Jack Dorsey, Marc Andreessen and the Makings of a Crypto Holy War

McKenzie is probably right. These two billionaires debating the future of money aren’t exactly in the mix for nomination to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. But Silicon Valley’s motto isn’t “slowly acquire expertise and fix things.” Blockchain is new, and it’s exciting to engineers, so things are going to get broken. Unfortunately for all of... See more

“Web 3 is Web 2.00001. It’s just got a different tagline,” said Galloway. “That’s because most of us don’t want to interact with the blockchain. We want a middleman to make it easier.

From a Bitcoin maximalist’s perspective, the VCs were playing three-card Monte.

And no one fights as hard as people from the same tribe who want their tribe to go different places.

They see the world, and themselves, differently. Andreessen thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room while Dorsey thinks he’s the most moral guy in the room. 

Engineers work out the future, competing fiercely, building on each other’s work, and giving birth to new advances that Dorsey, the romantic, hasn’t even meditated on yet.

You figure out what those improvements are in the marketplace of ideas, then test them out in the actual marketplace. 

Andreessen’s counterargument is that Dorsey is a hippie moron. No techno utopia is coming. The blockchain is nothing more than a new technology, and technology makes the world better in small ways that add up to big advances for everyone. 

All the perverse incentives that warped the previous generation of ad-targeted, user-tracking tech companies, including Dorsey’s Twitter, will come into play again if Andreessen’s vision of crypto is realized.