The younger generation *suck* at explaining the blockchain. No wonder there's so much FUD in the space right now - I'm looking at you @smdiehl
Let me explain what's going on, but this time we're going to leave the really important parts of the picture *in* the frame. A thread:
You've got to start in 2008 with the global financial collapse. Since then, interest rates have hovered around zero as government pumped cash into the global economy to keep it running.
For a long time, no inflation. The extreme medicine was working. Then covid, and 5% inflation
During that period with no inflation, and tons of money printing, there was very little economic *growth*. If there had been, inflation would have started then - the economy picks right up, credit risk goes down because lending is less risky, and prices start to rise on the cash.
So what happens to people who are turning 20 or graduating college in 2009?
Nothing. Nobody will lend them money to start businesses, VC becomes extremely conservative and risk-averse, and Silicon Valley starts to consolidate. Life is slowly getting harder, and young are v. poor
There's just a titanic concentration of wealth in the hands of older people, and the young are living on scraps. This is absolutely brutal: feels like civilization is going backwards. The young are terrified.
So in this situation what the young need is *economic opportunity* and THEY ARE NOT GOING TO GET IT IN ANY RESOURCE POOL THAT THE BOOMERS CONTROL.
There's just no room to expand: whatever you want to do, there's a tax: boomers control media distribution, VC finance, real estate.
Most of the easy niches in the dotcom world are already taken: people shop, they read the news, they listen to music, they date - and big dotcoms are already in all of those niches.
Nobody is going to overthrow reddit and FB anytime soon they're solidly locked into place now.
This is a simple problem of access to capital: land, patents, intellectual property, distribution networks for physical products (target, wal mart). The young don't have enough cash to BUY INTO THE SYSTEM.
They're so poor they can't even get exploited.
Now do you see BTC's fix?
BTC allows its adherents an escape from the boomer-ridden conventional economic landscape.
What is bitcoin's core feature? IT'S TOO HARD FOR BOOMERS TO USE.
So you can build an economy for the young, a parallel state to the Boomer Dollar dominated US political landscape.
This is one of those Voice, Loyalty and Exit things. The young complain: nobody hears them. They try and tough it out in existing cultural blocs: still can't make rent.
But to exit the boomer-controlled old economy into the btc/web3 space?
Wow: a huge self-financed bubble grows
There is practically no boomer control of bitcoin or web3. I'm 50, and I'm one of the oldest people in the space - Ian Grigg, David Chaum, Joe Lubin, Don Tapscott, a handful of others - but the old guys are rare and (apart from joe) not that powerful.
Young blockchain frontier.
Now, young people, they are not so smart. I was young myself.
They make mistakes. Big ones. Now we have Oh So Many young people running around with a huge pile of capital that they basically created by believing each-other's stories. It's a creative pact.
A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT.
So this New Social Contract (NSC), let's examine things like bored apes.
In this contract, kids who grew up with an ipad in their hand acquiring virtual property in games and trading it with friends, go from *renting* virtual property from Farmville to *creating and owning* it.
Why is an ape valuable? The younger generation decided it was valuable.
Why *isn't* this golf course valuable? The people that thought golf was at the centre of the universe are all too old to play much
This is a generational turnover of wealth, an escape from a locked-up world
Because there's *practically* no law in (for example) defi or the NFT game. The ICOs ran afoul of old school financial regulation. But the NFTs are bang in the middle of open ground: you draw a thing, the government says you own it outright if it isn't Mickey Mouse.
You sell it.
So now you have tons of cultural production - young people making art for young people - but the distribution channel is OpenSea, and that's also owned by... young people. And their fees are light.
The younger generation are Exiting the Boomer Machine to live on their own terms.
25 years ago, John Perry Barlow (I met him once!) wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
Now let's discuss the New Social Contract's critics.
Who's getting so het up here? Why all the hatred for Web3 these days?
Let me tell you where the action is: it's the people who are waiting around to inherit their parent's houses who are telling you that this NFT thing is no good and YOU SHOULD GET BACK INSIDE OF THE MACHINE WHICH WILL ONE DAY PAY MY PENSION.
Because this "defection" hurts them.
The more the young define their own system with their own rules, the more the old are missing out on the deal.
But they're mostly not watching this: Warren Buffet is an exception, and he called BTC "rat poison" remarkably early.
But he's the rat.
But mostly the old missed it.
Then the bridge generation, the one doing the complaining, clogging the airwaves with NFT hate and trying to coerce artists and brands into staying away.
What do they have to lose?
The answer is: they're late to the party, and were hoping to WIN AT THE OLD GAME in the future.
The well positioned chattering classes, the media and academics, want to inherit the system that the young are refusing to join and actively working to undermine.
They don't have real power *yet* but they know if the system stays up, in 20 years they'll run the next TED/Davos.
And these slightly younger defenders of the Status Quo are fighting like hell to defend the Status Quo *only because they expect to inherit it*.
If the cultural production system burns to the ground before they inherit, they get nothing.
All the value's skipping a generation.
So when you see somebody wailing on NFTs, ask the hard question: "how old are they, and what is their stake in the old system?"
This is not to say that NFTs and crypto are perfect: young people made them without much reference to the Old Social Contract and they worked very fast
I was under 30 in the 1990s when I got involved in cryptocurrency.
By the time Ethereum rolled round I was one of the oldest members of the team: a stabilizing influence, perhaps. But I was on that side because I had nothing to lose: I had no property, no stake. Open Source guy!
Now I'm plotting a global environmental and economic reform which, even if it works, I will not likely see the end of unless I live for a *very* long time.
I should probably mention myhopeforthe.world which is a rough summary of how I spent my life before lucking into Ethereum and becoming the Launch Coordinator for the 2015 launch
I've been working on plans for making homes for tens of millions of climate refugees since 2002.
What does it actually take to keep people happy? How can we do it at minimum ecological cost? What would those lives be like, and would we be happy living them if they were our lives?
To survive, we have to replace the imagined future apocalypse with something else, and then move towards that.
It has to replace our default pattern, which seems to be to bring the world to Apocalypse.
We have to end linear time. No more "and then the game stops" cultural maps.
This sense, that time runs *until the End of Days* and then stops?
It's simply an error but its one which is baked into the European Christian base map. That culture is dominated by apocalyptic mythology. You wonder why they were first to nuclear weapons? Biblical archetypes.
To fix the world you'd have to pull out that base map.
"The game goes on indefinitely and we leave the board in good condition for future players" has to replace any notion of an apocalyptic end.
Could such a shift in base map happen? Of course it could: history shows us that.
I'm running a company to save lives. Not directly, I'm not making HIV vaccines. I'm running a company to make money, and then I'm going to spend that money saving lives.
Maybe some of our technology will help but that's very much a bonus: goal is vast world-transforming wealth.
We're talking "man who fell to earth" levels of wealth. I figure there are going to be hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and the UN etc. will be totally disorganised and shambolic, as they are now.
And this is kind of my problem. I was yelling about the need for masks and research into mask effectiveness in pandemics >10 years ago
20 years into the work on climate refugees. 20 years of “we have to prepare to save the lives of hundreds of millions, homes destroyed by floods
When these things arrive, the “optimists” say “my god who could have predicted this unprecedented event” because *their optimism is rooted in avoiding the data about obvious possible risks*.
Add survivor biases, and we have a risk blind incredibly rich pundit class misleading us
I've been thinking really hard about people's inability to stare at the darkness of the world and the fate of the poor, without blinking.
It all seems pretty obvious to me: the central fact of human existence is that 5 or 10 million people starve to death each year. The core.
Everything that we do is set against the background.
Everything that we do is set against the constant drum beat of other humans starving to death. Maybe one every ten seconds. I hear that clock. That clock is with me. I wake up with it, I fall asleep with it. Brain won't block.
My brain won't block it because I trained my brain not to: I am "enlightened" - a human that has punched through its own programming. Freedom, certainly, but also awareness - and in that awareness one has a few choices.
God, I'm tired of trying to persuade people not to destroy their world, and to take care of the victims of prior attempts to destroy it.
People want to stay asleep at the wheel, in their comfy little ruts, even though they are two wheels off the cliff already.
It's Panic Time!
What does it take to move people's attention off their wallets or petty political rivalries on to the core question of the day: how do we regulate technology so that it doesn't destroy all of our lives?
That's the core issue: global warming, mass surveillance, combat robots.
I ploughed this territory 10 years ago, and published Mother of Hydrogen, an SF novel about how the human race survives nanotech and biotech wars, and manages a rogue AI problem.