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Or even mention the “value” of the many DeFi apps that are available on the ethereum blockchain. What do they do? My real question is: why would an investor wa

Or even mention the “value” of the many DeFi apps that are available on the ethereum blockchain. What do they do? My real question is: why would an investor want to put money into a company that doesn’t “own” the data from their customers? Do they even _have_ customers? What is their business model? I know, I know - they make commissions on all those billions of transactions that will happen on the blockchain. Right? Is the value simply coming up with new ways to add cost to transactions? I’m lost. Even when web2 was in an eyeballs race, I understood that you could monetize eyeballs with advertising (in what I considered a worst-case model). And SaaS was an obvious model, even if Marc Benioff seemed to yell about it a lot. What is a web3 business model outside of currency exchange?

PaulHoule 5y ago
On a very small scale I am working on a next-generation web for myself and people immediately around me. My #1 principle is cost minimization so that I don't need to worry about what it costs to run. Futurists circa 1970 expected that people would be getting their news from something like cnn.com in the Early 1980s https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/summer-reading-2013-the-information-machines-their-impact-on-men-and-the-media-by-ben-h-bagdikian-1971/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/summer-reading-2013-the-in... In some sense it came true in that you could access the AP newswire on Compuserve and the Source and that there were teletext services in Europe. All of these faced bad economics. The cost of CompuServe was astronomical. The only one that came close to mass market was Minitel in France and that was because the phone company saw they could save money on directory services. The web came along because technology had progressed an order of magnitude past feasibility to the point where people could publish stuff on the web and not worry about what it costs. That act of closing the circle and making it financial sustainable really trashed it.

PaulHoule 5y ago

On a very small scale I am working on a next-generation web for myself and people immediately around me. My #1 principle is cost minimization so that I don't need to worry about what it costs to run. Futurists circa 1970 expected that people would be getting their news from something like cnn.com in the Early 1980s https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/summer-reading-2013-the-information-machines-their-impact-on-men-and-the-media-by-ben-h-bagdikian-1971/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/summer-reading-2013-the-in... In some sense it came true in that you could access the AP newswire on Compuserve and the Source and that there were teletext services in Europe. All of these faced bad economics. The cost of CompuServe was astronomical. The only one that came close to mass market was Minitel in France and that was because the phone company saw they could save money on directory services. The web came along because technology had progressed an order of magnitude past feasibility to the point where people could publish stuff on the web and not worry about what it costs. That act of closing the circle and making it financial sustainable really trashed it.