Andreessen on Crypto

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/andreessen-on-crypto.html

by smitty1e • 5 years ago

36 103 5 years ago

luma5• 5 years ago

White a pile of horse manure. Big Tech is run by stinkin' liberals which is why they aren't pushing cryptocurrencies? Here's an alternative hypothesis: cryptocurrencies have thus far proven to be good for nothing at all and, as a result, technology companies looking to create actual value have avoided crypto until some value can be found.

It's not some liberal plot that cryptocurrencies are mostly usable as a way to separate the gullible from their money.

dcolkitt4• 5 years ago

This seems silly. Is Coinbase not part of “big tech”? It’s literally a $50 billion tech company.

luma5• 5 years ago

Per the article, Andresseen doesn't seem to think so.

qeternity• 5 years ago

So far the only mass use-case for crypto has been speculation, so the only success story being Coinbase is fitting.

WJW• 5 years ago

The biggest tech companies have a market cap of around 2 trillion USD, so it seem reasonable that a company with a "mere" 2.5% valuation of the big corps is not "big tech" TBH. This says more about how humongous FAANG is than about the size of coinbase though.

luma5• 5 years ago

It's telling that the single example anyone can think of is an exchange, essentially the casino where currency speculation is played out.

jla7• 5 years ago

CoinBase isn't going anywhere and it's board isn't politically connected left nor right. You can tell that big-tech is investing via coinbase by blockchain analysis and thus making it's value rise overall. Coinbase being used for large whale wallet sizes of these firms bloats its value. As long as the firms do not dump their BTC coinbase won't have any issue.

Also consider the transaction fees it charges for every btc trade. They're going to be around for awhile.

techbrobane3• 5 years ago

This is an ahistorical and backwards analogy. Historically the left/right political divide goes back to the French revolution where the rights side of their parliament supported the monarchy and the left opposed. From this perspective AI would seem more centralized, authoritarian, and right-wing, while open networks are more democratic, distributed, and left-wing.

TiberiusC4• 5 years ago

In the US, higher small business tax rates are championed solely by the left. This fact is more accurate in characterizing left/right centralized authoritarianism than tech metaphors ever could.

luma5• 5 years ago

Is there someone out there campaigning on "increase taxes on small business"? I think this is a strawman, "tax the rich" doesn't mean "tax the corner baker".

adpirz• 5 years ago

I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought that seemed exactly backwards. Even with a cursory understanding of history, the extreme right wing regimes are considered fascist, aka extremely top down.

Considering the best faith argument here, I’m guessing he’s seeing the “right wing” being pro business as opposed to a pro government “left”, and in that view, business is considered “bottom up”. As you alluded to, though, this ignores a lot of actual historical and political context and seems more driven by punditry shorthand.

lr1970• 5 years ago

Even with a cursory understanding of history, the extreme right wing regimes are considered fascist, aka extremely top down.

IMHO the political spectrum has a circular topology where extreme left and extreme right merge into one point. As an illustration, consider Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union:

* Extremely brutal top-down dictatorship.

* Suppression of all dissent by means of secrete police (Gestapo vs NKVD).

* Single party rule (nazi party vs communist party)

* No meaningful elections.

Of course, there were many differences and nuances but the power structure was surprisingly similar.

EDIT: bullet formatting

mypastself5• 5 years ago

Perhaps a more likely split would be along authoritarian/libertarian lines.

That said, early enthusiasts notwithstanding, the majority of businesses are likely far more interested in the profit potential than political or ideological aspects of technology.

Ar-Curunir2• 5 years ago

Even so, the libertarian right is a much more recent beast than the libertarian left. The latter predates the former by over 100years.

chrisco255• 5 years ago

In the US we never had that battle. We had Federalists (more aligned with a stronger federal government) vs Antifederalists (more aligned with weaker federal government and pushed for the bill of rights to limit government power). Neither one wanted or ever pushed for authoritarianism. It's about individual rights vs local vs national government, and how much authority is delegated to the national body. I think right vs left is an overused and over-simplistic tool for analyzing modern politics, especially across various cultures.

ciupicri• 5 years ago

Could someone edit the title and replace "crypto" with "cryptocurrencies"?

ZephyrBlu2• 5 years ago

They're synonymous, and crypto is the colloquial term.

nixpulvis5• 5 years ago

They are only synonyms to coinheads.

gnrlst• 5 years ago

AES-256 begs to differ... although having said that... it's probably a token by now as well.

darkerside4• 5 years ago

For everybody saying cryptocurrency has no use, you must not remember how much trouble society had envisioning the uses for the very internet upon which we are now posting.

Here's an example of a use case recently gaining ground. https://mobile.twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133...

I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems foolish and short-sighted to imagine we are certain that there are no legitimate uses for crypto.

arcturus173• 5 years ago

The internet took like a year to take off since it became commercially available.

It took the world by storm once people could connect to it, and viable and useful ideas and applications (browsers, search engines, eCommerce, filesharing, etc) proliferated at breakneck speed.

CyberDildonics2• 5 years ago

It might feel like this but it is anything but true. Prodigy was available in the early 90s and the age of 286 computers. AOL and compuserve were available very early too and for years their uses were email, online encyclopedias, looking up jpegs and eventually chat rooms. Lots of people saw no need for it in the dialup days. It took a decade for the first cable connections to become available.

Right now cryptocurrencies have taken off to an extent. Everyone knows about them but the eco system is a giant mess.

phpsuks• 5 years ago

I think the way Crypto bulls sell this analogy is flawed.

Internet had no competition from any other industry. It was nothing like anything that ever existed. In terms of Internet's development itself, we went from dial up to optical fibers. People in 21st century who use internet have no idea about pains of dial up connection.

Crypto is replacing something that has existed for centuries - the financial system. The financial system being challenged has itself kept up with changing tech, albeit slower than expected. This system is corrupted, exploitative and doesn't provide equal opportunities to all who use it. Crypto has to better the existing system by making things better. But the main point is, crypto itself is the next evolution of financial industry. Internet was a new industry of its own.

captn3m02• 5 years ago

There's also the fact that product-lifecycles have become incredibly short these days. Airlines took 68 years to get to 50M users, Mobile Phones 12 years, the Internet took 7 years, and Pokemon Go got there in 19 days[0].

We're at 12 years of Crypto and "a tech of the future" is now an increasingly difficult proposition to make as we're nowhere near real usecases.

[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-hi...

darkerside4• 5 years ago

The internet did not take a year to take off. AOL for DOS was released in 1991, and the dot com bust want for another decade. I guess it depends what you mean by "take off", but I'm old enough to remember that in the late 90s, the internet was very poorly understood by most people, and while experts predicted it would be the engine of our economy eventually, your average person couldn't see it.

Tesl• 5 years ago

I am so unbelievably sick of hearing this from bitcoiners.

It just isn't true. At all. There is zero comparison to be made between crypto and the early Internet, its incredibly dishonest.

faitswulff• 5 years ago

Email was immediately useful.

tim3333• 5 years ago

The bit that it's hard to foresee all the uses might have some truth. Like tiktok - I didn't see that coming. Or crypto itself which kind of depends on the internet.

zcw100• 5 years ago

So says the guy with a gigantic stake in cryptocurrencies. Screw him for making my choice of technology a political statement or making technology simply an extension of a political view.

I think this says more about Andreessen than it does about technology. Andreessen is pushing cryptocurrencies and his motivation is clearly political.

bradleyjg2• 5 years ago

The nature of the cryptocurrency beast, with its endless land rushes, is that participants are constantly incented to act like shady penny stock boosters. There may be some true believers in there but it’s impossible to tell with all the chaff.

dandanua• 5 years ago

we can now, in theory, build Internet native contracts, loans, insurance, title to real world assets, unique digital goods (known as non-fungible tokens or NFTs), online corporate structures (such as digital autonomous organizations or DAOs), and on and on.

I'm so tired of this stupid mantra that crypto-addicts keep repeating.

1. You can't put real world events into a blockchain in a decentralized manner. In no fckn way. How are you gonna put a result of a sports event into a blockchain? By mining what? It's ridiculous. It always should be an oracle, authority, company, government, etc, i.e. a centralized trusted entity.

2. Loans. Yeah, loans to anonymous entities that can just transfer money to another wallet without any possibility of reversal.

3. Digital ownership. It's nothing without a possibility of a forceful defense of this ownership. You bought a house on a blockchain, but previous owners don't want to leave. What are you gonna do? Call Satoshi?

heyidioturwrong• 5 years ago

You talk very confidently about something you don't seem to know much about.

1. >You can't put real world events on blockchain

Yes you absolutely can, look into decentralized oracle projects like Chainlink or Augur for more info.

2. Loans already exist fully onchain, look into Aave and Compound. Loans are overcollatoralized so 'credit' of address doesn't matter. They haven't figured out undercollatoralized loans yet, but it's just a matter of time before we get propor decentralized identity, which will open opportunities for credit creation on chain.

3. As for titles to realestate, its just a matter of time before goverments recognize deeds held on chain as legitimate, and then that problem is solved.

Ar-Curunir2• 5 years ago

Never look to people like Andreesen or Thiel for political advice.

Do they think that giant companies are run in a decentralized manner in any way? Walmart, Target, Delta, Southwest, Google, Facebook, etc, are all plagued by “central planning”, and resemble the USSR more than they resemble any right-libertarian ideal.

Never mind the fact that the word libertarian referred to left-libertarians until right-libertarians coopted it in the 60s. Left-libertarianism predates right-libertarianism by a century

Also, it’s rich for Thiel to talk about decentralization when he used his money and power to support Trump, the most authoritarian President in a while. Cut a right-libertarian, and a fascist bleeds.

timdaub• 5 years ago

I think it's pretty ignorant from both Thiel and Andreessen to put cryptocurrency and AI on the political spectrum.

And generally I doubt the usefulness in classifying things into right and left.

At the polar ends of each are people that have conflicting norms on how the world should work. These usually arise once again through ignorance as a norm carries the expectation to be accepted by everyone.

To someone that has worked in the tech of cryptocurrency, all I'm saying is that I'm not particularily interested in the left/right drama. Let's hope it never catches on.

In my opinion these narratives are just created because somehow they'll serve Thiel and Andreessen to run a more specific story that they can use to increase their wealth.

SuoDuanDao3• 5 years ago

I agree it would be nice, I think right/left is not so much a set of ideologies as an advertising campaign that has taken on a life of its own.

That said, I think one feature of that campaign is that every party will have to have a position on things affecting the population, crypto eventually being one of those.

diroussel2• 5 years ago

It's also a very strange characterisation of left and right wing. In the UK centralisation is thought to be right wing, and consensus is considered left wing.

lottin10• 5 years ago

TLDR version: "crypto" will turn everything upside down somehow, but we will have to wait at least 30 years to see it.

nixpulvis5• 5 years ago

— the ability for many untrusted participants in a network to establish consistency and trust. This is something the Internet has never had, but now it does, and I think it will take 30 years to work through all of the things we can do as a result.

Wow, when you put it like that, it's amazing that I can shop, bank, and safely talk with my friends and family online. Pretty much all my messages are encrypted and/or checksummed (as necessary) and I still have to trust all the hardware and software on top to do it's job, just like anything else.

How does "Crypto" change this?

SuoDuanDao3• 5 years ago

you don't have to trust the vendor, the bank, or the social media company.

aborsy2• 5 years ago

You still have to trust your hardware, software and surrounding tech (phone, computer, etc), produced by central authorities (lawful companies implementing government laws).

nixpulvis5• 5 years ago

Really!? How!?

DSingularity• 5 years ago

The conservative vs liberal angle is interesting but it just feels so contrived. So far the only thing cryptocurrencies was used for was to speculate on value of tokens and digital currencies. And my conclusion from that case-study is that cryptocurrency as a whole is a system unworthy of trust. Who owns BTC/ETH?

lottin10• 5 years ago

So cryptocurrencies allow you to buy something from someone you don't trust? How does that work?

lowkey11• 5 years ago

From the article, the use case discussed is distributed consensus.

With cryptocurrencies we as society have the option of a new way of organizing labor and capital to achieve a goal. Instead of kings, politicians, corporate owners or middlemen - we have the opportunity to build systems based on the idea of rules without rulers.

Bitcoin eliminates the need for central bankers to control the money supply.

Ethereum replaces armies of lawyers and beaurocrats with smart contract code.

In the future crypto might allow you to build Ubercoin so we can have a distributed ride-sharing platform without a central entity in the middle.

These new distributed consensus mechanisms eliminate the weaknesses of traditional approaches which rely on fallible human leaders who can be corrupted replacing them with code and incentives.

This allows for emergent properties such as censorship resistant money that can be transmitted quickly and irrevocably over the internet.

These are novel and innovative use cases powered by the most important invention of the 21at century.

mypastself5• 5 years ago

How does real-life information enter a smart contract, and how do you make sure all sides make good on their dues?

lowkey11• 5 years ago

One option today is Chainlink which uses a host of oracles to achieve distributed consensus on real-world prices, weather or other signals.

dcolkitt4• 5 years ago

A real life human still has to decide about real life information to put on the chain, but the point is we’re now globally unconstrained about who we choose to arbitrate that information. That allows for an intense global competition for trustworthy and reliable sources.

Say we enter a weather derivative contract that pays off based on total rainfall. If there’s a dispute, instead of a two-bit local judge playing amateur meteorologist, we can simply point our smart contract at AccuWeather’s daily data. AccuWeather is going to be far less likely to destroy their entire franchise by publicly releasing bad data to corrupt a single contract.

The point of smart contracts isn’t that everything’s automated. It’s that we can identify the areas that do require human input, and mix and match the best and most trustworthy oracles with high domain expertise.

lottin10• 5 years ago

The questions that you fail to address is what problem this "distributed consensus" is solving and what advantages and disadvantages has compared to existing solutions.

lowkey11• 5 years ago

Distributed consensus eliminates a whole host of problems associated with centralized middlemen.

For example, with Bitcoin the rules of the system are transparent to all participants and cannot be changed by any single party. 21 million coins is the limit and the emission rate is fixed. With traditional fiat, no one can promise or predict the supply or debasement rate this year, next year or ten years from now.

jyu• 5 years ago

The world and society at large has seen an erosion of trust.

For the naysayers, ask yourself:

- do you trust your government more or less than your parents

- do you trust the mainstream media more or less than your parents

- do you trust big companies to do the right thing more or less than your parents

As we culturally become less trusting, we need different tools to organize and determine value. Protocols that enable decentralized, distributed consensus helps build those tools. Adoption of these protocols, independent of cryptocurrency mania, is bound to happen.

lottin10• 5 years ago

There cannot be economy without trust. There cannot be society. You wouldn't be able to function normally. Imagine walking past a stranger and not having a reasonable expectation that that they won't punch you in the face.

tim3333• 5 years ago

Rating services seem to help. If my hotel gets 9/10 on the site it's usually good. Crypto on the other hand seems mostly ponzi scam.

bathtub365• 5 years ago

I’m frequently suspicious of the veracity of ratings online.

dcolkitt4• 5 years ago

I believe open source software is now the most trusted segment of society. (Prior to a few years ago, I’d say peer reviewed science, but the replication crisis has not been kind to its image.) Most people in the know probably trust Linus and the kernel team far more than the intelligence team or Vitalik more than Janet Yellen or Postgres more than Oracle or Wikipedia more than Harvard.

To that extent there’s going to be a major push, where practically feasible, to replace existing institutions with open software and protocols. Trust is more efficient, and trusted entities will long-term outcompete untrusted.

The technology doesn’t yet exist, but if you could replace JP Morgan with a DAO, how does JP Morgan not watch its business crumble. Why would any stakeholder choose to trust an opaque bank over an open protocol?

emerged• 5 years ago

I trust crypto developers and users even less than I trust those other things.

mkr-hn• 5 years ago

My parents' generation was far too trusting of the government. The government is just as trustworthy as it was then, but we're aware of some of what it's up to now. I still trust the FDIC and CFPB to protect my interests more than cryptocurrency pushers.

ceilingcorner• 5 years ago

Thiel said that “if AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.” He didn’t say “right vs. left” and Andreessen is misquoting him, either deliberately or on purpose.

rvieira• 5 years ago

Peter Thiel has made the characteristically sweeping observation that AI is in some sense a left wing idea — centralized machines making top-down decisions — but crypto is a right wing idea — many distributed agents, humans and bots, making bottom-up decisions.

I enjoy philosophical discussions as much as the next person, but this kind of sweeping postmodern categorical generalisations just smell like a new Sokal affair.

Andreessen on Crypto

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