Let’s say you run a startup that has a successful product, and you are now considering what product you should build or acquire next. 🧵
Something I find useful is mapping out the typical economic loop from start to finish, and then considering the startup’s position within that loop.
I’ll explain by looking at the current internet landscape and the strategic position of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. (I’ll adapt this to web3 in a future thread.)
Web2 is built on advertising. Big companies like Facebook and Google make most of their money on advertising, and many web2 startups build their customer base using advertising.
When you build a business on advertising, the theory is that if you retain enough customers, the long-term economics will work out and you’ll eventually be profitable.
The myth of "ETH killers" — why demand for blockchains will always outpace supply 🧵
For every important computing resource in history demand has outpaced supply. This includes CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage, and both wired and wireless bandwidth.
The core dynamic of computing movements is a mutually reinforcing feedback loop between applications and infrastructure.
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.
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. 😉
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.