Key Insights:
The most recent round of Tech elephants, rhinoceroses, unicorns, and spiny lizards—Netflix, Shopify, etc.—are very unlikely to payoff for those investors who stay on the ride to the very end.
That said, they were very much worth doing even if they never make their shareholders any money. The growth of communities of engineering, entrepreneurial, and organizational practice is a huge benefit for innovation and growth—and the overwhelming bulk of that becomes non-rival public knowledge, that nobody can make scarce and hence charge people through the nose for.
Having your rich and your superrich fund R&D for little return is not the worst thing to have happen.
The ideas behind “Web3”—an end to the walled-garden Web2 internet, with the useful parts of the social graph trustable and publicly accessible to anyone who wants to communicate—are great ones.
The ideas behind “Web2”—the clickbait-ad walled-gardens—are horrible. And it is not just Facebook and Twitter. Google and Amazon are manifestly less useful than they were a decade and a half ago. Why? Because using pixels to inform is less profitable than using them for selling ads, and the companies have decided to be evil.
Code is fundamental: a tech-finance drought is no reason not to learn to code. It is a reason to get a job working for a company that already has a real product, and, you know, profits.
At bottom, all of “crypto” is very familiar. It is taking out a map, drawing property lots boundaries on them, and then trying to sell those lots to people by telling them that the railroad is coming through. And in the end everyone will be very happy If the railroad does come through, and does not decide to build its river-crossing bridge ten miles north.
Hexapodia!
References:
Scott Chipolina & George Steer: The Terra/Luna Hall of Shame <https://www.ft.com/content/40c06a4f-3586-40be-b5ad-b836b5dcdc0d>
Brad DeLong: Tesla’s Valuation(s)
Brad DeLong: Wonders of þe Invisible Crypto World
Adam Ozimek: Think Bigger About Remote Work
Noah Smith: Meme Stocks & Bitcoin Will Not Redistribute Wealth: Financio-Populism Is Built on Dreams & Smoke
Noah Smith: Suddenly Startups Are Having Trouble Raising Money. Why?: ‘A Few Reasons for the Big VC Funding Crunch
Noah Smith: What Kind of Financial Asset Is Bitcoin?: Is It Money? Digital Gold? A Tech Stock? Recent Events Shed Some Light on The Question
Nicholas Weaver: Blockchains & Cryptocurrencies: Burn It With Fire <https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/blockchains-and-cryptocurrencies-burn-it-fire-nicholas-weaver>
+, of course:
Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>
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