DeFi

web 3 2 1

grumpygrandpa

Jan 15, 2022 — 4 min read

Nearly a decade ago I joined in this Bitcoin adventure (with many ups & downs) however ever-since everyone I started off with (myself included) have been attempting to optimise our wealth generation avenues. Circa mid-2021 a realisation seems to dawn that now it's time to pivot away from generation to wealth preservation.

Within the timeline & evolution of universe (ignoring all religious inputs); humans seem to be nothing but a rounding error. So sometimes we might be right and others we may well be hurtling towards solutions that are detrimental to our own aims over a long enough time horizon. It's a vague way of saying our individual lifespans might well be immaterial to the trajectory we are evolving into & we may not know the true consequences until it's too late.

So, for this first reading of the year, all I ask that you don't try to bucket any of my statements into truths, falsehoods or facts until the very end when you are try to self-actualize where you may stand and/or how this could be helpful to your or client's strategies.

Who do we see as biggest winners of each vertical below?

web 1.0
web 2.0
web 3.0

Web 3 2 1... where did we come from?

Web 1.0 - came out of military & scientific community's work (e.g. CERN).
Web 2.0 - was a consequence of entrepreneurial minds trying to leverage greater interactivity on user's part

Where we are (perceived to be) from?

Web 1.0's origins are a huge mix bag of civilian / military collaboration - e.g. many aspects of "semantic web" as some refer to under the umbrella of Web 3.0 have been debated, codified, experimented over decades ago. Much of origins of the design of the network has its foothold in the work of US DoD either through active work or funding
Nevertheless, US DoD didn't stifle any entrepreneurial spirits and instead has been a benefactor of technological advances
Web 2.0's intentions may well have been noble yet biggest winners have been the entrepreneurs & their financial backers; not the user's whose data is leveraged

Where are we now?

Looking back over past 2 years; if not the last decade; it should be stark clear by now that what counts is the perception not whether it's true or not. As globally the middle income class continues to shrink & merge into low or high; slowly we are decoupling by not income but across a new set of buckets that I can only refer to as ideologies of:

Ponzinomics - not in grotesque Madoff style fraud; but rather cryptosphere where tokens are leveraged to generate yield through multiple avenues (e.g. revenue sharing, inducing governance of decentralised organisation and enforcing product visions, finding avenues to leverage control over other productive assets within the ecosystem) - of course not all avenues end up with an ROl upon execution.
Monetarists - those who seem to push for continuing the status-quo albeit with some adaptations

Ponzi-what?

We can split this population into sub-demographics:

Cypherpunks - believers of true decentralisation; privacy & least state oversight
ponzi-monetarists - moulders of crypto ecosystem in the image of traditional finance and staying instep with true monetarists with eye to full government oversight & control

Essentially, the gambit of folks within the crypto ecosystem live on a spectrum between these 2 sub-demographics.

What's next?

There will be continued push into the concept of Web 3.0; yet each of the above ideologies have their own views on what it means. Some would already argue that Bitcoin was the true Web 3.0 with its public/fair genesis & bootstrapping of its ecosystem without any venture capital at its origins. Others will state that we already live in a metaverse given as humans our intrinsic value assignment only makes sense to food & shelter needs; rest being just wants & desires. In essence, this argument could be extrapolated to mean that we anyway are living in an optimistic thought experiment with a goal to reach some destination.

So Web 3.0 is an amalgamation of all above threads leading to this decade being a race between

monetarists' attempts to assimilate the fringes into a controllable existing ecosystem,
ponzi-monetarists' battles to gather value & greater control over the future ecosystem while keeping links with the existing one,
cypherpunks' generation of new ways to spawn off a new ecosystem in bid to escape the gravitational pull of existing one.

Coming full-circle; the low/middle/high income class will decouple into above threads and take avenues that best fit their narratives & beliefs; e.g. my Nov 25^th 2021 note wondered aloud whether retail is exit liquidity for Raoul Pal, Su Zhu & co. Indeed, there is greater noise in cryptosphere to lower the dependency on VCs and not give away rights to our own data like we did back in Web 2.0. I sense Facebook (aka META) might well be posterchild of this battle.

In the end I leave you with a quote that I am told is of Alan Greenspan because it always makes me wonder whether I am listening to my thoughts or my feelings...