[ad_1]
There are no good guys, and certainly no women at all, in the latest Silicon Valley high school drama between Jack Dorsey and bigwigs Andreessen Horowitz arguing over the true meaning of crypto.
It is difficult for normal human beings to understand concepts like ‘blockchain’ and ‘Web3’, which may be the point, or it may be a sign that a small community of insanely wealthy tech titans have duped themselves into betting the farm on something with negligible cost. mainstream appeal that will eventually fail like Google Glass. And it reflects even worse on these new currencies and supposedly promising technologies that, as Medium’s OneZero reports, the biggest players in the field are engaged in childhood memes wars, locking up on each other, and then releasing memes. fighter welcoming to block each other.
It’s a drama that goes back weeks and begins with – who else? – Elon Musk. Musk playfully tweeted in late December, “Has anyone seen web3? I can not find it. (Web3 is a buzzword for a future, completely ambitious version of the Internet, brought to life by the same VC geniuses who bet big to change the world with Juicero, Theranos, and WeWork).
Jack Dorsey responded to the tweet by saying that Web3 is “somewhere between a and z”, an unveiled reference to investment firm a16z, which is the new name for former venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz. Dorsey and a16z both have competing investments in cryptocurrency, the still little-adopted digital currency that Web3 is supposed to revolutionize and make popular.
And who knows, maybe Dorsey really sees a positive force in cryptocurrency. (He stepped down as CEO of Twitter and is now focused on the goal of making Square more blockchain-centric, even renaming the company Block.) OneZero reports that his new blockchain evangelism is “rooted in the journey. by Dorsey in November 2019 in Africa. During the trip, Dorsey saw the potential of Bitcoin to help people bypass a failing global financial system. Looks like a nice lens and everything. But it’s hard to see how we’ll save Africa by having new ways to buy fur coats for our Metaverse avatars using Dogecoin.
Either way, Dorsey’s sarcastic comments about rival investment firm a16z prompted a16z big boss Marc Andreessen to block Dorsey on Twitter. Which one … who cares? But apparently this was huge news in the tech industry, and Dorsey’s Tweet resulted in Andreessen, who has rarely tweeted in the past, to spend the last few weeks on a Twitter warpath and posting memes from Constant sub-tweets about Jack Dorsey blocking.
OK, sure, the one above is pretty funny, but most of it is. really immature. And as The Verge points out, maybe it has less to do with the future of Web3 and more to do with how Dorsey fucked up the prized a16z Clubhouse app by creating a knockoff called Twitter Spaces. So basically it might not be a philosophical debate over blockchain decentralization, but rather a dick swing contest over money.
And my apologies to people who may have big aspirations on how cryptocurrency and blockchain will forge a better future. But it’s hard to have confidence in emerging technologies when their main evangelists and innovators are people who publish the kind of childish nonsense seen above.
Related: Tech-savvy honeymooners spend miserable honeymoon living on Bitcoin alone [SFist]
Images: (left) C-Span, (right) a16z
[ad_2]
Source link