Don't show Me the Money

The crypto ecosystem (or web3, or blockchain-based, or whatever you want to call it) is offering a new set of promises of how wonderful it will all be. Most of these promises will not be fulfilled, at least not fully or in the way we expect. But in trying to fulfill them, we will learn new things about what people can do online, and what types of b... See more

Shared governance is attractive, even if it has no teeth. DAOs and token-based crowdfunding campaigns showed that people are much more likely to contribute if there is a built-in mechanism to vote on how their money is spent and how their favorite companies are run.

Separating "login" from "data" is powerful and attractive. Currently, we need to create an account with every app and website we use. And we need to let these apps store our data on their own servers. On the blockchain-powered web, people use a single private key (and wallet) to log in to many different apps, and their data and history belong to th... See more

People are willing to pay a lot of money for digital goods, and owning something online can be a powerful status symbol even if it does not correspond to anything offline.