@depressivehacks

Imagine this happening in any other industry. Imagine you own your own company, which you've put all of your heart and soul into, possibly over the course of years. Now, imagine that it finally catches the break you've been looking for. With this popularity comes people, claiming to want to support you, that want to launch assets with the likeness of your company. You have spent a lot of time cultivating not only your product, but your brand. You gave a lot of thought to brand equity and what your company stands for, whether it be solely in your industry or on the global stage as a whole. Due to this, as well as the concerns over giving external control to company assets, you politely refuse these people and their requests. However, unlike in the rest of the world (Web2), these people actually don't need your permission to launch assets tied to your company. Not only can they do it despite your refusal, but the assets they launch exist forever, and it takes a non-zero level of digging into technical details to find out that these assets weren't actually tied to your company whatsoever, despite using your brand and likeness. A level of lift that the average person encountering these assets likely won't take on their own, if history shows us anything. Oh, and good luck trying to sue these folks if you're infuriated that they would use your brand image and reputation like this (which you rightfully should be). Good luck trying to collect their personal details, let alone serve them with paperwork. This week, a film about @vitalik.eth was refused by Amazon Prime because they are so concerned with being tied with anything related to crypto that they would not put Vitalik's film on their platform. Web2 thinks crypto is a scam. Period. Most people won't even take the time to listen to details about any of the actually useful and good things we work on here because the bad is overwhelmingly greater and more prevalent in press coverage. Things like Prime wanting to distance itself, YouTube removing videos from crypto creators, etc. are not random. They are consequences for years of assuming that good technology was enough to win, regardless of its reputation. Viral instances of things like this example, where a developer with the hottest product of the week has to create disclaimers about tokens launched against their will and gets their GitHub hacked because the same people launching and trading these tokens were pissed that the developer wouldn't give these assets their blessing, are the reason Web2 does not want the reputation risk of dealing with our industry. I don't know how many more things like this need to occur before we, collectively, open our eyes and realize what a giant problem this is for us all, but we need to figure it the fuck out. Nothing will get better if we simply continue as we have.

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