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I've crossed swords with Molly a couple of times. I was the release coordinator for Ethereum, and I've been active in the space a long long time. Here's what i

I've crossed swords with Molly a couple of times. I was the release coordinator for Ethereum, and I've been active in the space a long long time. Here's what it boils down to: freedom is messy. The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Amazon stock dropped >90% and a trillion and a half in value vanished from the market overall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble And that's in a space whose biggest ambition was to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations are made. Crypto has bigger goals, and the mess is bigger. But it's the same innovation engine that ran Silicon Valley, the same type of people, it's just now they're less dependent on Goldman Sachs when they want to go to the public and ask for their money. Make no mistake: nothing new, strange or unusual is happening. It's just tech being tech, no cause for alarm.

ForHackernews 3y ago
Hello, as part of the bigger goals of the crypto space, I was wondering if you'd care to follow up on this generous $10k charity bet you proposed a few month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893333 If @phphphphp isn't available or doesn't want to continue, I'd be willing to wager $10k on the same terms that he offered.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DannyBee 3y ago
I doubt most of tech would appreciate being lumped in with crypto, which should be the first sign that your take is a little off. IE if you think you are just "tech being tech" but lots and lots of tech is like "uh, no, we aren't like you at all, please don't lump us in with you", that should tell you something. Beyond that, your take seems so divorced from reality i'm not even sure where to begin. I don't agree at all with your view of crypto's goals being bigger than tech's[1] , and even if i did, that the level of mess is proportionality similar, that this is a normal/good thing, etc. These are sort of fundamental issues so it's gonna be hard to get somewhere. I guess i'll just say if this is the best defense you've got of why what's going on is okay and good for the world, then you deserve everything crypto is getting and will get in the future. [1] Crypto has always been a subset of tech's goals, and is even framed that way 99% of the time in presentations/etc. It's very hard for me to see how you can even argue otherwise.
- d3vmax 3y ago
  I concur with your assessment.
- rlt 3y ago
  Of course “tech” isn’t a monolith, and neither is “crypto”. Many people into Bitcoin or crypto don’t appreciate being lumped into the very long tail of scams that are an inherent byproduct of permissionless money. It would be a bit like pre-internet engineers dismissing the internet because it’s the world’s best porn distribution mechanism.
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    Crypto sure seems like a monolith, albeit one with a dedicated force of apologists.
  - blowski 3y ago
    Crypto may not be a monolith, but the vast majority of it is combinations of bullshit, snake-oil, and techno-utopian dreams.
  - philipwhiuk 3y ago
    > Many people into Bitcoin Can these many people in Bitcoin doing legitimate stuff speak up, because I'm yet to see an actual implemented use case that isn't "evade financial regulations and hope governments don't care enough"
- miracle2k 3y ago
  > Crypto has always been a subset of tech's goals, and is even framed that way 99% of the time in presentations/etc. GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Amazon's goals aren't "selling books online", and that's just Amazon.
JohnMakin 3y ago
But the biggest scandals had nothing to do with the "tech" - the tech at its core is exceedingly simple and the idea has been around forever. This isn't just "tech being tech," this is tech mixing with unregulated finance + hucksters. This isn't just some overvalued tech stock going to zero, its people losing their entire livelihoods and capital based on blatantly false or misleading promises.
- drcode 3y ago
  Similarly, it's frustrating for many of us in crypto that things like the SBF/FTX meltdown is counted as a failure of crypto, when it was just a centralized traditional platform. It's hard for me to have too much sympathy for people that were parking a large amount of money at that place and trusting them with it. Who cares what "promises" they were making?
X6S1x6Okd1st 3y ago
I really don't see any reason why someone working in cryptocurrency, but clear eyed about the possibility of down sides would "cross swords with Molly". She is an incredible source, as far as I can tell the *best* at finding and highlighting what's going wrong. That's incredibly valuable. rekt.news is also quite good, but skewed towards less reporting but more in depth. IMO Molly should be getting public good funding from the ETH ecosystem for being such a good & reliable source, regardless of if there's a difference in belief of whether crypto is eventually worth it, if you want to build for the long term you must know what is going wrong.
- vvpan 3y ago
  I do not think "crossing swords" is necessarily something aggressive, it could have been debate. I am quiet the blockchain-believer and follow and read Molly's twitter. Yet I do not think she should be unopposed in her views, on the contrary I want her to be challenged, it just comes with making a name for yourself as being anything-skeptic.
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    Crossing swords implies armed combat, it's definitely aggressive.
  - thanranoel 3y ago
    [dead]
  - molly0x57 3y ago
    https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931
    - quickthrowman 3y ago
      ‘Possibly once in a generation levels of transformative intelligence’ (lol) Here’s the genius of our time backpedaling, lying, and disappearing when he is clearly caught lying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878584 Keep fighting the good fight, Molly.
chasing 3y ago
The Web hit the scene in 1991. By 2003 how we shopped, worked, consumed media, communicated with friends and family, and interacted with information was in the process of changing radically. A million "little ambitions" to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations were made were transforming how the world worked. Bitcoin hit the scene in 2011. By 2023 crypto's mostly a failed get-rich-quick scheme with a couple actual possibly legitimate uses that you can see if you squint just right. So not only did crypto have much smaller goals than the Dot-Com era, but it failed pretty hard at those goals. And the deep dark secret at the heart of crypto is that — apart from the get-rich-quick stuff — it's neither particularly interesting nor useful. And it takes a lot of set dressing and hand-waving to make it seem like such.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The most "legitimate" use for bitcoin and its friends is transferring funds electronically with people that others don't want you transferring funds with (e.g, avoiding payment processors, laws, etc). However, it remains to be seen if cryptocurrency could survive doing only that (e.g., without speculators) - because if there's no speculation how do you unload the currency? Only to others wishing to do the same. It's possible, but will it work out?
  - eli 3y ago
    "avoiding laws" is not a "legitimate" use
    - snapcaster 3y ago
      I think you're using legitimate to mean "legal and most reasonable people would be okay with it" whereas the post you're responding to meant "legitimate" to mean an actual real technological advancement that wasn't doable with previous technologies
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
jezzamon 3y ago
"messy" meaning like, oh people try business ideas and they fail, or "messy" as in many people are actively scamming other people with no intent of actually providing value?
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  Both.
donmcronald 3y ago
I think most of crypto is a scam, but I can see the upside in a few things like ENS where a distributed consensus might be better than a centralized authority. However, the tax implications are insane for me in Canada. I won't touch anything where I have to pay in crypto because it creates a huge burden when it comes to doing my taxes at the end of the year. How does crypto solve that? IMO, they've already been regulated to a place where they can't compete. I also feel like proof of stake is literally the code-is-law version of "the rich get richer". If the injection point for newly minted ETH is the rich that already own the majority of the existing ETH, how is that any different than the government printing FIAT and the rich that already own the majority of the FIAT being the injection point? For me, it's all the same because I don't see how anything changes for me (besides more complex taxes).
wmf 3y ago
But it's the same innovation engine that ran Silicon Valley, the same type of people, it's just now they're less dependent on Goldman Sachs... If this is true it's the biggest indictment of Silicon Valley ever. The goal was always to pump and dump on retail but finally they got to take the mask off? Fuck that forever.
api 3y ago
But where's the value? I see lots of gambling, lots of scams, and very little actual use outside the "classical" use cases that existed at the very beginning. These are wire transfer and black/grey market commerce.
themagician 3y ago
The only "goal" of crypto is to make money. Anything else is just worn as a mask for promotion because, "Lie, cheat, steal" isn't a great set of principles for a new economic universal ledger. What crypto has become has showed just how wrong Satoshi was about people. Crypto COULD have been everything he hoped for. It could have been a system where everyone participated, with millions of nodes. Instead it became something no one understood, operated by a few mega pools, all who are trying to fleece people who don't understand or care but just want to make money. Crypto is now an economic matchmaking system that matches the desperate and greedy with those who would take advantage of them. It's a free market system that matches predator with prey. It's doing what almost all banking regulation tries to mitigate. Capitalism consumed crypto in a second. I'd go as far as to say that the two are actually incompatible at a fundamental level.
- PretzelPirate 3y ago
  > The only "goal" of crypto is to make money. Anything else is just worn as a mask for promotion because, "Lie, cheat, steal" isn't a great set of principles for a new economic universal ledger. This is exactly why generalizing doesn't work. The most visible parts of the crypto space (exchanges, VC-funded blockchain, etc...) are there simply to make money. If you meet some of the longer-term devs, you'll see a completely different side of it. How can someone think that Vitalik is in this space for money when he gives so much of it away and has been known to question whether the price matches the value of Ethereum (meaning that Eth was priced too high)? He can also walk away and retire at any time, but chooses to keep working on Ethereum and helping other chains when needed. It's not just Vitalik either. There are many people in this space who value decentralization, personal freedom, financial inclusion, etc... but you dont read news articles about them because they aren't trying to get your attention or money, they're trying to make something that's meaningful to them that they think will make the world a better place.
  - topranks 3y ago
    Vitalik is not motivated by money. He decided to create a supra-national computer system no government can touch when “Blizzard removed the damage component from his beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.” https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-warcraft-nerf-nft-vitalik-buterin https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/22709126/ethereum-creat... Joe Lubin, the guy behind him, is of course all about the money.
napierzaza 3y ago
[dead]
npunt 3y ago
So in other words, "its going great" :)
Animats 3y ago
> The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Carnage, yes. I ran "downside.com" back then. (It's still up, but I stopped updating it around 2006.). In the first dot-com boom, everybody went public. So you could track their numbers from SEC filings. I just took their cash flow numbers and computed when the cash would run out as the "death date". That was surprisingly accurate. But not as many out and out scams as in crypto. Most of the original dot-coms actually did something real. It might not have been profitable, but there was some utility. You could order from Webvan and the stuff would show up.
- leashless 3y ago
  The scams were dressed as massively inflated IPOs for companies that absolutely never stood a chance. They needed Goldman or somebody like it in on the deal. Everybody had to put on a suit. It was industrial. Now it’s a cottage industry of petty grifters exiled from multi level marketing, plus a few big Silicon Valley institutions that turned to the dark side: A16Z springs to mind. Not much has changed, only the direct to consumer nature of the scams without needing an investment bank in the mix. Same old game.
lern_too_spel 3y ago
What the crypto promoters continue to fail to understand is that ownership ultimately is enforced by the state and its laws, not by code. This will never change. Given that reality, centralized ledgers will always be cheaper for every use case than decentralized trustless ledgers.
- topranks 3y ago
  Yeah. The centralized enforcers of the system may as well maintain the ledger themselves. Using a normal database at a fraction of the cost. If they want to be dishonest about things there is no decentralized magic tech that can prevent them doing so.
molly0x57 3y ago
"crossed swords" indeed: https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931
- ahelwer 3y ago
  Personally I'm a fan of the one where in the middle of talking about how smart he is he mixes up Cartesian and Euclidean.
- MrMan 3y ago
  [dead]
neilk 3y ago
I wanted to see what "crossed swords" meant, so I searched for what leashless might have meant. Some examples of threads that I felt were representative. https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1513184187498569729 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1513184187498569729 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931 I think the most generous summary of these interactions would be that leashless is solidly convinced of two things: blockchains are the answer to pressing world problems, and skeptics are simply not on his intellectual and moral level. The home page of Mattereum appears to be a pitch to create one NFT per physical item and then make transactions about it on the blockchain. I confess I am also unsure of how this technology adds value to e-commerce. Nor does this scheme seem to be sufficient to bring about such levels of transparency that it could meaningfully combat slavery, or address issues of climate justice. I hope that leashless is correct about all of that.
- leashless 3y ago
  https://mattereum.com/sustainability/ https://mattereum.com/sustainability/ You can find a ton of material here about exactly why tagging one NFT per object is worth doing. It’s a possible pretty decent fix for many of the problems continuing to run consumer capitalism in the current mode. Basically it gives a place for wear and use data to accumulate. The wear and use data is accurate and trustworthy because it’s presented in a legal framework which provides real accountability for the people involved in the transaction. We don’t know if consumers will accept it or not, but we do know that it works legally and technically. Early stage research.
- leashless 3y ago
  On the modern slavery front have a read of the transcript of the podcast from our modern slavery expert discussing how all this fits together. Serious policy people who are worthy of respect are doing this thing. Molly can snark all the likes but all that she’s demonstrated is arrogance, poor judgement, an unwillingness to admit when she is out of her depth on real world issues like modern slavery, and a willingness to use lynch mobs to defend her point of view rather than to discuss the actual topic. The world is filled with people who point and laugh for a hobby, but once it becomes a living all intellectual honesty goes straight out the window. If you want to understand what we really do, read on. https://podcast.mattereum.com/episodes/ending-slavery-with-technology-social-movements-with-helen-burrows https://podcast.mattereum.com/episodes/ending-slavery-with-t...
rhcom2 3y ago
Having "bigger goals" is meaningless by itself, especially when crypto has repeatably failed to deliver.
chx 3y ago
Nope. The only mess here is the snake oil. There's no freedom. There are no big goals. It's a scam, end to end. It can not be anything else. It never was and for the foreseeable future it will not be anything else because as long as there are transaction fees it's a negative sum game. (And no, cash, stocks and golds are each not such.) Everything else is just talk trying to cover this. The very nature of a negative sum game requires you to talk up the game. Talking of freedom, big goals etc. that's just required by any scam of this sort.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
Maybe you should have smaller goals, because you're achieving squat. Your personal biggest problems appears to be that the person doing it is you.
xwolfi 3y ago
For all your word salad, you cant hide the fact that your description is so inspirational, potential and unrealized that it sounds more like a scam than what the silicon valley ever did to deserve its name. You re not on an innovation engine, you re selling a dream, and the moment it would come true, its actual realization would be so disappointing that its value would crater.

ForHackernews 3y ago

Hello, as part of the bigger goals of the crypto space, I was wondering if you'd care to follow up on this generous $10k charity bet you proposed a few month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893333 If @phphphphp isn't available or doesn't want to continue, I'd be willing to wager $10k on the same terms that he offered.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

DannyBee 3y ago

I doubt most of tech would appreciate being lumped in with crypto, which should be the first sign that your take is a little off. IE if you think you are just "tech being tech" but lots and lots of tech is like "uh, no, we aren't like you at all, please don't lump us in with you", that should tell you something. Beyond that, your take seems so divorced from reality i'm not even sure where to begin. I don't agree at all with your view of crypto's goals being bigger than tech's[1] , and even if i did, that the level of mess is proportionality similar, that this is a normal/good thing, etc. These are sort of fundamental issues so it's gonna be hard to get somewhere. I guess i'll just say if this is the best defense you've got of why what's going on is okay and good for the world, then you deserve everything crypto is getting and will get in the future. [1] Crypto has always been a subset of tech's goals, and is even framed that way 99% of the time in presentations/etc. It's very hard for me to see how you can even argue otherwise.

d3vmax 3y ago
I concur with your assessment.
rlt 3y ago
Of course “tech” isn’t a monolith, and neither is “crypto”. Many people into Bitcoin or crypto don’t appreciate being lumped into the very long tail of scams that are an inherent byproduct of permissionless money. It would be a bit like pre-internet engineers dismissing the internet because it’s the world’s best porn distribution mechanism.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  Crypto sure seems like a monolith, albeit one with a dedicated force of apologists.
- blowski 3y ago
  Crypto may not be a monolith, but the vast majority of it is combinations of bullshit, snake-oil, and techno-utopian dreams.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  > Many people into Bitcoin Can these many people in Bitcoin doing legitimate stuff speak up, because I'm yet to see an actual implemented use case that isn't "evade financial regulations and hope governments don't care enough"
miracle2k 3y ago
> Crypto has always been a subset of tech's goals, and is even framed that way 99% of the time in presentations/etc. GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Amazon's goals aren't "selling books online", and that's just Amazon.

JohnMakin 3y ago

But the biggest scandals had nothing to do with the "tech" - the tech at its core is exceedingly simple and the idea has been around forever. This isn't just "tech being tech," this is tech mixing with unregulated finance + hucksters. This isn't just some overvalued tech stock going to zero, its people losing their entire livelihoods and capital based on blatantly false or misleading promises.

drcode 3y ago
Similarly, it's frustrating for many of us in crypto that things like the SBF/FTX meltdown is counted as a failure of crypto, when it was just a centralized traditional platform. It's hard for me to have too much sympathy for people that were parking a large amount of money at that place and trusting them with it. Who cares what "promises" they were making?

X6S1x6Okd1st 3y ago

I really don't see any reason why someone working in cryptocurrency, but clear eyed about the possibility of down sides would "cross swords with Molly". She is an incredible source, as far as I can tell the *best* at finding and highlighting what's going wrong. That's incredibly valuable. rekt.news is also quite good, but skewed towards less reporting but more in depth. IMO Molly should be getting public good funding from the ETH ecosystem for being such a good & reliable source, regardless of if there's a difference in belief of whether crypto is eventually worth it, if you want to build for the long term you must know what is going wrong.

vvpan 3y ago
I do not think "crossing swords" is necessarily something aggressive, it could have been debate. I am quiet the blockchain-believer and follow and read Molly's twitter. Yet I do not think she should be unopposed in her views, on the contrary I want her to be challenged, it just comes with making a name for yourself as being anything-skeptic.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  Crossing swords implies armed combat, it's definitely aggressive.
- thanranoel 3y ago
  [dead]
- molly0x57 3y ago
  https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931
  - quickthrowman 3y ago
    ‘Possibly once in a generation levels of transformative intelligence’ (lol) Here’s the genius of our time backpedaling, lying, and disappearing when he is clearly caught lying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878584 Keep fighting the good fight, Molly.

chasing 3y ago

The Web hit the scene in 1991. By 2003 how we shopped, worked, consumed media, communicated with friends and family, and interacted with information was in the process of changing radically. A million "little ambitions" to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations were made were transforming how the world worked. Bitcoin hit the scene in 2011. By 2023 crypto's mostly a failed get-rich-quick scheme with a couple actual possibly legitimate uses that you can see if you squint just right. So not only did crypto have much smaller goals than the Dot-Com era, but it failed pretty hard at those goals. And the deep dark secret at the heart of crypto is that — apart from the get-rich-quick stuff — it's neither particularly interesting nor useful. And it takes a lot of set dressing and hand-waving to make it seem like such.

bombcar 3y ago
The most "legitimate" use for bitcoin and its friends is transferring funds electronically with people that others don't want you transferring funds with (e.g, avoiding payment processors, laws, etc). However, it remains to be seen if cryptocurrency could survive doing only that (e.g., without speculators) - because if there's no speculation how do you unload the currency? Only to others wishing to do the same. It's possible, but will it work out?
- eli 3y ago
  "avoiding laws" is not a "legitimate" use
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    I think you're using legitimate to mean "legal and most reasonable people would be okay with it" whereas the post you're responding to meant "legitimate" to mean an actual real technological advancement that wasn't doable with previous technologies
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

jezzamon 3y ago

"messy" meaning like, oh people try business ideas and they fail, or "messy" as in many people are actively scamming other people with no intent of actually providing value?

philipwhiuk 3y ago
Both.

donmcronald 3y ago

I think most of crypto is a scam, but I can see the upside in a few things like ENS where a distributed consensus might be better than a centralized authority. However, the tax implications are insane for me in Canada. I won't touch anything where I have to pay in crypto because it creates a huge burden when it comes to doing my taxes at the end of the year. How does crypto solve that? IMO, they've already been regulated to a place where they can't compete. I also feel like proof of stake is literally the code-is-law version of "the rich get richer". If the injection point for newly minted ETH is the rich that already own the majority of the existing ETH, how is that any different than the government printing FIAT and the rich that already own the majority of the FIAT being the injection point? For me, it's all the same because I don't see how anything changes for me (besides more complex taxes).

wmf 3y ago

But it's the same innovation engine that ran Silicon Valley, the same type of people, it's just now they're less dependent on Goldman Sachs... If this is true it's the biggest indictment of Silicon Valley ever. The goal was always to pump and dump on retail but finally they got to take the mask off? Fuck that forever.

api 3y ago

But where's the value? I see lots of gambling, lots of scams, and very little actual use outside the "classical" use cases that existed at the very beginning. These are wire transfer and black/grey market commerce.

themagician 3y ago

The only "goal" of crypto is to make money. Anything else is just worn as a mask for promotion because, "Lie, cheat, steal" isn't a great set of principles for a new economic universal ledger. What crypto has become has showed just how wrong Satoshi was about people. Crypto COULD have been everything he hoped for. It could have been a system where everyone participated, with millions of nodes. Instead it became something no one understood, operated by a few mega pools, all who are trying to fleece people who don't understand or care but just want to make money. Crypto is now an economic matchmaking system that matches the desperate and greedy with those who would take advantage of them. It's a free market system that matches predator with prey. It's doing what almost all banking regulation tries to mitigate. Capitalism consumed crypto in a second. I'd go as far as to say that the two are actually incompatible at a fundamental level.

PretzelPirate 3y ago
> The only "goal" of crypto is to make money. Anything else is just worn as a mask for promotion because, "Lie, cheat, steal" isn't a great set of principles for a new economic universal ledger. This is exactly why generalizing doesn't work. The most visible parts of the crypto space (exchanges, VC-funded blockchain, etc...) are there simply to make money. If you meet some of the longer-term devs, you'll see a completely different side of it. How can someone think that Vitalik is in this space for money when he gives so much of it away and has been known to question whether the price matches the value of Ethereum (meaning that Eth was priced too high)? He can also walk away and retire at any time, but chooses to keep working on Ethereum and helping other chains when needed. It's not just Vitalik either. There are many people in this space who value decentralization, personal freedom, financial inclusion, etc... but you dont read news articles about them because they aren't trying to get your attention or money, they're trying to make something that's meaningful to them that they think will make the world a better place.
- topranks 3y ago
  Vitalik is not motivated by money. He decided to create a supra-national computer system no government can touch when “Blizzard removed the damage component from his beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.” https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-warcraft-nerf-nft-vitalik-buterin https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/22709126/ethereum-creat... Joe Lubin, the guy behind him, is of course all about the money.

napierzaza 3y ago

[dead]

npunt 3y ago

So in other words, "its going great" :)

Animats 3y ago

> The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Carnage, yes. I ran "downside.com" back then. (It's still up, but I stopped updating it around 2006.). In the first dot-com boom, everybody went public. So you could track their numbers from SEC filings. I just took their cash flow numbers and computed when the cash would run out as the "death date". That was surprisingly accurate. But not as many out and out scams as in crypto. Most of the original dot-coms actually did something real. It might not have been profitable, but there was some utility. You could order from Webvan and the stuff would show up.

leashless 3y ago
The scams were dressed as massively inflated IPOs for companies that absolutely never stood a chance. They needed Goldman or somebody like it in on the deal. Everybody had to put on a suit. It was industrial. Now it’s a cottage industry of petty grifters exiled from multi level marketing, plus a few big Silicon Valley institutions that turned to the dark side: A16Z springs to mind. Not much has changed, only the direct to consumer nature of the scams without needing an investment bank in the mix. Same old game.

lern_too_spel 3y ago

What the crypto promoters continue to fail to understand is that ownership ultimately is enforced by the state and its laws, not by code. This will never change. Given that reality, centralized ledgers will always be cheaper for every use case than decentralized trustless ledgers.

topranks 3y ago
Yeah. The centralized enforcers of the system may as well maintain the ledger themselves. Using a normal database at a fraction of the cost. If they want to be dishonest about things there is no decentralized magic tech that can prevent them doing so.

molly0x57 3y ago

"crossed swords" indeed: https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931

ahelwer 3y ago
Personally I'm a fan of the one where in the middle of talking about how smart he is he mixes up Cartesian and Euclidean.
MrMan 3y ago
[dead]

neilk 3y ago

I wanted to see what "crossed swords" meant, so I searched for what leashless might have meant. Some examples of threads that I felt were representative. https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1513184187498569729 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1513184187498569729 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931 I think the most generous summary of these interactions would be that leashless is solidly convinced of two things: blockchains are the answer to pressing world problems, and skeptics are simply not on his intellectual and moral level. The home page of Mattereum appears to be a pitch to create one NFT per physical item and then make transactions about it on the blockchain. I confess I am also unsure of how this technology adds value to e-commerce. Nor does this scheme seem to be sufficient to bring about such levels of transparency that it could meaningfully combat slavery, or address issues of climate justice. I hope that leashless is correct about all of that.

leashless 3y ago
https://mattereum.com/sustainability/ https://mattereum.com/sustainability/ You can find a ton of material here about exactly why tagging one NFT per object is worth doing. It’s a possible pretty decent fix for many of the problems continuing to run consumer capitalism in the current mode. Basically it gives a place for wear and use data to accumulate. The wear and use data is accurate and trustworthy because it’s presented in a legal framework which provides real accountability for the people involved in the transaction. We don’t know if consumers will accept it or not, but we do know that it works legally and technically. Early stage research.
leashless 3y ago
On the modern slavery front have a read of the transcript of the podcast from our modern slavery expert discussing how all this fits together. Serious policy people who are worthy of respect are doing this thing. Molly can snark all the likes but all that she’s demonstrated is arrogance, poor judgement, an unwillingness to admit when she is out of her depth on real world issues like modern slavery, and a willingness to use lynch mobs to defend her point of view rather than to discuss the actual topic. The world is filled with people who point and laugh for a hobby, but once it becomes a living all intellectual honesty goes straight out the window. If you want to understand what we really do, read on. https://podcast.mattereum.com/episodes/ending-slavery-with-technology-social-movements-with-helen-burrows https://podcast.mattereum.com/episodes/ending-slavery-with-t...

rhcom2 3y ago

Having "bigger goals" is meaningless by itself, especially when crypto has repeatably failed to deliver.

chx 3y ago

Nope. The only mess here is the snake oil. There's no freedom. There are no big goals. It's a scam, end to end. It can not be anything else. It never was and for the foreseeable future it will not be anything else because as long as there are transaction fees it's a negative sum game. (And no, cash, stocks and golds are each not such.) Everything else is just talk trying to cover this. The very nature of a negative sum game requires you to talk up the game. Talking of freedom, big goals etc. that's just required by any scam of this sort.

philipwhiuk 3y ago

Maybe you should have smaller goals, because you're achieving squat. Your personal biggest problems appears to be that the person doing it is you.

xwolfi 3y ago

For all your word salad, you cant hide the fact that your description is so inspirational, potential and unrealized that it sounds more like a scam than what the silicon valley ever did to deserve its name. You re not on an innovation engine, you re selling a dream, and the moment it would come true, its actual realization would be so disappointing that its value would crater.