Criticisms of crypto (and gleeful pointing to failed/hacked projects) are irritating to me.
In the lead up to the dotcom bubble there was a website called fuckedcompany.com, which gleefully pointed out all the failed+scammy dotcoms. It eventually got turned into a book.
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But today barely anyone remembers the book or the website, and nobody cares about the scams.
Today we live in a world shaped by Amazon and Google and Facebook, many of whom were run by people (or companies) that emerged out of the wreckage of 1999.
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It’s terribly easy to point out all the scams and failures in crypto.
But it doesn’t matter. Nobody will care you got it right a decade from now.
The really hard but valuable thing is figuring out which project might become the next Amazon, and therefore change our world.
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I saw a quote recently that captures part of the dynamic here: “Pessimism always sounds smarter because it relies on knowledge of what currently exists. Optimism sounds stupider because it assumes technology or use cases that do not yet exist. Optimism tends to get it right.”
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Ok, something more practically useful: watch the meta, not necessarily the projects.
If, say, Terra blows up, what matters isn’t ‘boohoo stablecoin stupid’ but what the OTHER projects take away from the blowup, and how they change their mechanisms.
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Ignore the hype and the criticism and just watch the meta — the rate of combination and technical experimentation, and the way mechanisms are tried, discarded and spread throughout projects.
To bet against this much experimentation appears risky to me.
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The problem is that there is less than 100 people on this planet that understand maths behind cryptography enough to create a valueable product and I’d hedged a bet less then a what I count on my hands are the number of those who understand what product market fit is.
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It’s not the folks who understand the math who created the last round of companies that survived the dotcom rout.
Not sure why this time would be any different?
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criticisms are healthy when it actually acknowledges the work that many smart people dedicate their lives to working out.
sure, there are scammy projects out there, but also plenty of signal if you engage in good faith and find it.
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Yeah I guess I should have said 'gleeful pointing at failures' instead of 'criticism' — since criticism is totally good if it's serious.
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I only really listen to criticisms that also have an alternative now. E.g. "terra bad" is useless. "terra bad, Dai good" is useful because it gives something to think about and situate
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