That’s interesting. But obviously, if you pitched that right now, there might be some complaints. Yeah, of course. Obviously. A lot of players are extremely savvy and they do connect the dots and see this world. It is just not very popular right now to be talking about it, because the mainstream dialogue is at such a level that taking these kinds of sophisticated use cases requires an understanding of so many concepts.
But adoption surely requires understanding. How do you address that? How do you explain the vast sums of money in the blockchain ecosystem? There is an outsized - which is both a problem and an opportunity - amount of liquidity in the blockchain world that is looking for opportunities that are feeling similar to how it came to be in the first place. So, when you looked at Second Life, there was nobody really looking to invest in a character in Second Life, because people had plenty of opportunities to use their fiat money to buy real estate in the real world. That is not so much the case with cryptocurrencies. They don’t have a good recourse to invest in investable things. So they’re looking to reinvest themselves in something that still exists in the ecosystem, because then you still exist in the domain of being a crypto asset class. And you have to understand the motivation of investors and motivation of liquidity to understand why that is meaningful, and why that is also dangerous. Nobody really knows this, because they just have a
very basic understanding of economies, investments, asset classes, jurisdictional taxation, and returns, all these things. They just don’t know them very well. But you need a borderline PhD in economics to get them. It’s actually more like physics than economics. ‘Digital physics’ is the term I sometimes use.
That kinda makes sense. So why can’t advocates for web3 explain it without being broadly condescending or arrogant? The definition of understanding is to be able to flexibly explain it to people at varied levels. If you can’t explain it to six year olds, you probably don’t understand what you’re talking about. I asked my son, who I discuss these things with...
maybe not exactly these things, and he’s 11. I overheard him talking to his friend on Discord. And I asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ He says, ‘Well, there’s this guy on Reddit and I’m just telling him to stop crying about it and just make an NFT.’ He’s 11. And I asked him, who I have never discussed any of this before with, ‘So, what are NFTs?’ And he says,
‘Ugh, Dad. It is like art you can bet on.’ And right there, the clearest definition of NFT’s I’ve ever heard! From an 11 year old!
That makes me feel old and a bit dim. You can carry a conversation on these topics with anyone. It’s just like we’re talking here. Like you just need to connect to people’s understanding. And in your case, you know so much about EVE Online that it’s easy to draw on your understanding. You understand all of the concepts of emergence, all of the concepts of autonomy, all of the concepts of community governance, for all its opportunities and issues. Like, you come from an extremely unfair advantage into this conversation. And if somebody cannot explain to you what this is about, well they don’t understand it. It’s like the Dunning-Kruger effect. You think
you know it. And then you find out you don’t. It’s only when you go through that bump that you reach enlightenment. And I can speak to it! It took me an embarrassing amount of time to wrap my head around it. Like, I’m a computer scientist. I’ve been around EVE Online for 20 years. It took me like six months of pretty deep, tactile, hands on, to come away with ‘Wow, okay, now I can see through all the obfuscation what we’re really talking about.’
I have no hope. This element of cryptographically locking away assets, such that nobody can interfere with them - is a fundamentally interesting concept. It just is. I have the ability to interfere with things in EVE Online and it makes me lazy to come up with elegant solutions, when we can just take the shortcut and just compensate assets and freeze them and undo them and whatever. Having the pressure of not being able to do that makes you do your job better. Because if there’s no way to address a mistake, you will just think a lot more carefully about it. It’s powerful. But with great power comes great responsibility, of sorts. It can be paralysing. It’s a powerful thing. It just is. Then you have the network effect…that starts to
create these kinds of data physics, where there are actual immutable unbreakable laws to this universe. Nobody can break them. And that is a standard to aspire to. It has vast and deep and wide-ranging implications. Which makes me a little daunted in it because I understand those implications. …And that’s why the web3 kids just throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks.
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