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

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.

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

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

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

Andreessen, by contrast, is a crypto polyamorist. He thinks the blockchain should be used not just for Bitcoin but for any coin with a new idea behind it.

“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.

Dorsey is a Bitcoin maximalist, an economic idealist who believes that Bitcoin must be the only digital currency.

Dorsey argues that while Andreessen Horowitz is marketing its Web3 investments (that is, companies dealing in crypto, non-fungible tokens, the metaverse and anything on blockchain) as power to the people, the firm is going to wind up with as much power as it had in Web 2.0 and the people with just as little.