"But the only people who can own items in the metaverse are giant corporations. It's a weird idea. It basically says that only Zuckerberg is allowed to own the metaverse. Only he can own the entire metaverse. Why should each of us Can't everyone have their own room, their own property in the metaverse? So, people who deny and oppose NFTs and crypto are basically saying: "We will not have a collectively owned future, we will have a corporate owned future. "
“I used to think that what we were going to do was replace Uber, Facebook and Twitter with the primitives that enabled Web3 and the resulting web, but now I don’t necessarily think that, I think we’re just going to create things that we can’t even predict or recognize But we will eventually turn our attention to these things. So, Twitter and Facebook will still be good and will continue to exist. But we will focus on these new applications that are uniquely enabled by primitives such as NFTs and tokens. "
——Naval Ravikant, Founder of Coinlist
first part:
The following is the second part (the content has been deleted):
1
The evolution and development direction of NFT
Naval Ravikant：We are now at the heart of Web3, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), which is what Chris has been doing since day one, and of all the investors I know, Chris is the first to make a big move into the NFT space And the one who has been consistent. In fact, I remember meeting him in February of this year and all he wanted to discuss was NFTs. And I didn't get it at the time, and I thought, "Yeah, anyway, Chris, that sounds cool, a nice toy."
Now I think: "What did you say again?" So I missed the NFT, but the NFT answers a whole bunch of questions I didn't know before. One problem is that a bunch of people showed up and bought bitcoin early and got rich in this huge wealth transfer movement.
Chris mentioned them as well when we moved from fiat to some kind of scarce math-backed currency. So does that mean whoever entered the field in 2009-2015 or 16 will be rich and everyone else will be poor? Nope, there's a funny saying that's been going around, and someone says, "Each generation invents its own new Ponzi scheme and rejects the previous generation's Ponzi scheme." Now we're moving faster, So the last generation of Ponzi schemes could be Bitcoin or Ethereum. If you think about what Bitcoin is, it comes out and says, "We reject fiat money, we reject money printing, we reject kings, rulers and tyrants, we want people's money." We got it, and then someone said, "Wait, can you create your own currency? Well, I want to create my own currency."
So everyone will come out and say, "Well, I have my own currency, and instead of using your ledger of record, use my ledger of record."
… Just like in the real world, anything that is popular can hold its value, it could be real estate, it could be oil, it could be gold. It could be every house, it could be every business, it could be a pair of shoes.
Of course, the value of the vast majority of objects will tend to go to zero, which may be short-lived, but at least this provides an opportunity for everyone who is "late", "well, we can define any object as having a value (we think Valuable)”, such as these cultural memes we created around NFTs such as Boring Ape. HODLing is the meme of the bitcoin community, right? You have to hold your Bitcoin, the word comes from the misspelling of HOLD, whereas in the NFT world, you hold for sentimental value.
If you own a Punk 6529 and someone comes and buys your Punk, you're not going to sell it. The most famous Punk has been used as a Twitter ID by its holder, and his CryptoPunk received an offer of about $10 million, but he refused to sell it because it represented his identity. That actually makes it a cultural meme, and his CryptoPunk is probably even more valuable now. So NFTs are an absolutely fascinating rabbit hole, and I think Chris might be the first investor to identify them in depth, going back to his investment in Dapper Labs. These guys built CryptoKitties and evolved from there. So, I'd love to hear Chris talk about NFTs, how they've evolved and where they're headed. Chris Dixon: Yeah, obviously I'm excited about NFTs, I think they're very, very broad, kind of like what I call primitive. As you understand, like the way we use it, it's sort of a key fundamental building block of the internet. The Internet has gone through this -- I think most of the problems I mentioned earlier, you can only build with an open approach, and a lot of the problems, frankly, I think come from advertising. In fact, because we don't have native payments and tokens, all this forces people to do what Google wants, they want to have a digital closed loop before crypto, and you can only achieve it through advertising.
So we built this massive infrastructure and the internet is now driven by banner ads and search ads and stuff like that. That's great for some companies, but it's usually bad for creative people. Someone tweeted a great one yesterday: "Web2 company convincing you to give away your creation in exchange for hearts (likes). But yes please show me how NFTs are a real scam."
It's amazing how they convinced all these people, oh, Instagram, what did they pay for? zero! Facebook, zero! YouTube, 50%, right? Apple, they take 30% just because the user owns the phone.
You know how many businesses don't survive when you take 30% away? It's kind of crazy that we put up with all this. So now, as you said, put the NFT aside and see what's going on like in Substack? It's a newsletter platform that you can access as a writer and get people to subscribe to it. It's a relatively simple, very elegant idea, but the interesting thing you're seeing now is that writers who used to make maybe $100,000 or something are now making $1 million a year. You'll see a lot of people say, "Hey, this shouldn't be happening. We're told the internet is bad for creative people."
The internet isn't bad for creative people, but Web2 is bad for creative people. I just saw the stats advertised by Spotify the other day, they have 8 million artists, 14,000 of them make $50,000 a year, and the rest are less. Basically, with such an income, life is very difficult. By the way, I'm not blaming Spotify. A lot of money goes to record labels, I think Spotify is a good company, it's just a matter of logic of the model. Then there's an artist named 3lau, who I think is only moderately famous on Spotify, and he made $11 million by releasing an NFT.
You could argue that $11 million is just a bubble, and if all he makes is $100,000, that's transformative. This is the same as Substack. So you now have this really powerful new way where these creatives, who were previously at best banner ads, very poorly monetized, can now go and create all kinds of interesting stuff. We have art, we have utilities, we have... NFTs are also a broad concept, so I think you'll see all kinds of interesting experiments and I really encourage people to get involved in these communities to learn about them. For example, I will buy NFT on Foundation, which is one of our investment projects. It is a high-end NFT art platform and planning platform.
I think in the future, we will see more and more practical use cases. Games are really fun right now and I don't think the world has seen that yet but I'll tell you we have a gaming group at our company and these guys are from Riot and Blizzard (Blizzard) and I think they're almost 1 percent right now Baihui involves NFT. They're at the forefront, especially the next generation of young people, there's going to be a lot of fun stuff that's going to be real utility.
I think NFT is a concept that is as common as web pages, think about websites, when it first came out, people were like: "Oh, this is a website!" They tried to map it to the offline world, it was like a This brochure, but as we've seen over the course of these 30 years, all the smart people came and they innovated, the website? It's not a website, it's a social network, it's a SAAS tool, it's a ... and NFTs will be just as broad.
It's a core new concept, the idea of owning something on the Internet. Another way I like to think about it is, like, imagine that every time you go to a hotel or a restaurant, they're like, "Oh, you gotta change, buy a new one." That's how the Internet works today , and you leave, they'll say,"Hey, you gotta give those things back to me."Then one day, someone came up and said, "No, you can take it."
Imagine the amount of innovation this would enable, and that's what's happening on the Internet. We used to have this leasehold design, and now we're just bursting it, so people say, "Oh, it's a bubble."
But I don't think so, I think this is the beginning of an incredible creative journey of the next 20 years, I really believe in it.
Tim Ferriss：Chris, I'd love to let you talk a little bit more about games, because I think NFTs in the context of games are easily understood by a lot of people, even if they don't play games. But a lot of apps make sense to me. So I mean, you can talk about whatever you want, right? Say something like YGG, what does that mean? Because it was so much fun for me—and "fun" is a lazy adjective—it was eye-opening and exciting.
Chris Dixon：So what is the video game model today? is the dominant model, where despite the emergence of new technologies, the old ways persist. So, to buy a video game like Madden, you pay $60 or something, and that business still exists, and that's what companies like EA do. But now there are new, more modern companies, probably best of all, the likes of Fortnite and Supercell, Clash Royale and League of Legends.
The model these companies use is that the game is completely free and you can play forever and the only thing you have to buy is skins and stuff like that so you can't buy items that will make you win because people think that would break the integrity of the game sex, so it's all just to look cool, but it's a $40 billion a year industry that's just virtual goods. OK, by the way, the same goes for NFTs.
But those virtual goods are locked into the game, right? And when you buy virtual goods, all the money goes to the company. Whereas with a game like Axie Infinity, you're not buying from the company, you're buying from one of the investors, it's more like peer-to-peer, right? It's more like the eBay and Craigslist way, you're buying from another person. In the case of Axie, for example, there are hundreds of thousands of people playing this game, many of them live in the Philippines and rely on this game for their livelihood. So they do a lot of different things that people call grinding.
You play with a bunch of stuff, and then they might improve NFTs, and then, other richer people buy those NFTs from these people, and the company only charges like 3% transaction fees instead of all the money. That is, the protocol charges a lower fee, but in exchange you get a really cool vibrant economy. So the game really exploded, it had about 2 million active users, by the way, the game wasn't in any of the app stores because it was banned by google and apple, it still had such a big following user group.
I think Axie probably really inspired a lot of people. And the YGG you mentioned above is an independent company, we are actually its investors, its full name is Yield Guild Games, it is actually what we call DAO, but in essence, it is an online Software organizations where people can basically take out an Axie loan so they can play with it without having to pay an upfront fee, and then make money. It's like the guild mode in games where people get together and join the same team, but all of a sudden, you can have some real money and people can live off of that. So I think this is the future of the game industry, and a lot of next-gen talent sees that and gets excited about it.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you, Chris, Naval, do you have anything to add?
Naval Ravikant: I mean, you both brought up a really interesting, subtle point that might be worth clarifying, which is that a lot of people see an NFT for the first time, and their reaction is, "Well, I just right click Click and save this JPG, how does this thing have value?", and then you all give examples of how these things have value, and the simple answer is, "Yeah, I can copy any artwork too, right? It doesn’t mean I own the real art, it still has provenance, the art itself still has authenticity.”
For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club project, assuming we are building a metaverse, we are building a 3D virtual space, of course we don’t want Zack’s 3D virtual space, but an open metaverse. Well, if I walk into two rooms, one of which has an authentic Bored Ape Yacht Club with actual pictures of Apes or CryptoPunks on the walls, my software tells me that. Then I walk into another room full of fakes and replicas, and my software immediately tells me it's all fake. Where do you think the cool kids will hang out? Where do rich people's children go to play? Where will the queue be held? So NFTs provide real value in authentication, it allows you to create a metaverse and then differentiate space A from space B, but that's just the simplest level.
You also gave an example that in the game, NFT is a kind of smart contract, which is a thing that can be used in the game. If I have a special loot or a special item that I pick up in one game, and then the devs or or the same group of users go to a second game, I can transfer my NFTs pretty well and they'll have some value, And right clicking on saved JPG has no value. Finally, Tim, the NFT example you gave could also be a social contract between the creator of the NFT and the fans of the NFT, so that it gets a ticket to future rights, and the fake one doesn't have this function, or it can make the holding Some have priority in getting the artist's future works, and so on.
I like Chris's web page example. Because a web page is programmable, a web page can do anything, it's complete, it can run any piece of code. So we have these essentially complete programmable objects that are now suddenly scarce and you can own them, you can transfer them, you can link them to the real world, you can link them to the digital world through smart contracts.
Essentially, what the blockchain does is allow for open composition and programmability between all these objects in the digital domain. If Bitcoin can have value, and if Ethereum can have value, then in theory, NFTs can have value as long as the smart contract of the social contract and the community that executes it has value. Of course, most of them won't have value, but some of them will.
Tim Ferriss: Chris,I wanted to ask you a question, you mentioned a word earlier, skeuomorphic, and you wrote earlier that one of the most common mistakes people make when evaluating new technology is to focus too much on making old things better, so as What we've seen, a lot of people are trying to copy and paste Web1 or Web2 into Web3. I hope you can spell the word and then give some examples of skeuomorphic designs and then, if you can, some examples of Web3 native applications, or just examples of what might be possible.
Chris Dixon: I think it's a word Steve Jobs used to refer to visual design, do you remember the original iPhone had an app like a book? So the concept in the design is to take something from the real world and use that design to make it look more familiar in the online world. I don't know, for whatever reason, my colleagues and I started using the term internally three or four years ago. I'm not sure if we invented it or enabled it, I mean, ported it from the design world.
But we always use it to represent an idea, so when you go back to the early movies, the early movies seem like drama, and then over time, the movies develop their own new grammar, right? This happens with every new technology. Like the early web, right? It's like brochures and magazines, and then people say, "Wait a minute, you can do new...", which is what we call native, like having a social network, which can be a two-way medium. So I don't think people really started exploring "native" web experiences until the mid-2000s, and I believe the best way to invest is to develop native stuff. So it's a concept that we use a lot internally. People like to use the blockchain to do things like supply chain management or offline tickets, and I'm happy to see entrepreneurs in various fields doing this. I respect all entrepreneurs, but I think these are skeuomorphic ideas. Might work, but people won't be talking about them in 10 years, right? It's going to be a new thing, NFT, so let me give you an example of a really cool project, it's called Loot, we've never heard of it before, and Loot is one such game.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, the creator of Loot seems to be the creator of Vine as well.
Naval Ravikant:Yes.
Chris Dixon: Yep, Don Hoffman, he's a genius developer and product designer who created this thing called Loot. So what is Loot? It's basically little cards with elements like Dungeons and Dragons, with some words on them, and those are NFTs themselves. But what's cool about it is that it inspires a whole community of people to build around it, it's as if Ernest Hemingway didn't write a book, he just wrote the first page of the book , and let the community add the next page, right? That's what Don did when he wrote: "This is the beginning of it, now let your imaginations run wild." By the way, Loot won't have one canonical game, there will be a hundred different things in it , which are all in the Lootverse.
It's a tapestry of creative people who have incorporated the different building blocks into this new structure. It's just a very deep new way of thinking about building games these are very simple new building blocks and it's that simplicity that makes them so powerful this is just an early experiment and there are more cool things like this to come Experiment, Loot doesn't have millions of users, but the people who like it are the best product designers in the world, so I think this will be a moment, Naval do you remember del.icio.us and Flickr, from 2003 to During this period in 2005, all the core Web2 primitives appeared.
Naval Ravikant: Yes, the advent of Flickrs led to Pinterests.
Chris Dixon: That's right!
Naval Ravikant: Yes, your skeuomorphic thoughts go even deeper. Like you look at basic computers, we use the desktop computing model, it has a desktop, it has files, it has folders, it's a skeuomorphism simulation from the physical world, it helps people reason about how to use something by analogy. In fact, I made a big mistake, it was early in the history of the blockchain, I thought, what we want to do is to replace Uber, Facebook and Twitter with primitives that support Web3 and the resulting network, but Now I don't necessarily think so, I think we're just going to create completely new things that we can't even predict or recognize. But we will eventually turn our attention to these things. So Twitter and Facebook are still going to be fine, they're here to stay. But we will focus on these new applications uniquely enabled by primitives like NFTs and tokens. Chris Dixon: I think this line of thinking is correct. I mean, people are still using Microsoft Office, it's still around, and the Internet hasn't gotten rid of it, right? I think these are just layers of things. I also agree that value is created in cool stuff and will be created in native cutting edge stuff.
Naval Ravikant:Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Chris Dixon:Yes.
2
Challenges facing Web3
Tim Ferriss: I would recommend a book and a movie that you guys might make fun of me for, starting with Avalanche which is an incredible book and then you can watch or re-watch Number One The Player movie, of course, I don't think some aspects of it are coming, but I think a lot of things are coming sooner than people expect. I've been down the rabbit hole for the past few months, but I still want to ask, what are some of the weaknesses or challenges associated with Web3?
For example, I remember buying some NFTs and someone suggested I share them online, so I asked, "Wait a minute, if I shared them online, people would effectively be able to check my bank account, which Filled with a certain amount of assets, all of which are kept on the blockchain.”
Then, their answer: "It's your own bank."
But then I asked again: "I'm not sure I want to be 100% my own bank, in the sense that there are many good reasons why people use outside banks, right? They don't want to stuff gold bars and money into their own home In the mattress, and dealing with security."
Naval Ravikant：I've been to your house, Tim, and I think the security of your house is pretty good.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, I do a good job of security, I do, but the question is, what are the challenges? I sometimes think, "Well, do I want Amazon to see my entire purchase history, or do I want the entire Internet to see my entire purchase history? For me personally, the answer is probably Amazon."
I want to hear your opinion.
Naval Ravikant：Security is a big issue for me. I've been a crypto prop for a while now, and I have to be very careful about moving all my investments into custodians and funds so that I don't need to hold anything directly. You can hand it over to escrow, and then there will be a multisig where multiple people need to agree to move something. Or set a time delay, cannot transfer within 6 months or 1 year, etc., so some measures can help us mitigate these security issues.
It makes me uncomfortable that the industry is moving so slowly on this, but it's happening. But I think you can also remain anonymous in a number of ways. We mentioned Punk 6529, which is a pure Twitter identity, people don't know who its holder is in real life, but he has been regarded as an excellent NFT collector and curator. You can also create new wallets on the fly, and the software is getting better. So you can actually make each purchase from a different wallet, which can be hard to track because there are enough ways to anonymize it, at least to the public. Or if you can use something like a zero-knowledge proof.
So, these problems will be solved, but they are the problems that exist today. When anyone can mint, hold and easily move NFT, it will be a happy time, but many so-called alpha opportunities in this field will also follow. disappear.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, Chris, do you have anything to add?
Chris Dixon: Yes, I agree with that, I think a point that is closely related to security is usability and how to make everything easy to use and secure. I think everything will work out, but I agree with Naval that it's not done yet. Probably the biggest challenge in this space for me is the messaging around it, I think there's a lot of misconceptions around it, some of it self-inflicted, some of it created by the community, which makes a lot of people think about crypto and Web3 and so on reacted negatively, and I think that may have led to excessive regulatory action as well. What we're trying to do here is just explain the ideas and ultimately convince people that it's up to them to decide whether to dig in and I've been working in this field for 8 years and I've never met someone who knows the field very well and at the same time Anyone who would doubt it, never did.
Naval Ravikant:Yes, if you are deeply skeptical about the idea of owning digital assets, then you —
Chris Dixon: You haven't understood it yet, yes.
Naval Ravikant：Which means you're a metaverse denier, because if you look at Avalanche by Neil Stephenson and pretty much anywhere the metaverse is described, you'll see that there's a concept of "property" in the metaverse, obviously Some people own property and have jurisdiction over that property. Like, this is my room, these are objects in my room, I can move them around, I can control who goes in and out of this room, I can control when someone tries to sit on my metaverse couch, so, All this programmability comes from "ownership".
"The only people who can own items in the metaverse are giant companies", this is a strange idea. It's basically talking about Zuckerberg here, I don't mean to offend him, but it's basically saying that only Zach is allowed to have the metaverse, only he can have the entire metaverse, why can't each of us be in the metaverse Do you have your own room and your own property? Therefore, people who deny and oppose NFT and crypto are basically saying: "We will not have a collectively owned future, we will have a corporate-owned future."
Ironically the best job in 2021 is to be a JPG collector and I think too late that the best job in 2020 might be to be a DeFi farmer, which is crazy but the world moves so fast, Adapting so quickly, the frontier is in the crypto space, it's digital. If you have a natural curiosity about these matters, your moment will come. In fact, ACE players and YGG players may find that the best career of the future, the best career of the present may have to revolve around the game, just play the game in a certain way for a certain time, which is important to all gamers is good news.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, I would like to read two paragraphs from the blog post "Climbing the wrong hill":
"The allure of the current mountain is strong, and humans have a natural tendency to take the next step up. He ends up falling into a common trap highlighted by behavioral economists: people tend to systematically overestimate short-term returns in favor of Not long-term returns. This effect seems to be stronger in more ambitious people, whose ambition seems to make it difficult for them to give up nearby ascending steps.
Early career people should learn from computer science: when you find the highest hill, stop wasting time on the current hill, no matter how good the next step might be. "
This article comes from Tao of Yuan Universe, reproduced with authorization.
This article comes from Tao of Yuan Universe, reproduced with authorization.
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