Original translation: Block unicorn

Original translation: Block unicorn

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Web3.0 debate

Last Friday, everyone's favorite Professor Scott Galloway posted a post titled《Web3》simple article.

Should I be nervous about opening this article? I'm a long term cryptocurrency holder and I'm not nervous at all because I'm not going to side with the professor what kind of article he's going to write and this is exactly what he wrote.

Now I don't want this to be a "slam dunk for the professor because he's always wrong". My friend Jordi Hays, CEO of Party Round, proclaimed that "shit on Galloway is done". Tend to agree with my friend's point of view, I don't even want to respond.

But then I noticed he misquoted me and misrepresented what I was involved in. Then I looked a little deeper and found a lot of errors and misleading.

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welcome to the debate club

At the risk of making myself look incredible: I debated vigorously in high school and college, and I actually just started a debate club in New York City when COVID hit.

In a parliamentary debate, like we do in debate clubs, there are two teams - those proposing and those opposing - debating a resolution. The resolution could be something along the lines of "Artificial general intelligence should have fundamental rights." Proponents defended the resolution, while opponents sought to poke holes in it.

The two sides argue back and forth, and finally wrap up the debate in each team's rebuttal, reiterating their point and trying to figure out why their side won.

In order to win an argument, you need to do a few things, the most obvious being to find the evidence that is most favorable to you.

During the course of your research, you will also discover evidence that contradicts your point of view. Note the evidence in case you need to defend it, but anyway, don't bring it up (unless, of course, you're playing an advanced game and want to say "I hope our opponents will tell you x, y, z...they Wrong because a, b, c."). Less cautious debaters might even bend over or make things up.

Remember, the point of debate is to win, not to know the truth, that's debate 101 type stuff.

And then there's the more advanced shit: instead of fighting the fight you were assigned, you start a new fight, no matter what your agenda is.

A seasoned debater spends a lot of time setting up definitions, take our general AI debate for example, what is general artificial intelligence?

The proposal could define general AI as "a being with intelligence and emotions similar to that of a human being, indistinguishable from a human being in all but its origin." If the opposition let this definition slip, they may have lost the debate .

They're more likely to come back and say the definition is wrong, and experts agree, "Artificial intelligence is the hypothetical ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can perform."

Proposals may come back and call out the opposition for using Wikipedia's definition, restate their own definition, and argue that their own definition is correct.

The outcome of debates among seasoned debaters often comes down to who defines who.If a general AI is indistinguishable from a human, then of course it should have fundamental rights (and let's not even begin to define fundamental rights!).

If general AI is just a hypothetical ability to understand or learn intellectual tasks, it probably deserves more computer-like rights than humans.

Really, if you win the definition battle, the actual points you get aren't that important. All in all - if you're a nerd like me, debating is a very interesting intellectual battle, but it's not conducive to uncovering the truth, nor is it a particularly useful way to approach real-world conversations.

Unfortunately, over the past few weeks,first level title。  

The Web3 Conversation: More Debate than Dialogue

Probably since the day Satoshi Nakamoto abandoned the white paper in 2008, there have been people who have been in favor of cryptocurrencies and those who have been against it. Among those who support it, warring factions faction their coin and chain of choice, fighting for supremacy.

Infighting is stupid, counterproductive, and never-ending. Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum and all other smart contracts L1. Arbitration and optimism. Bitcoin and the world. As I've written before, I'm a minimalist.

Front combat is also unchanged, but the angle of attack changes and evolves. First, the counter-argument is that cryptocurrencies are only used by criminals. Then it's bad for the environment. When a criticism is sufficiently refuted, the critic moves on to the next one.

Today, the argument seems to be that web3 — including traditional “cryptocurrency” as well as things like dApps, NFTs, social tokens, and DeFi — is a VC-inspired structure that’s not as decentralized as you might think.Whatever the reason, people rarely change sides or change their minds.

I guess you could administer a personality test that has nothing to do with crypto - like the Big Five personality test - and get a high degree of accuracy about who's on which side. You can do the same by looking at someone's last 50 tweets about other technologies or new things. If the people who didn't like Elvis Presley and rock 'n' roll in the 1950s were alive today, they'd probably be against cryptocurrencies.

So really, what's happening is people are choosing their positions ahead of time, and then trying to use whatever evidence they can to prove their point, rather than accepting the evidence and then making up their minds.

In this sense, web3 is more of a debate than a conversation. If we think of this as a parliamentary debate, the resolution for this particular debate would be something like: "Web3 is fine."

debatedebateFoundation:

Jack brought up the idea that VC owns web3, so it was brought into the spotlight.

In the second post, Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike adds some texture to his very thoughtful post, My First Impressions of web3, earlier this month. His greatest contribution to the opposition was to argue that web3 actually relies on a lot more centralized technology than your opponents would have you believe.

Now that you've been trained in the finer arts of debate, you should be able to see what's going on here. Jack and Moxie shift the battle to the centralization debate.

They are trying to win the Web3 definition battle, and instead of saying "Web3 is good", they focus on the easier win "Web3 is more centralized than it looks from the outside, which sucks". Like seasoned debaters, Moxie and Jack deftly shifted the field.

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Professor Scott Galloway joins the Web3 debate

When I debated in high school, sometimes we would randomly assign groups of threes. If your team has two strong speakers and one weak speaker, ideally you'll be strong, weak, and strong over the course of your three presentations. A strong opening debater can set the tone, a weaker debater stumbles a little in the middle, and then another strong debater can come in and clean up the mess with a strong rebuttal.

But sometimes the weaker debaters ask for a rebuttal and you can't bear to say no, so you let them go last...it's a train wreck.

Rebuttals are the last argument. It's usually make or break. In a rebuttal, the debater summarizes his or her team's point, tears down the opposing team's point again, and then attempts to draw a convincing bow on the whole matter. No new information is allowed in the rebuttal; it is simply a summary of what was said. The best you can do is use more colorful and compelling language on top of existing bullet points and structure everything in a way that makes your team look good.

It should be fairly easy - no new points to make - but in the hands of a weak or inexperienced debater, rebuttals can be a disaster.

When this happens, the problem is often that the two stronger debaters make most of the arguments and figure out how they fit together into a larger narrative. They feel the argument in their bones, feel their way deeper, and actually understand what they want to say, but they need to rely on weaker debaters to get it across.

Often, even though the weaker debaters make mostly the right points, in their speech, word choice, flow, and the way they lean on their notes and look at their partner, they make it clear that this is not their argument, theirs. Didn't actually know what they were talking about.

That's what it's like to read the professor's rant on web3, and take this passage, a short and simple one that exposes many of his tricks:

Wow! Reading this, you might be thinking, "The professor is so bad! He knows web3 infrastructure, he must know his stuff! I can trust everything he says."

The truth is, this is a poor copy-paste rewrite of Moxie's work. While he does link to the article (which is the underscore for "people don't want to run their own servers"), he doesn't mention Moxie by name anywhere in the article or paragraph.

As a style, this might be forgiven. Personally, I'd lead with "As Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike pointed out..." lest people think I'm trying to pass on these ideas as my own, but that's just me. But there's something else lurking in it that suggests the professor is just ruminating rather than understanding.

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That's not how it works, that's not how it works

Second, the professor fails to point out that a16z led Alchemy's Series C funding round at a $3.5 billion valuation in October, but missed the layup! If I were his debate partner, steam would come out of my ears. a16z seized every opportunity that came his way, including investments in Coinbase and OpenSea.

Anyway, this is just one paragraph of a larger debate:

• Jack gave the first speech for the opposition to web3 and tried to set the definition to debate VC ownership in web3, he screwed things up and it worked.

• Moxie gave a second talk, addressing some of Proposition's claims and adding a new point to the opposition: the technology stack is also more centralized than people realize, and it's doing a good job, too.

• Then the professor steps up to rebut the opposition, and... woohoo.

now, again,I think the web3 debate is kind of stupid, good and bad, good and bad, some things should be centralized, some things should be distributed, nothing is good or all is bad (for a more nuanced synthesis of proposals and con's, check out my friend Dror's article "Unpacking the Web3 Sausage", I am more Like a more constructive conversation.

Everything, everywhere, is always about tradeoffs, and Web3 is no exception. I prefer a more constructive conversation from there, the debate is so...violent.

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My Rebuttals to Propositions in the Web3 Debate

Ladies and gentlemen, judges, teammates, and of course, distinguished opponents: thank you for being here today for this fascinating debate.

Since we're a little off course, I want to remind everyone what we're talking about. I'm going to go straight to the resolution in the paper to make sure I don't miss anything: "Web3 is good."

Now, the opposition has done everything it can to debate this centralization vs. Believe it, then web3 sucks. They have shown that there are places where there is centralization. Of course there is! You won't hear any arguments here.

But that doesn't mean the opposition has won, because that's not what this debate is about.Debates around web3 or any specific properties of the web (such as centralization or the presence of bad actors) are not important, such as arguing that the internet is bad because of Facebook or 4chan (sites or channels that discuss Japanese otaku culture and popular stickers) The presence.

We publicly agree that there are bad actors, scams and frauds, and that a lot of tokens are held in the wallets of a few. We agree that there is still a lot of work to be done to build a truly decentralized internet for those who want it, and strongly agree that not everyone is going to do it.

We will go further than our opponents,Saying a Fully Decentralized Future Is Impossible. Some people always prefer centralized services, more people prefer fully decentralized services, and others prefer centralized services.

But this debate is not about centralization vs. decentralization, this is a debate about choice. The debate is about web3, an internet owned by users and builders, curated tokens, good or bad for humanity, not just in its earliest form today, but the promise it holds.(See what I did there?)

It's about whether the world would be a better place if entrepreneurs had web3 tools. Again, it's about choice - the builder's choice and the user's choice.

Some will want a centralized service, some will want a fully decentralized service, and many will choose points that work for them at different times and between different things. We think they should have that option.

first,

first,Allow me to try to overturn the opposition's arguments, as summarized in Professor Galloway's rebuttal. I'll tell you why they're irrelevant, incorrect, misleading, or just plain wrong. Importantly, I'll demonstrate that when the evidence doesn't quite fit, he twists the facts to make it fit.

This web of lies underpins what the professor is trying to deliver as an argument, and if you can't follow it, I understand, I'll try to summarize, it goes like this:

Elites are exploiting the "promise of decentralization" to centralize control and gain unimaginable wealth. Centralization is evident in NFT and Bitcoin ownership, the Forbes twelve (12) crypto billionaires list, potential monopolies like Coinbase and OpenSea, and the infrastructure itself. There is crime, DAOs aren't as centralized because constitutional DAOs aren't because they elect representatives, why do we need new internet native structures when we have public companies? Also, centralization is great thanks to the Webb Space Telescope, web3 tools like NFTs and DAOs have potential, but not much, and regulators need to stop innovators. In addition, a16z has also invested in centralized companies. Meet the new boss who is your old boss. Also, Elon is on my side, Gary Gensler better do something. Anyway, don't want web3 to be regulated. Web3 and Web2.0 are the same thing, Facebook and Google control too much, ask a teenage girl, is this guy nice?

I'm exaggerating a bit here, but not really. Go back and read his article, it's for traffic, it may not be yoga babble, but it's babble stuff.

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misleading #1

The debate is often a definition battle, so when the professor used my modified version of the web3 definition (and called it a "yogababble"), my ears perked up (laughs).

Yogababble (spiritual virtue signaling) is one of the professor's favorite words. He actually repeats this later in the article, arguing that decentralization "creates a Coachella festival for fraud, where anonymity, spiritualist virtue signaling and complexity protect fraudsters from oversight or accountability." I Not offended by the character, I don't think my definition is perfect by any means.

I'm a little annoyed that the professor adjusted my words to fit his core thesis - web3 is actually not as decentralized as it seems. Specifically, he added the word decentralized to the definition of centralization.

The actual definition I use in the article he linked is: "Web3 is an internet owned by builders and users, orchestrated by tokens.’ I deliberately didn’t use the word decentralized because I don’t think decentralization is actually the key feature, but it’s a pretty good straw man, so the professor threw it in there.

For the sake of charity, it's a subtle distinction, and the article he cites discusses decentralization.

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misleading #2

The second misleading is straight numbers, Galloway uses the chart below to show that "the power of propaganda is dispersed from the few, and power is actually re-centralized to the few."

The chart on the right represents BitInfo data, showing that 2% of accounts own 95% of Bitcoin, which means, “If it were a country, Bitcoin would have the greatest inequality in the world.”

(Of course, in the professor's argument, he fails to mention that his former enemy and now ally Jack and his company Block are among the largest Bitcoin holders in the world and account for that 2%.)

However, Glassnode (a cryptocurrency data platform) found a big hole in that analysis last February. 2% includes wallets on exchanges like Coinbase, which hold Bitcoin for millions of people. Adjusting for this, the top 2% own 71.5% of Bitcoin. That Glassnode article isn’t obscure; it’s the fourth thing that comes up when you Google “bitcoin concentration.”

We agree that 71.5% is still high concentration; not as sensational as 95%, but it has the benefit of being accurate, which is important to our opponents in a way. We agree that we would like to see ownership more evenly distributed. But we disagree that this is relevant to the professor's argument, especially since to the professor's teammates, Jack, web3 and Bitcoin are very different.

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misleading #3

Next, the professor argues that DAOs are generally not decentralized, using the example of a constitutional DAO I was involved with, specifically, he writes:

ConstitutionDAO, which made news for losing the $43 million bidding war for the original U.S. Constitution, didn’t even have a governance model in place before shutting down because the founders didn’t figure out how to prevent a few large holders, or “whales,” from taking control.

He links core team member Jonah Erlich to a conversation with The Verge's Nilay Patel. As it turns out, that's not exactly what Jonah said. I'll give the full conversation section here to show you how the professors are picked and selected:

The Verge: When someone buys a token called $PEOPLE or $WTP, do they get one vote per token?

Jonah: We haven't figured out the governance model yet, and in the rush to be able to buy this document, there are a lot of details we'll have to figure out after we win. If we win, we're actually talking about different governance models. One of the biggest concerns is that some of the big holders in the crypto world — what we call whales — will have disproportionate control over what happens to the copy of the constitution. Our big message: This is a movement for the people. This is the people's copy of the constitution, so we want it to be controlled by the people.

We are working on different mechanisms. We are working on direct democratic voting: one token, one vote. We're still looking at one vote per wallet, which isn't an exact representation of a person, but it's pretty close. Quadratic voting is another mechanism where voting power actually decreases as one owns more tokens: you don't get a hundred extra votes for every hundred extra tokens, but with The number of votes decreases with the increase in the number of tokens.

Verge: When you say DAOs are fast-running the history of organizational structure, you're describing the history of fast-running democracy: building a voting system and figuring out how those votes are going to represent a group of people. But, having to make these decisions by a group of people, not fully democratic, what does that do for ConstitutionDAO?

Jonah: There's a nice concept called progressive decentralization: it's really hard to start something fully decentralized, so you have to start with an initial team and build something and then take it to decentralization . Our plan with ConstitutionDAO is that once we win this auction, we will achieve maximum full decentralization as quickly as possible.

Only in the most uncharitable interpretation could you read the above as "no governance model built because they couldn't figure out how to stop whales from taking over."

In fact, Jonah referred to the whales in response to Patel's question about whether people get one vote per token, not as a reason for not having a governance model. Contrary to the prof's opinion; founders know exactly how to stop whales from taking over: don't give every token a vote.

As Jonah said, the real story is:

• From conception to auction in less than a week.

• The team chooses to work on non-mission critical things like the governance model in case of a win until we actually win.

• Potential governance options are known (Jonah lists a few); that's not the bottleneck.

• 99.9% of DAOs have been planning to gradually decentralize, which is a recognized best practice.

That's not me relying on memory and first hand experience, that's exactly what Jonah said in the conversation quoted by the professor, who just chose to omit anything that didn't fit his point of view.

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misleading #4

Finally, my naysayers argue that the decentralization narrative "is a false god evangelized by a high priest who passes through a Mars-sized pan of funds and admonishes regulation as heresy." The language is interesting and colorful; this is simply not true .

Aside from a handful of bitcoin maximalists (who tend to hate web3 anyway), there isn't a single serious person in web3 or cryptocurrency or whatever you want to call it who doesn't believe it should be regulated, let alone Whoever believes this regulation is heresy. Every founder and investor I've ever spoken to on this topic wants regulation to come sooner in the US so they can stop building ambiguity and move to clarity.

In fact, when Chris Dixon of a16z and I wrote about the future of cryptocurrencies in The Economist, we ended the piece with a call for sensible regulation of the industry in the US and beyond:

In the coming year, more leaders in the United States and other democracies will recognize the need for sound regulation that encourages responsible innovation while allowing entrepreneurs to build the next generation of the Internet.

a16z, I'm a consultant, and the professor decided to dedicate his own section to it, there's a section on his website dedicated to web3 policy, which states:

We are entirely optimistic about web3's potential to restore trust in institutions and expand access. But realizing that potential depends on smart policies. Good regulation creates a framework for how innovation can benefit society while managing real risks that can harm consumers. It's time to define that vision.

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a16z

These are facts, but facts can get in the way of a good professor's story, as @Jack said:“Do what you say and let the truth come out”。

Of course, there are many more examples of a lack of understanding, or a lack of desire to understand. He mentioned a16z's investment in centralized exchange Coinbase, but not its investment in decentralized exchange Uniswap.

He pointed to data showing more recently launched blockchain tokens had more insider ownership at the time of stock offerings, but failed to acknowledge that most of these projects were founded and funded during a bear market in cryptocurrencies, requiring Venture capital to survive.

No doubt he took inspiration from Moxie, he also uses OpenSea as an example of web3 centralization, and he exaggerates his hand without knowing the facts:

The potential to build monopoly power, own channels (i.e. centralization) and increasingly become a source of funding for VCs is the real deal for web3. OpenSea, the world's largest NFT marketplace, is much like any other trading platform: In return for making transactions easier and (modestly) safer, the company takes a 2.5% cut of every transaction.

Ironically, four days before the professor's article was published, a group calledLooksRareThe NFT platform launched. What's especially important about NFT platforms rolling out all the time is how it leads to initial demand.

LooksRare airdropped 12% of its total $LOOKS token supply to users, largely based on users' trading volume on OpenSea between June 2021 and December 2021. This data is easily accessible to them; it's all publicly available on the Ethereum blockchain.

LooksRare is able to attract OpenSea's biggest customers by offering the biggest rewards to those who spend the most on OpenSea. They were also able to entice these customers to perform specific activities on LooksRare to unlock these tokens: I couldn't claim my $200 LOOKS until I listed the NFT for sale on the platform. In fact, I've never even listed an NFT on OpenSea, but I've now listed one on LooksRare!

So does it work? Yes, according to this Dune Analytics dashboard by @hildobby:

It's early days, there's been a lot of talk about $LOOKS, but it's a good start. LooksRare's daily transaction volume is 2-3 times that of OpenSea, although OpenSea is still being sucked by LooksRare in terms of daily users and daily transaction volume. As some have pointed out there's some brush trading and liquidity mining here which is what makes the difference, it's a good start to the week and shows an angle of attack that can be beaten with decentralized services Centralized service.

Now, LooksRare needs to build on its early momentum to retain and grow its user base. To this end, it built the platform to lower gas fees, reward users who buy and sell NFTs, charge lower transaction fees, and $LOOKS token holders can share 100% of the fees.

It's hard to see this and call OpenSea a monopoly. Of course, if you're looking, if you're trying to find the truth rather than trying to win an argument.

In fact, this is the point that Jack, Moxie, and of course the professor missed,It's not about whether any particular platform is centralized or who owns how much. This is because data is open and builders and users have options, and they will choose platforms that extract less and give them more ownership.

In web3, if a platform misleads users, those users can choose to transfer their data and funds to another platform.

It also highlights why the whole debate is practically pointless. Over the course of our conversations, some entrepreneurs opened up their laptops, built better things, and made the case for web3 better than I ever could.

I hope we can now end this stupid debate and have a more nuanced, thoughtful conversation like Moxie's article, instead of yelling loudly and inaccurately like the professor, or just getting out of the way.

Web3 isn't all good or all bad, but we believe it's "good". Either way it's happening, it deserves more thoughtful and honest criticism, and yes, regulation needs to reach its full potential.