, web 2.0 is really just taking web 1.0 and adding a lot of fancy stuff like SPA, new fancy protocols and social media. Web 3.0 however, depending on which vision of the 3.0 you support, ranges from "just" another upgrade to a completely different thing than what we have today. And to make it quite simple: Completely different things are loads of work. Work means people need to dedicate their time to it, which means they need to be paid.
      - adventured 5y ago
        You're miscalculating by trillions of dollars of capital investment across Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Data centers, research & development, operations, national infrastructure (eg telecom), chips & hardware, software (R&D to maintenance). Now climb inside any of those segments and walk the horizon of the businesses and costs and what was required to build out what eg semiconductors can do today, or what fiber can do today, or what networks can do today, or what harddrives can do today, or what GPUs can do today, and on and on and on and on it goes. Do a tally on Google's capital investment since 1998 (year by year and final tally), then tell me Web 2.0 wasn't as expensive; then do it for Apple, Microsoft, AWS, etc. It was drastically more expensive. Web 2.0 also includes China's Internet build-out era, and the global mobile build-out, I really don't need to say anything more than that given the scale everyone here knows we're talking about: Web 2.0 was massively more expensive than Web 1.0, by at least a magnitude globally. Web 1.0 was laughably trivial in cost compared to Web 2.0. It was petite, tiny, itsy bitsy small, versus scaling to billions of global users across all major economies, and shifting tens of trillions of dollars of GDP online. Just the entertainment wing of Web 2.0 is larger and more expensive than all of Web 1.0 combined.
csee 5y ago
> understanding of what’s happening in the space. Where can I get a concise, recent, high quality and big picture summary of the space? It would be useful because I am out of the loop.
- kolinko 5y ago
  Week in ethereum news may be a good place to start. There is so much happening in the field that it’s hard to keep track without spending a few weeks full time first to wrap your head around the main concepts.
- syntheweave 5y ago
  This is the one you want, a 250 page investment letter covering all aspects(admittedly from one person's view): https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2022.pdf https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2022... A full view is actually even bigger than that, but this covers the prominent, well-capitalized and hyped players of the past year, at least.

by numair 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago

but if "where we're going we don't need their money" is true, why is that money useful?

numair 5y ago
Not sure where you’re getting that statement from. The most important shift taking place right now is the massive increase in both capital velocity (speed at which it’s moving around) and capital diversity (whose money is being used) within crypto/web3 markets. Capitalist societies use capital — money — to accomplish things, so I’m not sure what someone who says “where we’re going we don’t need their money” is talking about...
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  hm well i m not sure if web1 or web2 needed that much money to take off ...
  - 7steps2much 5y ago
    Remember that the internet was originally developed mostly as a military / university project. It got kick-started by quite a bit of money as well. Web 2.0 was arguably not as expensive, but then again you could also argue that it was not as big a step. If you think about it, web 2.0 is really just taking web 1.0 and adding a lot of fancy stuff like SPA, new fancy protocols and social media. Web 3.0 however, depending on which vision of the 3.0 you support, ranges from "just" another upgrade to a completely different thing than what we have today. And to make it quite simple: Completely different things are loads of work. Work means people need to dedicate their time to it, which means they need to be paid.
    - adventured 5y ago
      You're miscalculating by trillions of dollars of capital investment across Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Data centers, research & development, operations, national infrastructure (eg telecom), chips & hardware, software (R&D to maintenance). Now climb inside any of those segments and walk the horizon of the businesses and costs and what was required to build out what eg semiconductors can do today, or what fiber can do today, or what networks can do today, or what harddrives can do today, or what GPUs can do today, and on and on and on and on it goes. Do a tally on Google's capital investment since 1998 (year by year and final tally), then tell me Web 2.0 wasn't as expensive; then do it for Apple, Microsoft, AWS, etc. It was drastically more expensive. Web 2.0 also includes China's Internet build-out era, and the global mobile build-out, I really don't need to say anything more than that given the scale everyone here knows we're talking about: Web 2.0 was massively more expensive than Web 1.0, by at least a magnitude globally. Web 1.0 was laughably trivial in cost compared to Web 2.0. It was petite, tiny, itsy bitsy small, versus scaling to billions of global users across all major economies, and shifting tens of trillions of dollars of GDP online. Just the entertainment wing of Web 2.0 is larger and more expensive than all of Web 1.0 combined.

csee 5y ago

> understanding of what’s happening in the space. Where can I get a concise, recent, high quality and big picture summary of the space? It would be useful because I am out of the loop.

kolinko 5y ago
Week in ethereum news may be a good place to start. There is so much happening in the field that it’s hard to keep track without spending a few weeks full time first to wrap your head around the main concepts.
syntheweave 5y ago
This is the one you want, a 250 page investment letter covering all aspects(admittedly from one person's view): https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2022.pdf https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2022... A full view is actually even bigger than that, but this covers the prominent, well-capitalized and hyped players of the past year, at least.