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While waiting for metamask to sign complex contracts is annoying, that step will soon speed up. It’s the human-to-human parts that are the bottleneck.
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Speed up implies automation of “execution” — a single human takes a decision, you can speed up everything after that, they’re delighted. But when a technology is mostly about multiple humans coordinating, that’s… not as valuable.
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If your NFT never sells, does it matter that it took seconds rather than minutes to mint? It’s literally nonfungible so mass production logic fails. There’s no factory to speed up. It’s a market of 1 thing. For eg, there’s no high-frequency trading market in diamonds afaik.
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There’s the usual high speed trading in the big exchanges, but low/zero liquidity DeFi sites feel like Arab tribes meeting at an oasis or something. Or corner sidewalk trade. Markets are made faster but operate slower. Limited by liquidity, not transaction speed.
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While discords and telegrams (Web2 staging areas?) can be manic, actual Web3 sites have a cozyweb/waldenpondy/backwater feel to them. Everybody is an address, there’s generally no native messaging, no dopamine loops. The speed needs tend to be outsourced (backsourced?) to Web2.
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So much relies on looking up and bs ktracking things through block explorers. That’s like reading ledgers. Limited by the speed of mental arithmetic and logic. Better UIs will emerge but it’s still accounting thinking not meme thinking. System-2 slow.
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Hmm. Trusted third parties are really the enabler of all the speed and convenience the industrial stack delivers. There’s vast chains of delegation riding the warp and woof of economies of scale and scope.
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There’s literal delays engineered into workflows everywhere. Vault unlock periods, motion passing countdown clocks on DAOs, time locks in contracts… delay is an explicit engineering element.
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Designing with delay *is* used in industrial tech but is a rare pattern. You see clocking delays in chips, optics delays in interferometers… but the sort of “delay engineering” you see in blockchain tech is inherited from human trust patterns, not physical phenomena.
Replying to
It’s no accident that speed-obsessed projects tend to be VC-funded private things solving for Industrial Age metrics and aesthetics. They’re still solving for old-economy measures.
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Not a bad thing. Speed and convenience are still valuable, and pragmatically trading off pure-paradigm blockchain performance by injecting centralization/TTPs is fine by me, so long as you don’t promise one tradeoff point and deliver another. That’s a kind of bait-and-switch.
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The moxie Web3 article mostly left me feeling I was watching a debate between old vs new decentralization utopians fixated on different fetishes (servers vs private-key self-custody) but I’m not personally invested in either god.
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But the one dark pattern the moxie article flagged for me was promising one level of decentralization and TTPness and delivering another. You get all the coordination overhead and inconvenience of pure-paradigm Web3 with the vulnerabilities of Web2. Worst of both worlds.
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(the inconvenience if trust jams that is, not the transient UX jankiness we face now). A bit like promising the independence of cars, and delivering the expected traffic jams, but really you’re putting users in a subway system wearing VR glasses and with fake steering wheels.
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Stephen Covey jr. wrote a book called the “speed of trust” which I haven’t read but the title stuck with me. Web3 tries to remove TTPs to varying degrees (depending on tradeoffs) and varying levels of success, and lets society run at natural speed of trust
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Viewed that way, if there is a natural “speed of trust” for a social system that’s something like the design frequency of a CPU, you could say industrial tech stacks “overclock” societies by introducing TTPs and cashing out speed, convenience, and scale, apparently for “free.”
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But as with chips, overclocking is not something you do casually at no cost. And the results of overclocking trust for 250 years now manifests as a range of social externalities. Too big, too fast, too convenient = fragile, carbon-debted, overconsuming societies.
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All advertising has exactly the same message, a TTP telling you “trust me, delegate a bunch of decisions to me that I can automate for your speedy delight and convenience” That’s why adtech is the sine qua non of late-stage industrial tech, up to and including Web2.
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I sorta backed into the main thesis of this thread and it’s all out of order. But the tldr is: Speed is an affordance of TTPs and Web3 wants to be slowtech operating at the natural, non-overclocked speed of trust, trust jams and all. Beware anyone selling speed and convenience.
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