The Web: A VC-funded gig economy of securities fraud
I mean, pets.com? Seriously? It's a bubble waiting to be burst (and it did in 2001) so the Web is morally depraved and the government should come in and make sure only millionaires can invest in them. Makes total sense.
You could easily build on the web in 1999 without trying to peddle your shares to retail investors. Most people did just that.
But on “web3” nobody wants to just build useful or interesting stuff. Instead everybody is looking to sell you their useless thing as an amazing investment. And that’s why it’s both morally obnoxious and tends to run afoul of securities laws.
You can easily build on web3 in 2022 without trying to peddle your tokens to retail investors, too.
But those aren't the projects that you hear about.
It is disingenuous of you to recognize the possibility on the web in 1999 but then characterize people building on web3 as not wanting to build useful or interesting stuff.
Whenever I ask to see the useful web3 projects that have an actual user base, people point me to stuff like “automated crypto lending platform offers 10% annual gains guaranteed!” — and it just further reinforces my impression that it’s all shell games around traditional pyramid/MLM schemes.
I build tools for blockchain games and from my experience there is heavy polarization in the communities of most of these games (on the sustainable - exploitative spectrum). You have three types of people involved in these communities:
1. People who genuinely care about the games, about building narratives together, playing together, etc. This is a growing minority.
2. People who have come from the Play-to-Earn world who care about extracting as much monetary value as possible from the game economies by playing the game. These are the people who put the rules under as much scrutiny as possible.
3. People who have come from the crypto finance world who are looking for "alpha" from the game economies. They typically try and attain their gains by performing arbitrage on the game's ERC20 token(s).
For most blockchain game communities, early on, the communities are mostly populated by people of types (2) and (3). Type (1) groups in the community build organically over time, whereas type (2) and (3) members of the community come and go. This flow of (2)s and (3)s is actually important in building the core group of (1)s.
It feels like the kind of marketing you are talking about is necessary in order to build sustainable game communities for blockchain games. But good projects do have a growing number of members of type (1) who do derive essential (as opposed to economic) value from the underlying games themselves.
In general, though, the tools that blockchain projects use to organize and build up their communities will probably become useful beyond the scams (in the form of DAO tooling). It will take time for this to play out.
Disclaimer : These are not the kind of tools I build. Wasn't trying to shill myself there. My company will move in this direction eventually, but that is not what we do at the moment. This is just my sincere belief.
I don't think anybody selling Beanie Babies was claiming to be transforming finance and democratizing intellectual property or making any of the many other ludicrous claims in the web3/crypto space. When I look at web3/crypto, at best I see "solutions" in search of a problem, but mostly I see confused techno-utopianism mixed with Beanie Babies and various other scams and empty crazes.
A lot of stuff on the Web sucks (always has), but importantly, there was always a sizeable proportion that didn't (Wikipedia, etc.). Cryptocurrencies are so bad at doing what they originally set out to do (function as currencies in at least some of the ways that currencies are useful), that anything in the space is almost universally exhibiting the problems I mentioned above.
I had the thought a few months ago that crypto is just a meme, a potent viral marketing scheme for the modern era. The gig economy notion of the article resonates strongly with me.
