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Centralization and Decentralization an Update..Thank Goodness I Am An Incrementalist
Howard Lindzon
April 11, 2023
Good morning…
Bitcoin is above $30,000 today and has doubled in 2023.
Not to be outdone, Gold is at weekly all-time highs (2,000 years) so it has been a good year for ‘the end of the world is upon us’ assets.
Gold AND Bitcoin surging in 2023 was on very few financial ‘bingo’ cards at the end of 2022. In November of last year, Bitcoin plummeted after an already horrific drop going from $20,000 to $15,000 amid the daily fraud, chaos and panic as FTX imploded.
While people place end of the word bets/hedges, most investors are wondering how the hell does this help me and how can I easily participate beyond buying gold bars and Bitcoin.
It has been another horrific year for ‘centralized’ anything. Our government has attracted the oldest, meanest and most useless dregs of society, banks are failing again, Twitter is a daily soap opera of personal Musk paranoia’s, and the Ticketmaster monopoly is out of control. Do not get me started on Verizon and AT&T. BUT, decentralization has been mostly a bust for anyone beyond speculators. Decentralization has been so brutal that the ‘hot’ venture money buzzword is ‘climate change’ (no beef with this personally).
I am still firmly in the centralized world and left to bitching about it on the very centralized Twitter. Every month or so I open up my ‘Farcaster’ app to see if usage is increasing. It is cool, but still quiet. Farcaster calls itself a ‘sufficiently decentralized’ social networking app. It is a ‘Twitter’ type app lurking and waiting for Twitter to implode. You can go broke waiting for centralized companies, products, worlds to implode.
I like this riff from Packy at NotBoring…
Obviously, crypto is not popular right now. It’s a non-starter in many conversations. There’s a lot of work to be done to improve both the image and the infrastructure, so that entrepreneurs and CFOs are able to use the technology in some of the ways we’ve discussed today without raising eyebrows on their boards and among their users.
Put another way, if you told people not, “You should use crypto” but, “I have this brand new technology called Zoop or whatever and here’s what it does,” and then listed crypto’s feature set, they would say, “Wow, that’s actually super useful and exactly what I’m looking for” and adopt the technology. We shouldn’t throw the benefits out with the bathwater.
Look, if you view 2023 as some sort of End of Tech and Business History, nothing I’ve written here will be particularly compelling. Twitter’s network effects are really strong. The banking industry is the banking industry. Many have tried to take down Ticketmaster before, and just as many have failed. And if anyone’s going to control the most powerful technology ever, Sam Altman seems like as good a person as any.
If you’ve read Not Boring for a while, though, you know that’s not how I view 2023. I think we’re still at the starting line, that the technology that awes us today will look laughably primitive when Dev and Maya are my age, and their kids will make fun of them for the dinosaur tech they used. There will be new social networks, monopolies will fall, banks will continue to fail, and AI will only get smarter and more useful.
In that view of the world, it’s worth the short-term headache and expense to build systems that are robust and fair over the long-term.
Anyways, I am off to New York to start a long month of travel across the world to see friends and founders so I hope to get a clearer picture of the world.
In the meantime, I am grateful that I am paid well to be an ‘incrementalist’, not having to chase after and sound like an expert in all the new buzzwords in venture like AI, decentralization and climate change. The good news is everyone reading this can make incredible returns as an incrementalist as well.
And, by the way, you are still very early to the trends of decentralization and AI if you are downloading the latest crypto wallets and using ChatGPT4 a few times a week.
Have a great day.
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