Cassie Heart on Farcaster

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https://warpcast.com/~/channel/crypto

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Sometimes I wonder if people don't realize the extent of how crypto's reputation is absolutely 𝒄𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒆𝒅 outside crypto circles. Large overlap with the "AI sucks" people. However, that one will fade as AI has obvious use-cases for individuals and groups which don't require network effects to be successful. AI will succeed and the "AI sucks" people will be seen as luddites, path-independently. Crypto however - at least the originally-intended version as democratized peer-to-peer money - can only succeed with network effects going its way. Same goes for a network like Farcaster, where we can see from this thread that crypto's reputation is a large reason why folks aren't being invited here. https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x51d1875b Trust and reputations are difficult to rebuild. I worry it may be too little too late. The scenario I fear most is the one where crypto is relegated to boring settlement backend tech for tradfi, providing none of its promised self-sovereignty benefits to individuals.

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I don't think these anti-tech communities are completely healthy either, and there's an argument that they aren't those we should try to reach out to anyway. I hear that. https://warpcast.com/matthewb/0xfaee7617 At the same time, the continued splintering of the web suggests that if nothing is done, this will get worse over time, not better. https://warpcast.com/polymutex.eth/0xd3d79631 It doesn't matter if tribe A is factually incorrect about tribe B if tribe B is shrinking, because tribe A simply has to wait things out while tribe B withers out. Seems to me like the remedy is the same: build real things demonstrating real value to people. This conclusion has already been written about to death, no new insight here. I just wish it wasn't multiples harder than tabula rasa.

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Another force at work here is Big Tech, which is broadly pro-AI and anti-crypto. Even the non-AI Big Tech people play a role. They sit on web standards bodies, payment processor industry committees, internet identity standards, etc https://warpcast.com/polymutex.eth/0x596c25a2 https://warpcast.com/darrylyeo/0x7d4be879

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... And they will go out of their way to build redundant systems that could have been better/more self-sovereign with a blockchain. Certificate Transparency? Sigstore/Rekor? Why don't browsers support IPFS yet support worse alternatives like SRI? Why aren't DNS records onchain yet? These are not coincidences.

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another one probably is lack of connections between the standards people and the super cool new decentralized tech people, unfortunately

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I don't believe it's due to lack of connections, it's the immutability factor. These networks are largely built as immutable structures, "code is law", including the consequences of people finding ways to "break the law", metaphorically or literally. This, combined with their limited "bandwidth" results in parallel systems built because frankly, why would Google adopt a permissionless smart contract driven approach to certificate transparency if an obscure selector bug let someone take over Google.com permanently? Being able to override these things are technically possible with the right code, but its layers of additional complication, for a language nobody outside of crypto uses, on a system that again, processes data at the speed of a 8088 on a good day. Fixing these problems is what wins over big tech. They do not care about principles of neutrality or decentralization, they care about their own objectives, and if they can't align, everyone from leadership to stakeholders will emphatically reject crypto.

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Yeah. That's a sober reminder that there was a time where these companies were much more about the open web, creating open standards, resisting governmental overreach... You're entirely correct that these ideals are long gone now... Now these companies have also placed themselves as gatekeepers of all the crucial integration points. Browsers, operating systems, phones, "app stores", binary signing, certificate authorities, internet registries. There's irony in the fact that to gain adoption, permissionless tech needs permission to wedge itself through these layers.

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The irony is perhaps mediated by the fact that permission itself is a composable resource, but wasn't well articulated in the current architectures of crypto. On even the basis of needs for upgradeability, proxy contracts were created. Other networks embedded upgradeability and disowning of applications as a reasonable shortcut. But the higher dimensionality of making the entire network able to reasonably express the equivalent to chown/chmod, well, that's the next step. I still hold that read/write/own is shortsighted, ownership is a feature to an application, the future is read/write/execute, and that simplicity begets a complexity that changes the web for good.

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