> Right this very moment, I could open a new tab, stand up an anonymous Bitclout account, and start re-publishing all the NYT paywalled articles on it, and nobody could figure out who I was or make me stop.
I assume someone owns the Bitclout.com domain, and it's hosted on servers that can be seized? As it is, almost no one actually uses Bitclout which is why you could get away with posting copyrighted content on it. Even if it's like torrents and the actual data is peer-to-peer, the government can and will cut off access to the Bitclout version of The Pirate Bay if it gains popularity.
> Or, imagine a municipality where property records are all on-chain. No need for a fee to look them up.
The property records database is only useful if you can expect a court to enforce what the database says, or fix it if it's wrong (who cares what on-chain if you can't get possession of the real-world asset). The virtues of crypto (censorship-resistant, immutable, etc.) make it hard to trust in court and also impossible to fix when it's wrong.
> But over the past five or so years, the crypto community has solved this problem by introducing intermediaries back in at key points to address these trust and self-custody issues. Take the example of Coinbase...
99+% of people aren't inclined or competent to manage their own crypto wallets, which means in a crypto future it's not the chain itself, but Coinbase and a few other exchanges that are the source of truth. Then we're just replaying the history of the gold standard. Why bother paying transaction fees to shuttle gold around when you can just update a number in a database table for free?
I think the elephant in the room that everyone ignores at their own peril is that technology doesn't exist in a vacuum - politics matter greatly. And many of the goals sought by defi and cryptocurrency are anathema to sovereign governments everywhere (from China to the US). In other words, they simply won't allow much of this to happen because it means the loss of control (over fraud, over taxation, over money, etc).
The technology is compelling, but my bet is that it will be partially co-opted by banks and governments to make the system run faster and more efficiently, without giving up the control and intermediation that currently exist( and in fact may increase it).
See how China co-opted certain technologies with their e-RMB digital currency for an example of where I think things are progressing towards
> The paywalls are about to come down everywhere. It's going to suck, and there will be many careers cut short and much value wiped out.
> But the destruction will be creative because the crypto-powered creator economy will distribute the rewards of good work to many more individual creators than our current, centralized system.
Why doesn't the first phenomenon undermine the second? Doesn't crypto's presumed ability to drive the price of digital goods to near-zero via a resale market work the same way for the creator economy?
Cryptocurrency and the Great Unbundling
I find this critique of crypto-everything quite convincing: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is-a-giant-fraud
Indeed, with China's ban (at least I'll finally be able to get a new gpu for my gaming rig, maybe? https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-bitcoin-market-gpus) and India looking to try and follow suit (https://www.barrons.com/articles/bitcoin-future-51625156640), I'm still betting crypto is more Segway than Automobile--an interesting niche thing but not something that revolutionizes the world.
> Right this very moment, I could open a new tab, stand up an anonymous Bitclout account, and start re-publishing all the NYT paywalled articles on it, and nobody could figure out who I was or make me stop.
I assume someone owns the Bitclout.com domain, and it's hosted on servers that can be seized? As it is, almost no one actually uses Bitclout which is why you could get away with posting copyrighted content on it. Even if it's like torrents and the actual data is peer-to-peer, the government can and will cut off access to the Bitclout version of The Pirate Bay if it gains popularity.
> Or, imagine a municipality where property records are all on-chain. No need for a fee to look them up.
The property records database is only useful if you can expect a court to enforce what the database says, or fix it if it's wrong (who cares what on-chain if you can't get possession of the real-world asset). The virtues of crypto (censorship-resistant, immutable, etc.) make it hard to trust in court and also impossible to fix when it's wrong.
> But over the past five or so years, the crypto community has solved this problem by introducing intermediaries back in at key points to address these trust and self-custody issues. Take the example of Coinbase...
99+% of people aren't inclined or competent to manage their own crypto wallets, which means in a crypto future it's not the chain itself, but Coinbase and a few other exchanges that are the source of truth. Then we're just replaying the history of the gold standard. Why bother paying transaction fees to shuttle gold around when you can just update a number in a database table for free?
I think the elephant in the room that everyone ignores at their own peril is that technology doesn't exist in a vacuum - politics matter greatly. And many of the goals sought by defi and cryptocurrency are anathema to sovereign governments everywhere (from China to the US). In other words, they simply won't allow much of this to happen because it means the loss of control (over fraud, over taxation, over money, etc).
The technology is compelling, but my bet is that it will be partially co-opted by banks and governments to make the system run faster and more efficiently, without giving up the control and intermediation that currently exist( and in fact may increase it).
See how China co-opted certain technologies with their e-RMB digital currency for an example of where I think things are progressing towards
I just wish so many DAO advocates didn't believe that business would be so much better if we eliminated all the messy humans
> The paywalls are about to come down everywhere. It's going to suck, and there will be many careers cut short and much value wiped out.
> But the destruction will be creative because the crypto-powered creator economy will distribute the rewards of good work to many more individual creators than our current, centralized system.
Why doesn't the first phenomenon undermine the second? Doesn't crypto's presumed ability to drive the price of digital goods to near-zero via a resale market work the same way for the creator economy?