Crypto

“I kind of tend to compare crypto, blockchain, whatever you want to call it, a lot with open source, which had an all of that sort of millenarian fantasy, and also was very important, like half of which didn't happen, but it is very important. And, you know, th…”

“And a lot of them are working on crypto, and some of them Are working on it for the money, but most of them aren't just working on it for the money, or they're working on it because they think, here is this substrate.”

“You get a whiteboard and you write VR, AR, social, crypto, place, tradable goods, creator economy, and you draw a box around this and above the box you write metaverse. Like, okay, but that doesn't mean it exists or you can buy it or invest in it. It's just a …”

“NFTs aren't about art either, just as crypto isn't about money. the point, you know, what we're still doing is trying to work out what the building blocks are. And so the NFT might be another building block within how a crypto social system or publishing syst…”

“Layered onto that, you have a huge amount of sort of scamming because basically you've added software to money and connected to the internet, and it's relatively early, immature software.”

“Don't clone office, make Google drive. Like that's making something that where it matters that it's the internet, make something where it matters that it's crypto.”

“We're at this stage now of, like, internet early, PCs early eighties, internet early nineties, Enormous amounts of bullshit, and people kind of building this plumbing, and infrastructure, and that's where all the kind of clever, interesting stuff is.”

“And in tech, when people say five to 10 years, that's sort of the edge of science fiction. It's like, yeah, this is really interesting. But we don't know yet.”

“And in fact, a lot of the use case of crypto is in fact speculating on crypto.”

“And crypto is basically sort of SaaS meets open source. So it's all sort of running publicly in the cloud. And so you can make different applications with this. You can do these incentive structures and open governance structures and portability that you can't…”

“And you read this and you think, okay, that's not a mass market consumer experience any more than the command line was, any more than open source coding was, and you can believe everyone will learn the command line and everyone will write the code, but they pr…”

“The visible complexity goes up in a kind of a bell curve. And then you reach a point by like, you know, you get GUIs and Windows and Mac and so on that the visible complexity starts going down. Even as though you carry on getting more and more plumbing underne…”

“And so I sort of just, I mean, I just kind of think like with all of the attention and all the buzz and hype around like metaverse and web three and crypto and DeFi and VR, we kind of stopped paying attention to AI.”

“There's a whole other set of people and a whole set of energy that's very nerdy in a good way, very mathematician, very people building very, very abstruse engineering infrastructure. Out of which consumer products will pop in a couple of years.”

“Creation of the stack with the enthusiasm for crypto, whereas creation at the top of the stack is the enthusiasm for machine learning.”

“Whereas it seems to me the kind of creative energy around crypto was sort of, like, it was more like the creative energy of the internet in, like, the late eighties and early nineties. In that there was no HTTP. There was no SSL. There was no SMTP. Yes, there …”

“And this may be where VR is today, and you'll come back in 20 years. Crypto may be the new open source and it's plumbing. It may, you fade away, like, you know, people who thought that open source would destroy Windows and desktop Linux. This is the year of de…”

“It wasn't all a scam. Just 99% of it was a scam and useless.”