7 ms·

Jack Dorsey and Marc Andreessen's crypto feud puts Web3 at risk

27 points by lxm 5y ago

Turing_Machine 5y ago
I am reminded of Henry Kissinger's comment when Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran went to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq: "It's a pity they can't both lose."
garbagecoder 5y ago
mkehrt 5y ago
Good.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
vmception 5y ago
> Intentions aside, things go awry. There are bugs and hacks and there are kinks yet to be worked out. That's what everyone in the space likes about the space. The permission to fail in a fantastically quick project lifecycle and rapidly iterate in any direction! The entire premise of this article are people pretending to represent the space. A lot of the space is very wary of projects with VC backing, they are wary of people that derive confidence from projects based on the logos and presence of VCs. The VCs are the only ones that need large groups of suckers for their liquidity ponzi scheme, everyone else just needs small groups :) and derive confidence in a stronger prisoner's dilemma from the lack of larger whale. Cheers
julianz 5y ago
"Last year, venture capitalists backed about 460 blockchain projects, spending nearly $12.75 billion". And not one has produced anything of use to real people. That's a lot of billions for basically no return.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- stanfordkid 5y ago
  You want a certain portion of capital going to waste... if it doesn't you're not taking big enough risks. A well functioning system will have failures.
  - fnord77 5y ago
    but still some things will never amount to anything. Capital expended on, say perpetual motion machines is not a risk, it is pure waste
  - klyrs 5y ago
    This nearly $13B could fund hundreds of thousands of failed restaurants. The cool thing about a failed restaurant is that while it's operating, people have jobs and other people get fed. Failed restaurants have positive externalities. Other failed business ventures at least give people jobs. But this? It's just gambling.
- brian_cloutier 5y ago
  For nearly everybody who is not European trying to send money to other Europeans, cryptocurrencies are the easiest way to make international payments. For example, I have at various times sent money from the US to Turkey, with bitcoin I was able to send the money with very low fees and it arrived in under an hour. To the best of my knowledge crypto is the cheapest and fastest way to send my friend money, though as transaction fees fluctuate we have occasionally changed which currency we use. So, "not one has produced anything of use to real people" should be amended to "not one has produced anything I personally consider useful". How can you be so sure that you are correct, and that the people willing to invest $12.75B are incorrect?
  - twelve40 5y ago
namlem 5y ago
Web3's massive technical hurdles put it far more at risk I think.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Bigger than the technical hurdles is the fact that the 'user-owned' selling point is all an illusion.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rhinoceraptor 5y ago
Isn't it the whole selling point of "web3" that it belongs to the users and not VCs and billionaires?
- giantrobot 5y ago
  That's the selling point, not the truth.
  - bb88 5y ago
    So would this be a form of "virtue signaling"?
    - aaronbrethorst 5y ago
      There’s nothing virtuous about any of this garbage.
      - bb88 5y ago
        Exactly!
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      It absolutely can be. Similar at least. Companies that have nothing to do with this market are shoehorning in "crypto", "web3", and "defi" projects and announcements just to go with the trend and look good to VC's. Like "AI" and "machine learning" from a few years back. In this case it isn't really "virtue signalling" since there's no moral position involved, but it's a similar form of market signaling.
      - bb88 5y ago
        There's definitely a lack of moral concern involved in web3 -- which in and of itself is a moral position. Solving the crime aspect seems to be the lowest priority problem.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
duxup 5y ago
> Users benefit directly from their contributions — creativity, play, engagement or deposits, say. They can also help govern futuristic community-run companies, where they can vote on decisions with tokens created by the particular project. That sounds like something that just gets wrapped up in some meta game and whatever it is …is just a meta game.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
There’s a great take on the economics of web3 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-19/washing-web3 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-19/washin... > “This is, essentially, a pyramid scheme,” said Dror Poleg in an infamous post about Web3... “A Ponzi. But it makes sense. It will be the dominant marketing method of the next decade and beyond.” I don’t like it! But I am not confident that he’s wrong.
YATA0 5y ago
Web3/crypto reminds me of those early 2000s Hummers. Before they came out I thought they were stupid as fuck, wasteful, and a poor sign of the times. I was right.
- bb88 5y ago
  There's still FUH2 pictures tagged on flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fuh2/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fuh2/ I suspect that something like that for Web3 is coming soon based upon the amount of overall hate I'm seeing. FUW3.com goes to an asian porn site, but fuweb3.com is available.
  - pkulak 5y ago
    > I suspect that something like that for Web3 is coming soon So... web3 will completely take over? I don't know where you guys live, but I see trucks all over the place that have hoods even higher than those old Hummers.
    - bb88 5y ago
      It won't if we don't let it.
  - YATA0 5y ago
    Ahahaha! Love it! I do that internally when I see them on the road, but here's the thing: I rarely, if ever, see them anymore. Hopefully we can say them same about Web3 garbage 20 years from now.
- hiyer 5y ago
  When I first visited the Bay Area in 2005 Hummers were all over the place. And not just the smaller H3s but the massive H1s as well. The next time I visited in 2013 I saw exactly zero Hummers on the streets.
- dang 5y ago
  Ok, but please don't shallow dismissals to HN. They aren't necessarily wrong, but they're predictable and repetitive and therefore uninteresting in HN's sense of the word. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20-flamewars%20-flamewar&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fallingknife 5y ago
If that's all it takes to put web3 at risk...
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Please, sir, I want some more. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7tOkpntQtBM https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7tOkpntQtBM
mehrdada 5y ago
If* a technology were to be dependent on lack of "feud" between two individuals, I wonder if it has any intrinsic merit. That is especially ironic for something that bangs on the decentralization drum. [*] Not claiming all interpretations of "web3" fail that condition, but if they do.
Barrin92 5y ago
So web3, the alleged fundamental reorganisation of the internet as we know it and the future of how we interact and communicate is put at risk because two dudes have a spat on twitter? Do China and India exist in this scenario? Does everyone in the world just go "well Marc and Jack are pissed off, so we might as well bin the thing" Imagine someone picks up a heated Hackernews conversation and goes "well these two guys put functional programming at risk". It says a lot about what people truly think web3 actually is.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  In fairness, spats have changed the course of computing. The UNIX wars of the early 1990s, pitting AT&T against BSD (1-800-ITS-UNIX), the QDOS / MSDOS episode, and the Traitorous Eight all come to mind. As Frank Herbert wrote, "a beginning is a very delicate time".
- rektide 5y ago
  > put at risk because two dudes have a spat on twitter? Computing is largely faith/belief by tribes. The eco-protests against cryptoshit has been high & loud & I think effective: it's obviously a colossally inefficient system, the most unimaginable conflagration of computing resources imaginable. But Jack has honed in on a more purist argumentation, one that is less rooted in the hard fact of cryptoshit scorching the planet, & far more insightful about the hypocracy & ineffectuality of the beast. There are few benevolent factors about in crypto-coin shit, it's a world dominated by self-interest first & mistrust second. They are systems ruled by concensus-of-the-powerful, & most folks need deeply deeply deeply intermediated experiences to have the most remote hope of getting anywhere at all. In short, Jack's one of the first critics to highlight just how perverse the profit motive has been here. Cryptocoinshit is free to become good, to show a light side, to enable real genuine capabilities, any day any time. But it's a highly highly costly environment to innovate in. There's a lot of pick axes folks need, is what Jack has highlighted. And the costs of working the medium, of sticking your pick in, are absurdly high, fantastically expensive. I don't see this as a specific threat of person versus person, but a battle for the soul of a young, interesting technology, one that has had less & less enobling, user-empowering potentials, and more and more been a dis-empowering, deeply intermediated, finnicky & costly boondogle. The particular personages here are proxy combatants, whose contest has provided a bit better televisable experience of what the real battle-lines & conflicts are.
wmf 5y ago
Jack Dorsey may be critical of Web3 but it's because he's high on something much worse: Bitcoin maximalism. He's a crackpot crypto billionaire who has some minor disagreements with billionaire crypto VCs. Web3 may be designed to benefit insiders but Bitcoin emergently benefits its own early adopters; the result will be the same either way. The masses don't even enter into the equation.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Meh. Bitcoin maximalism is at least grounded in more pristine principles of fairness. The rest of the crypto space is little more than an outright grift of insiders who premined a bunch of coins that they then pump and dump on the oblivious masses. edit to address your ninja edit; of course bitcoin emergently benefits the early adopters who got lucky or took a big risk on it. That's literally how all property works, e.g. if you got lucky enough to buy real estate in New York city 200 years ago and held it.
_robbywashere 5y ago
I imagine something reminiscent of web3 will exist in the future, but I think it will come from the ground up rather than by the will of our technologic overlords; or a solution in search of a problem.
acchow 5y ago
Funny the decentralized web is at risk because of 2 people
jancsika 5y ago
Are there any clever twists where a company/dev leveraged blockchain fever to get funding for an actually useful project? E.g.: 1. "We're building a blockchain-based Linux phone." 2. Showered in metric shitton of money 3. Use money to make kick-ass Linux phone 4. Release kick-ass Linux phone with a power-hungry, unusable blockchain-based messenger on it 5. "We've received reports that Yakchain may drain the battery, sometimes when sending a single message. Looking into a proof-of-stake alternative for our messenger, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please enjoy your kick-ass Linux phone!" 6. Give up on messenger. 7. Focus on refining kick-ass Linux phone
questiondev 5y ago
it’s always interesting to see how many people on hn dislike web3, could it be because some have investments in “traditional” ventures that may become obsolete due to web3? i can understand the negativity towards it but to me this is how technology operates. whenever something new comes out the next generation adopts it while the previous generation seems to be extremely skeptical until one day they buy in. what i would love to see is the hype subside, the market to level out and then see where we are, i really don’t see this going away anytime soon, in reality it’s gonna be here for a lot longer than what most skeptics think
- wmf 5y ago
  Yeah, when Heroin first came out I'm sure there were some haters but eventually they were forgotten.
mmanciop 5y ago
A feather in Jack cap for sure
theshrike79 5y ago
Oh no! Anyway...
trog 5y ago
Does their crypto feud put 'web3' at risk? Or does the fact that it's a meaningless buzzword being driven by a zillion different people all trying to strike it rich(er) with no real interest in collaboration or standards or efficiency or functionality put everything at risk?

27 points by lxm 5y ago

I am reminded of Henry Kissinger's comment when Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran went to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq: "It's a pity they can't both lose."

garbagecoder 5y ago

mkehrt 5y ago

Good.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

vmception 5y ago

> Intentions aside, things go awry. There are bugs and hacks and there are kinks yet to be worked out. That's what everyone in the space likes about the space. The permission to fail in a fantastically quick project lifecycle and rapidly iterate in any direction! The entire premise of this article are people pretending to represent the space. A lot of the space is very wary of projects with VC backing, they are wary of people that derive confidence from projects based on the logos and presence of VCs. The VCs are the only ones that need large groups of suckers for their liquidity ponzi scheme, everyone else just needs small groups :) and derive confidence in a stronger prisoner's dilemma from the lack of larger whale. Cheers

julianz 5y ago

"Last year, venture capitalists backed about 460 blockchain projects, spending nearly $12.75 billion". And not one has produced anything of use to real people. That's a lot of billions for basically no return.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stanfordkid 5y ago
You want a certain portion of capital going to waste... if it doesn't you're not taking big enough risks. A well functioning system will have failures.
- fnord77 5y ago
  but still some things will never amount to anything. Capital expended on, say perpetual motion machines is not a risk, it is pure waste
- klyrs 5y ago
  This nearly $13B could fund hundreds of thousands of failed restaurants. The cool thing about a failed restaurant is that while it's operating, people have jobs and other people get fed. Failed restaurants have positive externalities. Other failed business ventures at least give people jobs. But this? It's just gambling.
brian_cloutier 5y ago
For nearly everybody who is not European trying to send money to other Europeans, cryptocurrencies are the easiest way to make international payments. For example, I have at various times sent money from the US to Turkey, with bitcoin I was able to send the money with very low fees and it arrived in under an hour. To the best of my knowledge crypto is the cheapest and fastest way to send my friend money, though as transaction fees fluctuate we have occasionally changed which currency we use. So, "not one has produced anything of use to real people" should be amended to "not one has produced anything I personally consider useful". How can you be so sure that you are correct, and that the people willing to invest $12.75B are incorrect?
- twelve40 5y ago

namlem 5y ago

Web3's massive technical hurdles put it far more at risk I think.

anonporridge 5y ago
Bigger than the technical hurdles is the fact that the 'user-owned' selling point is all an illusion.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rhinoceraptor 5y ago

Isn't it the whole selling point of "web3" that it belongs to the users and not VCs and billionaires?

giantrobot 5y ago
That's the selling point, not the truth.
- bb88 5y ago
  So would this be a form of "virtue signaling"?
  - aaronbrethorst 5y ago
    There’s nothing virtuous about any of this garbage.
    - bb88 5y ago
      Exactly!
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    It absolutely can be. Similar at least. Companies that have nothing to do with this market are shoehorning in "crypto", "web3", and "defi" projects and announcements just to go with the trend and look good to VC's. Like "AI" and "machine learning" from a few years back. In this case it isn't really "virtue signalling" since there's no moral position involved, but it's a similar form of market signaling.
    - bb88 5y ago
      There's definitely a lack of moral concern involved in web3 -- which in and of itself is a moral position. Solving the crime aspect seems to be the lowest priority problem.
  - anonporridge 5y ago

duxup 5y ago

> Users benefit directly from their contributions — creativity, play, engagement or deposits, say. They can also help govern futuristic community-run companies, where they can vote on decisions with tokens created by the particular project. That sounds like something that just gets wrapped up in some meta game and whatever it is …is just a meta game.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

There’s a great take on the economics of web3 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-19/washing-web3 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-19/washin... > “This is, essentially, a pyramid scheme,” said Dror Poleg in an infamous post about Web3... “A Ponzi. But it makes sense. It will be the dominant marketing method of the next decade and beyond.” I don’t like it! But I am not confident that he’s wrong.

YATA0 5y ago

Web3/crypto reminds me of those early 2000s Hummers. Before they came out I thought they were stupid as fuck, wasteful, and a poor sign of the times. I was right.

bb88 5y ago
There's still FUH2 pictures tagged on flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fuh2/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fuh2/ I suspect that something like that for Web3 is coming soon based upon the amount of overall hate I'm seeing. FUW3.com goes to an asian porn site, but fuweb3.com is available.
- pkulak 5y ago
  > I suspect that something like that for Web3 is coming soon So... web3 will completely take over? I don't know where you guys live, but I see trucks all over the place that have hoods even higher than those old Hummers.
  - bb88 5y ago
    It won't if we don't let it.
- YATA0 5y ago
  Ahahaha! Love it! I do that internally when I see them on the road, but here's the thing: I rarely, if ever, see them anymore. Hopefully we can say them same about Web3 garbage 20 years from now.
hiyer 5y ago
When I first visited the Bay Area in 2005 Hummers were all over the place. And not just the smaller H3s but the massive H1s as well. The next time I visited in 2013 I saw exactly zero Hummers on the streets.
dang 5y ago
Ok, but please don't shallow dismissals to HN. They aren't necessarily wrong, but they're predictable and repetitive and therefore uninteresting in HN's sense of the word. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20-flamewars%20-flamewar&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

fallingknife 5y ago

If that's all it takes to put web3 at risk...

dredmorbius 5y ago
Please, sir, I want some more. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7tOkpntQtBM https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7tOkpntQtBM

mehrdada 5y ago

If* a technology were to be dependent on lack of "feud" between two individuals, I wonder if it has any intrinsic merit. That is especially ironic for something that bangs on the decentralization drum. [*] Not claiming all interpretations of "web3" fail that condition, but if they do.

Barrin92 5y ago

So web3, the alleged fundamental reorganisation of the internet as we know it and the future of how we interact and communicate is put at risk because two dudes have a spat on twitter? Do China and India exist in this scenario? Does everyone in the world just go "well Marc and Jack are pissed off, so we might as well bin the thing" Imagine someone picks up a heated Hackernews conversation and goes "well these two guys put functional programming at risk". It says a lot about what people truly think web3 actually is.

dredmorbius 5y ago
In fairness, spats have changed the course of computing. The UNIX wars of the early 1990s, pitting AT&T against BSD (1-800-ITS-UNIX), the QDOS / MSDOS episode, and the Traitorous Eight all come to mind. As Frank Herbert wrote, "a beginning is a very delicate time".
rektide 5y ago
> put at risk because two dudes have a spat on twitter? Computing is largely faith/belief by tribes. The eco-protests against cryptoshit has been high & loud & I think effective: it's obviously a colossally inefficient system, the most unimaginable conflagration of computing resources imaginable. But Jack has honed in on a more purist argumentation, one that is less rooted in the hard fact of cryptoshit scorching the planet, & far more insightful about the hypocracy & ineffectuality of the beast. There are few benevolent factors about in crypto-coin shit, it's a world dominated by self-interest first & mistrust second. They are systems ruled by concensus-of-the-powerful, & most folks need deeply deeply deeply intermediated experiences to have the most remote hope of getting anywhere at all. In short, Jack's one of the first critics to highlight just how perverse the profit motive has been here. Cryptocoinshit is free to become good, to show a light side, to enable real genuine capabilities, any day any time. But it's a highly highly costly environment to innovate in. There's a lot of pick axes folks need, is what Jack has highlighted. And the costs of working the medium, of sticking your pick in, are absurdly high, fantastically expensive. I don't see this as a specific threat of person versus person, but a battle for the soul of a young, interesting technology, one that has had less & less enobling, user-empowering potentials, and more and more been a dis-empowering, deeply intermediated, finnicky & costly boondogle. The particular personages here are proxy combatants, whose contest has provided a bit better televisable experience of what the real battle-lines & conflicts are.

wmf 5y ago

Jack Dorsey may be critical of Web3 but it's because he's high on something much worse: Bitcoin maximalism. He's a crackpot crypto billionaire who has some minor disagreements with billionaire crypto VCs. Web3 may be designed to benefit insiders but Bitcoin emergently benefits its own early adopters; the result will be the same either way. The masses don't even enter into the equation.

anonporridge 5y ago
Meh. Bitcoin maximalism is at least grounded in more pristine principles of fairness. The rest of the crypto space is little more than an outright grift of insiders who premined a bunch of coins that they then pump and dump on the oblivious masses. edit to address your ninja edit; of course bitcoin emergently benefits the early adopters who got lucky or took a big risk on it. That's literally how all property works, e.g. if you got lucky enough to buy real estate in New York city 200 years ago and held it.

_robbywashere 5y ago

I imagine something reminiscent of web3 will exist in the future, but I think it will come from the ground up rather than by the will of our technologic overlords; or a solution in search of a problem.

acchow 5y ago

Funny the decentralized web is at risk because of 2 people

jancsika 5y ago

Are there any clever twists where a company/dev leveraged blockchain fever to get funding for an actually useful project? E.g.: 1. "We're building a blockchain-based Linux phone." 2. Showered in metric shitton of money 3. Use money to make kick-ass Linux phone 4. Release kick-ass Linux phone with a power-hungry, unusable blockchain-based messenger on it 5. "We've received reports that Yakchain may drain the battery, sometimes when sending a single message. Looking into a proof-of-stake alternative for our messenger, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please enjoy your kick-ass Linux phone!" 6. Give up on messenger. 7. Focus on refining kick-ass Linux phone

questiondev 5y ago

it’s always interesting to see how many people on hn dislike web3, could it be because some have investments in “traditional” ventures that may become obsolete due to web3? i can understand the negativity towards it but to me this is how technology operates. whenever something new comes out the next generation adopts it while the previous generation seems to be extremely skeptical until one day they buy in. what i would love to see is the hype subside, the market to level out and then see where we are, i really don’t see this going away anytime soon, in reality it’s gonna be here for a lot longer than what most skeptics think

wmf 5y ago
Yeah, when Heroin first came out I'm sure there were some haters but eventually they were forgotten.

mmanciop 5y ago

A feather in Jack cap for sure

theshrike79 5y ago

Oh no! Anyway...

trog 5y ago

Does their crypto feud put 'web3' at risk? Or does the fact that it's a meaningless buzzword being driven by a zillion different people all trying to strike it rich(er) with no real interest in collaboration or standards or efficiency or functionality put everything at risk?