A very common experience in crypto/web3 is to have a friend who was previously dismissive — “it’s all scams” — become a convert after “going down the rabbit hole.”
It’s not a coincidence that people who have this experience almost always refer to a rabbit hole, popularized by the book Through the Looking Glass about Alice in Wonderland, where the logic and ideas are reversed on the other side of the portal.
Because once you dive in and learn about all the interesting things in web3, it’s the opposite of what you were previously told.

What’s actually a breakthrough for building trustworthy services on the internet is incorrectly portrayed as a haven for ponzis and scammers.
The mainstream view is skewed partly by our own failure. There are too many voices in the web3 community who focus on “number go up” instead of real technology and applications.
It’s also skewed by a media environment that has decided, for whatever reason, to focus exclusively on the negative aspects of web3.
If you are a believer you know what I mean. If you are a skeptic, I’d encourage you to read primary sources and decide for yourself.
Here are some resources we put together:

Crypto startup school a16z.com/crypto-startup…

Crypto canon a16z.com/2018/02/10/cry…

NFT canon future.a16z.com/nft-canon/

There are many other great resources which I’d be happy to tweet below.
“Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice.

cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice-II.…

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More from @cdixon

12 Nov
Software has an extremely rich design space — closer in the breadth of possibilities to creative activities like fiction writing than traditional engineering.
Therefore, universal negatives like “there will never be great software created in category [x]” should be interpreted as analogous to “there will never be a great novel written in genre [y]”
If you want to bet against human ingenuity and creativity, go for it — I’ll take other side of that bet. 😉
Read 5 tweets
11 Nov
Good thread 👇

Letting users own their social graph & switch services *while taking your network with you* is one of the core public services web3 can deliver.

This is how email works and there is no reason all social services can’t work this way.
I believe we already have all the necessary infrastructure.

The key is judicious division of what goes on-chain vs off-chain to guarantee user ownership of critical data while minimizing gas fees and maximizing scalability.
web1 maintained strong decentralization of web (http) and email (smtp) all via DNS. If a hosting provider behaved badly you could just switch your domain to point to a new IP and you didn’t lose any data or your position in the network.
Read 5 tweets
11 Nov
My simple mental model

web2: engagement first, monetization second

web3 monetization first, engagement second
and because in web2 the monetization sometimes went awry, the ideal outcome is web2 & web3 layer on top of each other bringing out the best in each
Read 4 tweets
9 Nov
The reason I like the phrase “computers that can make commitments” is that it expresses the full generality of the blockchain app design space.

cdixon.org/2020/01/26/com…

(I realize it hasn’t caught on yet - I think it will eventually :))
There is nothing inherently financial about blockchains. Finance happens to be a design-rich subdomain, because blockchains can make commitments about scarcity, ownership, immutable code, etc.
But you can also make other kinds of commitments. For example, ENS makes commitments around how its namespace works and is governed.

You can’t have a situation like this with DNS where a private equity firm tried to control the entire .org tld icdsoft.com/blog/the-org-c…
Read 7 tweets
8 Nov
Why gm?

global community- it’s a friendly grounding ritual across different time zones

authentic community with positive sum mindset that genuinely likes each other and uses memes to signal

Symbolic of high clock speed & info density wrt to code, ideas, culture, and memes.
Also a good rule of thumb is faster clock speed wins.

Why Twitter ate news and why web3 will eat culture.

Related: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
Credit to @pmarca here
Read 4 tweets
8 Nov
Certain categories of web2 websites and apps fall into a usability-monetization death spiral. 🧵
Relying on ads and monetizing at low CPMs, the incentive is to add ever more intrusive ads to increase click rates.

User experience degrades, requiring more intrusive ads, in a downward cycle.
News sites, cooking sites, games, music, Q&A, travel, and many other web2 categories that didn’t figure out subscriptions or high-CPM business models fall into this trap.
Read 9 tweets

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