This article comes from the WeChat public account Laoyapi (id: laoyapi).

This article comes from the WeChat public account Laoyapi (id: laoyapi).

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On Friday, February 4, BuzzFeed's Katie Notopoulos published a story that sparked an online war. The reason is simple: in this article, the reporter revealed the names of the main founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT series, namely Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow. The revelation of Solano and Aronow's identities almost immediately sparked outrage. Many proponents of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and/or web3 believe that Notopoulos exposed the two men in their 30s and put their personal safety at risk.

"What's the point? What's the public interest?" asked Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook employee who was kicked out of Apple after employees publicly complained that he had made misogynistic comments. come out.

"I can't wait to give @BuzzFeed the Gawker treatment," wrote Ryan Selkis, CEO and co-founder of crypto intelligence firm Messari, referring to the Peter Thiel-backed lawsuit that shut down the digital news site .

Selkis and Martínez aren't the only ones condemning. The crypto personality, who goes by the pseudonym Cobie and runs the popular show UpOnly, called Notopoulos “a click-seeking whore.” The founder of a cryptocurrency recruiting firm has suggested that the Bored Ape community could pool its funds through a decentralized autonomous organization to complete a Gordon geko-esque “hostile takeover” of BuzzFeed. People sent Notopoulos threatening messages saying they had found her address and work, as well as the addresses of her parents and siblings. (Notopoulos was told "your parents' suburb isn't actually that far away".)

This reaction feels like a prologue to the web3 movement, which Motherboard uses for simplicity as an umbrella to describe the heterogeneous community around cryptocurrencies, NFTs, the “metaverse,” and the desire for a more decentralized web. Overall, the movement has attempted, and has largely succeeded, to position itself as a righteous party, pushing for a fairer, more communal form of internet capitalism. But some people's reaction to the BuzzFeed report took a dark turn.

For many web3 proponents, the fact that Notopoulos discovered the identity of Solano and Wylie through public records and linked them to Yuga Labs does not seem to matter; Yuga Labs CEO confirmed ahead of reports Nor does the fact that Bored Apes is taking the world by storm with the help of countless celebrities; Yuga Labs is seeking a $5 billion valuation and is being completed by A $200 million funding round led by one of the venture capital firms; the real power that Solano and Aronow are amassing, their real-world clout, and the idea that they should be at least minimally accountable in the public eye don't seem to matter.

"Many times I've been told that I can't express my doubts or opinions. - Molly White, software engineer, web3 and cryptocurrency community

While some web3 proponents see this identity exposure as justified, many feel strongly that the only thing that matters is that Solano and Aronow perpetuate the central fantasy of web3 — a decentralized world where all The idea that they are only responsible for the actions they choose—they wished to remain anonymous, and journalists failed to respect those wishes. The outrage surrounding the issue of anonymity largely reflects what will happen in the years to come.

The culture wars ahead will take place in the web3 world, and are already happening.

The term "web3" is often traced back to Gavin Wood, co-founder of the ethereum blockchain, who wrote an online paper in 2014 outlining his vision for a "post-Snowden" web. In the report, Wood said a core tenet of the next-generation network will be privacy, including encrypted communications through "identity-based" anonymity. “The information that we consider public, we publish it. The information we assume has been agreed upon, we put it on a consensus ledger. The information we consider private, we keep it private and never reveal it, ’ he wrote.

This statement coincides with the idea of ​​​​a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin but never revealed his identity. But the true scope and power of the U.S. surveillance state leaked by Edward Snowden made it clear to Wood that "no government or organization can reasonably be trusted." In an interview with Wired magazine late last year, Wood He said his vision boiled down to "less trust, more truth".

"What we're trying to do is activate the web3 community and make it a great source of funding, media and votes. That way, if MPs act negatively, they pay the price in their votes." - Andrew Yang, former presidential candidate

"I have a particular understanding of trust, which is essentially faith. It's the belief that something will happen, that the world will work a certain way, without any real evidence or rational argument as to why that's the case ’” Wood said.

Today, Wood's words could easily be used to explain the army that has assembled around his web3 concept. In theory, web3 can be boiled down to the "re-doing" of the Internet, as Brian Morrissey, former president and editor-in-chief of Digiday Media, puts it. In this model, users are the main economic beneficiaries of their time, rather than the "Web2" model, where large corporations like Facebook and Google benefit from a system that "provides services in exchange for your personal data".

“Web3, they argue, will eliminate the middlemen—whether lawyers, banks, or portals run by executives and subject to human error,” Charlie Warzel recently wrote in The Atlantic. “Creators and consumers of content will have Internet services, rather than relying on the whims of platforms and the designs and rules of their founders.”

The theoretical lack of a core player is why web3 (and its vaguely associated concept "metaverse") is referred to as a "decentralized vision" in which blockchain technology allows people to Build a business and make money without middlemen like Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg helping facilitate deals and taking a commission on them.

In fact, as tech journalist Mike Elgan points out, "Two of the most buzzwords in tech right now, 'metaverse' and 'Web3' describe platforms that don't exist, and even their enablers don't expect them to exist for at least a decade. Will exist, and likely never will.” Phil Libin, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur who immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States, likens the enthusiastic lobbying of the currently theoretical web3 world to communist propaganda.

"There is no single website that will allow you to do anything useful or scalable, but you should believe in it, just as the Soviets should believe in a communist utopia." - Phil Libin

To the extent they exist, they mostly consist of centralized, unitary institutions and those that aspire to be so. Embodied is not a world in which middlemen are stripped of their share and data brokers are cut out of action due to privacy-preserving agreements, but a new online world in which seemingly anything can be passed through the blockchain Technology is financialized. It creates a digital infrastructure in which, as Bloomberg's Matt Levine puts it, "every product is simultaneously an investment opportunity." This pattern puts speculation at the heart of digital life (which itself is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from real life as secular trends accelerate dramatically driven by the pandemic), creating an environment in which In the report, scammers "lured people into bogus investment opportunities in record numbers," as the FTC warned last year.

But the most obvious impact of these developments is that they have created a world in which a receipt for an original image of a bored ape can be worth millions.

Incredibly, the Bored Ape phenomenon is less than a year old, even though algorithmically generated NFT collectibles have been around for years. Solano, Aronow, and two other crypto programmers who started Apes, code-named "No Sass" and "Emperor Tomato Ketchup," invested about $40,000 up front to make the Bored Ape project, most of which went to illustrators. From this, they created a 10,000-image NFT series that sold out in a day and quickly became the most recognizable symbol of the NFT movement to date. Since then, celebrities including Stephen Curry, The Chainsmokers, Jimmy Fallon, Post Malone, Timbaland, Logan Paul, Eminem, Serena Williams, Paris Hilton, Gwyneth Paltrow and Justin Bieber have packed into the club.

After their sudden success, Solano and Aronow didn't shy away from the media, money or notoriety, even as they hid their identities. In an anonymous interview with Rolling Stone, one of them described Ape’s founding team as “the Beastie Boys in NFTs” and said that Yuga Labs wants to become a “Web3-style company.” Seeking opportunities related to film, music, television and gaming, Yuga Labs signed well-connected Madonna and U2 executives and announced plans to launch an Ethereum token. They hosted the 2021 APE FEST event in New York, which included a VIP charity dinner at the exclusive Carbone restaurant, a merchandise pop-up, a Brooklyn warehouse party and, of course, a Halloween party on a 1,000-person yacht . As of November, the company's four founding members had "generated approximately $22 million in secondary market revenue alone," according to Rolling Stone. (Bored Ape’s lead artist, Seneca, later said she herself was paid “absolutely not ideally,” and some have taken this as evidence that NFTs aren’t always as beneficial to artists as their users claim.)

The company has also attracted the attention of Andreessen Horowitz operators. The iconic venture firm is by far the closest thing to an institutional voice on the web3 concept. The firm, known simply as a16z and which recently launched its own media arm, has not only launched a $2.2 billion cryptocurrency fund and invested in more than 50 cryptocurrency startups — saying crypto “will change every aspect of our lives” — — and recently sent representatives to a five-day lobbying campaign in Washington, D.C., in support of web3 policies. (“We support the appointment of a senior official as web3 envoy,” a member of the firm wrote in a related blog post.) As a result, a16z is reportedly leading Yuga Labs’ multibillion-dollar funding round, which will The company received hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. All of this — money, celebrity connections, deals with Silicon Valley tycoons — gives companies and their founders real power.

The amount of money invested in web3 is so large that it has become a literal joke. (Redpoint Ventures' Logan Bartlett recently wrote: "Dozens of underperforming VC firms bought themselves a few more years by rebranding as 'web3-focused.'") Overall, risk Investment firms provided $30 billion in funding to cryptocurrency startups last year in an industry worth more than $3 trillion. More than 40 cryptocurrency companies founded in 2021 have achieved "unicorn" status, meaning they have private valuations of more than $1 billion. Sequoia Capital Led $450 Million to Blockchain Network Polygon. Venture capital firm Paradigm announced last November that it had raised a $2.5 billion cryptocurrency fund. What’s more, sales in the NFT space hit $25 billion. Sotheby's alone sold $100 million worth of art.

The infighting and heterogeneity of the web3/crypto/NFT community may make it seem like a united front. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was a big fan of Bitcoin, but he hated web3; later, Mark Anderson of a16z investment firm who loves web3 seems to want nothing to do with Dorsey. Moshe Malinspike, founder of encrypted messaging service Signal, which helped create the MobileCoin cryptocurrency, called for centralization in the space in a blog post, saying, "Technology like Ethereum has built many Same implicit pitfalls as web1". Crypto enthusiast Selkis, who wanted to give BuzzFeed the "Gawker treatment," described Ron Paul as the "patron saint of cryptocurrencies," while others sincerely said they wanted to create a more diverse and fair world, in line with left-wing tendencies. Technically, web3 is not something everyone can agree on, except when it comes to cryptocurrencies.

"A common misconception about web3 is that it's a single concept that founders have to choose whether to fully embrace," one venture capitalist wrote this month.

But there are signs that the cultural web3 movement may be creating a new alignment. Andrew Yang is a pro-venture, pro-cryptocurrency, publicity entrepreneur turned twice-failed political candidate. He said in a recent interview that building a united front will be key to the web3 movement's move to power.

“I fear it will dehumanize our online world.” — A web3 supporter on her concerns about anonymity

“What we’re trying to do is activate the Web3 community and make it a great source of funding, media, and votes so that if members of Congress act negatively, they pay the price in their votes,” Yang told cryptocurrency news site Blockworks. Bitcoin proponents, while they often seem very different from the web3 movement and even cryptocurrencies more broadly, are still charting a political roadmap to follow.

Predictably, the rise of web3 has led to a sizable number of high-profile skeptics who have long focused on criticizing Bitcoin. Many software experts, policy experts, and artists have made similar points, not only about cryptocurrencies, but also NFT (Brian Eno recently said: "Now artists can also become capitalist villains, which is really good. ”) and the game concept that is so important to the idealized vision of web3. One theory is that maybe these people are cynical and unimaginative, like many journalists, prone to picking on new ideas. As Wurzel recently wrote in The Atlantic, David Letterman scoffed at the idea of ​​the Internet when he interviewed Bill Gates in 1995, and in retrospect, the optimists might be right.

But what sets web3 apart so far is its unique combination of extreme optimism and self-righteous defensiveness. As Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal writes, the movement's most famous leaders often seem to struggle with "who's against them. Who disagrees with them. Who doesn't fully respect their work. Who hasn't joined them or invested yet." ". And since the BuzzFeed story, this tendency to circle around has never been more apparent. Shortly after the Notopoulos article was published, Mike Solana, vice president of the Peter Thiel Founders Fund, wrote: "There is absolutely no reason to expose these people." Solana called the suggestion that BuzzFeed's reporting was in the public interest "disgusting." , and suggesting that something about Yuga Labs is clearly frivolous.

It's not hard to imagine that a similar argument could be used to justify the earliest version of Facebook if Mark Zuckerberg founded the social media company under a pseudonym in 2021. However, the fact that Facebook has gone from the way college students share party photos to an election-changing juggernaut in just a few years should provide evidence that popular but seemingly insignificant Internet businesses can quickly become very different. Chris Dixon, a partner at a16z and one of web3's most ardent evangelists, has said the same thing in the past, writing more than a decade ago: "The next big thing always starts out as a 'toy'." Ignored."

The question then becomes, when exactly should public due diligence on organizations begin? Now, or after their creation has clear and inevitable consequences for all of us?

The controversy over Notopoulos' coverage and the way it was expressed has the contours of a battle in a culture war. The remarks, the threats against female journalists, and the grievances of a group even as society is reordering around their whims, recall Gamergate, and the many reactionary tendencies it ultimately led to. There are real and obvious differences between the two; comparison does not equal equality. A key similarity is that the definition of web3 is as "almost undefinable" as Deadspin's Kyle Wagner defined Gamergate in a 2014 article, so much so that "any discussion of the topic" becomes " semantic debate".

The reaction to the BuzzFeed story, more than a week later, appears to have ushered in a new chapter in the battle for online anonymity, long linked to relatively arcane topics such as government attempts to end end-to-end encryption, but now sparking It addresses more fundamental questions, such as where and why the right to conceal one's identity ends.

"The next big thing is always seen as a 'toy' from the start." - Chris Dixon, partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz

The idea that this will never end is not incidental to web3, it is absolutely central, and is likely to get worse as more anonymous founders rake in hundreds of millions in funding and revenue. (As Notopoulos points out in her story, Yuga Labs provides the blueprint for where the internet economy is headed—a world of decentralized autonomous organizations, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies, where people can’t be sure who benefits, or Determine what anyone's true motivations are.

Proponents of Web3 say this anonymity has value. Shortly after the BuzzFeed story was published, a venture capitalist argued that "Internet pseudonyms are a public good" and that journalists needed to adapt to this new world. Another cryptocurrency-focused firm told Notopoulos that it could help address chronic discrimination faced by founders of color. Women-led companies received just 2 percent of venture capital funding last year, and Latino and Black entrepreneurs received similarly meager funding. Given the barriers women and people of color face, allowing founders to raise funds under pseudonyms could level the playing field, at least in theory.

Of course, such arguments have merit, and it doesn't take long to think of the myriad of technologies that promote anonymity that make meaningful contributions to society. One problem with technical systems of granting pseudonyms, however, is that it can be difficult to discern whether such systems improve or perpetuate social problems. Another problem is that it can certainly serve powerful people who simply don't want anyone to know what they're doing.

It's also worth thinking about what perceived threat led people to attack Notopoulos. It is understandable to want to avoid the surveillance of the NSA. But until web3 is fully built, pushing corporate power over the use of pseudonyms comes with ethical issues worth considering. One of the hallmarks of the new economy has been the so-called "rugpull," where creators of cryptocurrency projects pool people's money for some (or not) higher purpose and then disappear with it. Some anonymous teams have been able to do this in many cases, in one recent example a web3 architect was able to hide past financial crimes by remaining anonymous until they were exposed to the shock of investors. The issue has become so important that cryptocurrency projects sometimes advertise what are known as "doxxed devs" as a way to reassure investors that their money will be kept safe.

This makes NFT market operations equally difficult. This month, the blockchain startup that started when Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet as an art NFT for $2.9 million stopped buying and selling NFTs due to "rampant" and "fundamentals" issues. The company's chief executive told Reuters he couldn't figure out a way to stop people from selling NFTs that they don't actually own or that could reasonably be called securities.

“It keeps happening. We ban offending accounts, but it’s like we’re playing whack-a-mole,” the CEO said. "Every time we ban one, another comes up."

In November, Annika Lewis, a self-proclaimed “recovering VC,” expressed her reservations about web3’s growing acceptance of pseudonyms, even though she now works for web3-focused platform GitCoin. “Last and first names have been replaced by cryptic .eth and .nft domains, and the faces behind accounts have been replaced by cartoonish JPEGs,” she wrote. “For its prominence, it is largely It’s not discussed enough online, and in a way, I fear it’s dehumanizing our online world.”

In a way, web3 enthusiasts elevate the idea that anyone should be able to do anything online without anyone knowing about it into a general principle, and they're fighting for a world where no one is fully responsible for their actions And argue. However, the evidence we have shows that even in its infancy, web3 is creating a group of people with a lot of responsibility. In fact, the system was formed in much the same way as previous systems, with a powerful few controlling the vast majority of wealth. "Blockchain has become the fastest decentralized technology I've ever seen in my life," Tim O'Reilly, the coiner of the term Web 2.0, said this week. With the top 10% of NFT holders owning four-fifths of market value and the 0.01% of Bitcoin holders owning 27% of all coins in circulation, Scott Galloway says creating a new online ecosystem is more like a “recentralization of power.” into the hands of a few", and nothing else.

"Every member of Forbes' 2021 Crypto Billionaires list is male. A third of them attended Stanford or Harvard. Of the 12 listed, only one is not white.web3 's narrative feels like a Ted-X talk for the survivalist community," Galloway added. Sure, some newcomers made a fortune, including Bored Apes, but so did the misfits in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street.

Blockchain turned into the fastest decentralized technology I have ever seen in my life. —Tim O'Reilly, coiner of the term Web 2.0.

Molly White is a software engineer who started documenting the problems she sees with web3 last year in her ironically titled "web3 is going great" blog. White told me in an email that she wasn't at all surprised by the hostility Notopoulos faced. “Actually, I think this backlash is very typical, I find the cryptocurrency space has such a resistance and hostility to criticism, I’m not sure I’ve seen it in this way before. People with this technology are very angry, let alone critical of it. I have been told on numerous occasions that I cannot express my doubts or opinions," White said.

Like many web3 advocates, White understands the value of online anonymity and privacy. “There are many very good, noble reasons why people want to remain anonymous: people living under oppressive governments, whistleblowers, journalists and researchers exposing extremists, etc., for example,” White wrote. “I’m not sure Would I put 'want to run a multi-million dollar company without any liability' on this list. I'm amazed that so many people in the crypto space protect these multi-million dollar companies so strongly The anonymity of the people behind large projects, especially when the many reasons for the choice of anonymity for those involved in these projects prove to be highly questionable."