Bankless - 144 - Web3 Is Going Great!! with Molly White

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the Episode: https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-molly-white  After many episodes, we finally brought on a crypto skeptic, Molly White! We brought Molly on to take us out of our crypto bubble, to challenge our assumptions, and to steelman the anti-crypto argument. Molly White is an engineer, public goods contributor, and an extremely articulate crypto critic. She also runs the web3 skeptic website: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ In today’s episode, Molly gives us her central claim on why web3 isn’t actually going so great, why she thinks tokens make everything worse, and why—despite acknowledging some of the good—Molly believes crypto is a net negative to the world…and probably will be in the near future. P.S. Keep in mind, this episode was recorded on October 7, 2022 — way before any of the FTX meltdown occurred this past week. ------ 📣 Earnifi | Check For Your Unclaimed Airdrops, POAPs, & NFTs https://bankless.cc/earnifi  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/?utm_source=banklessshowsyt  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🔐 LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ⚡️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod  ----- Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 7:35 How Great is Web3 Really Going? 8:10 Headline Selection & Website Goals 12:50 Molly is Anti-Crypto 13:36 Crypto’s Promises 15:36 Are We Early? 17:35 Crypto’s Successes 20:23 Crypto’s Biggest Failures 21:50 Banks 26:22 Education Problem 28:10 The Future of Crypto 33:34 What’s Wrong with the Internet? 35:27 The Money Side of Crypto 37:38 Web2 to Web3 42:23 Starry-Eyed Optimism 54:04 Public Goods 1:02:00 Hyperfinancialization 1:05:55 Show Me Fix It 1:08:34 Environmental Impact 1:13:31 Crypto Idealists 1:16:52 Surveillance & Changing Business Models 1:20:40 Wikipedia 1:25:17 Decentralization 1:26:23 Advice For Crypto People 1:27:44 Closing, Resources, & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Molly White https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF  web3 is going just great https://twitter.com/web3isgreat  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

We're still here. Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, a crypto skeptic take today. Just some context for the episode you're about to hear. We have Molly White on the episode, the title of which is Web 3 is going great. David and I recorded this just over a month ago on October 7th with Molly. It's been in our queue to get out. We've had a lot of podcasts in queue. We had it targeted for release today, the day that you are listening to it. So November 14th, I believe you'll be listening to this episode for the first time. Molly did not have the context of the FTX meltdown as we're going into this. So as you are listening to this episode, put yourself in the place of the crypto industry a month ago before the events unfolded for FTX. I'm going to get into some of the claims that Molly makes in this episode. But David, do you want to give us some more context for where we've come since our original episode recording with Molly?

Yeah, certainly. During this episode with Molly, we met the person that can critique Web3 the best. And Molly is a software engineer, very experienced one. She's also a contributor towards Wikipedia. And so there's some Web3 valence, Web3 ethos valence that she has, like contributing to the open commons of knowledge, knows how to code. and she's somebody that knows the difference and I think I really appreciated Molly when she made claims that like critiquing the lack of scalability of these systems is like not the right critique

or critiquing like the energy of Bitcoin isn't really the best critique. So her critiques of what she was talking about goes straight to the heart of Web 3. They are real criticisms. And so that is the frame of mind that we can go into this. And like Ryan said, we recorded this a month ago. We've just been holding it in the pocket.

and then the FTX debacle happened. So we actually are re-recording the intro to this podcast that you are now listening to because we had to update it. And I think just because of this FTX debacle, it's certainly hitting a little harder for me as to how this industry looks to the people that are not yet believers. And I think that is the frame of mind that it will be useful to go into this episode. It's like, damn, sometimes it's pretty hard to justify what we're up to in this industry. and I think Molly comes and shares that perspective.

Well, Molly had a lot of critical takes before the FTX thing actually just happened. So you can imagine what she would add to this. And overall, I do think she is a good skeptic and we need more of those in the crypto space, of course. So a few things we get into this episode, Molly's central claim why Web3 is not going so great. This was even prior to FTX. Number two, why she thinks tokens actually make everything worse. Interesting point there. and why despite acknowledging some of the good in crypto and Web 3, Molly believes crypto is a net negative for the world and probably will be in the near future.

I think her claims got a little bit stronger after the week's events. Of course, David and I have a debrief after the episode, which we've recorded on October 7th as well. So you can hear our frame of mind. Then if you are a bankless premium subscriber, you get access to that. I can't even remember everything we said at this point in time, David, but. some hot takes post this conversation that I actually want to listen to again and see how well they held up. I think this whole, we've gone through the portal of this FTX debacle and now like the frame of mind is just completely different. And I think it is going to be interesting to see what

we said back back then a lifetime ago. I'm so curious. Anyway, if you want to access to the debrief episode, of course, it's on the bankless premium podcast. You can upgrade to a premium membership. There's a link in the show notes. Guys, we are going to get right. to our episode with Molly, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1, producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and

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Across's critical ecosystem infrastructure and Across V2 has just launched. Their new version focuses on higher capital efficiency, layer 2 to layer 2. transfers and a brand new chain with Polygon, all while prioritizing high security and low fees. You can be a part of Across's story by joining their Discord and using Across for all of your layer two transferring needs. So go to across.com to quickly and securely bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, or Boba networks. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to Molly White today. She's a crypto critic. She's also an experienced software engineer. She's been a longtime Wikipedia editor. We thank her for her.

Wikipedia service. It's a website I use every day. She also cares very deeply about free and open access to high quality information and things that we definitely value in crypto and at bankless. And recently, Molly has been doing a lot of critical speaking about crypto, about this thing called Web3. She covers this in her website. It's called Web3 is going just great. And it chronicles all the headlines of all the grift, hacks, toxicity going on in crypto, a marvelous website. I enjoyed a lot. Molly, welcome to Bankless. Thanks for having me. So this is going to be a fun conversation, I think.

And really, we want to get out of our crypto bubbles and hear your perspective during this conversation, Molly. But let's start with this question. So how great is Web 3 really going? Well, the title's a little bit sarcastic. You know, when I first created the site, I was trying to figure out what Web 3 even was and like what it was all about. And every time I was looking for stuff, I kept coming across things where I was like, wow, this doesn't seem like it's going so great. And so that's sort of where the title came from. I love it.

And so for folks that can see, we're going to share this on YouTube. But if you're listening to this, the title is Web3 is going just great. And the subtitle is, and it's definitely not an enormous script that's pouring lighter fluid on an already smoldering planet. That is the tone. And I'm looking at a few of the more recent. This is as of October 6th. The headlines like Celsius, they just exposed the names of all their customers and their recent transactions. Of course, bankless listeners will be familiar with Celsius's shenanigans. Also on October 6,

the Binance smart chain just halted. We also have South Korea, reportedly freezing 40 million from Doe Kwan, Zcash, suffering attacks. It's kind of all of the bad news, I would say, in crypto. Molly, give us a sense for some of these headlines, how you select them from an editorial perspective and what the website itself is trying to accomplish. So, well, I guess I'll start with what I'm trying to accomplish with the website, which is when I created it back in the fall and winter of last year, you know, crypto was really on a bull run. Prices were at almost all-time highs.

People were really buying into a lot of the mania. And it felt like a lot of the headlines that I was seeing, even in mainstream media, but also in the crypto press were around people becoming, you know, overnight millionaires and, you know, putting a ton of money into crypto and then becoming super wealthy and, you know, saving their families because of crypto. And it felt like there was not all that much attention being given to where things were going really poorly. And, you know, even when crypto was on a bull run, there were a lot of examples of things going really, really badly where projects would get hacked or, you know, someone would get their wallets would be compromised or, you know, some of them were just really

bad ideas of projects that people were thinking up that they were like, we're going to do this, but on the blockchain. And so I was kind of hoping to provide sort of the alternate perspective or at least just like a little bit of balance to some of the reporting to say that like, hey, not everyone is becoming a millionaire overnight and maybe if you put your retirement money into this, it won't be there in a couple of months. So that's really the goal is just to say that like, you know, despite some of the really, you know, the boosterism, there's also a lot to be concerned about. As far as how I select, you know, articles for the site, it mostly has to do with, I mean, any example of something going really poorly, any loss that's over like $100,000 or so,

I usually will include. But I also try to really highlight some of the examples where people as individuals are getting hurt. So, you know, even if a person isn't losing an amount of the of money that would be significant to like an institution. I still will often put it in there, you know, if it's really significant to them, just because I think that's also been a pretty big issue where, you know, people will put money that they really can't afford to lose into crypto and then something goes wrong. Did you ever think you'd have this much content, Molly? Yeah, I didn't fully expect it to be like multiple posts a day. Molly, there's a lot of people in crypto, I think bankless would be a part of this group of people that are like perpetually optimistic

and perpetually bullish. Like we can really only see the best of what crypto has to offer. Some might call us the people that are like, you know, handing out the Kool-Aid, if you will. So this effort is like the opposite. It's like the anti-Kool-Kool-Aid. It's like trying to say, hey, there's all these crypto like crypto believers that are just like only, are up only, like believers and they can't really see the negative side. And so you're trying to sober us up with this website. Is that kind of the goal? I think so. Although, you know, I think with some of the true believers, you know, the really idealistic folks, there's only so much that can really be done on that. But, you know, I think it is important regardless of what technology you're interested in to sort of pay attention to the potential downsides, where people can get hurt if they're using it, you know, the risks that people are being exposed to. And then, you know, I also try to reach some of the people who are still kind of on the fence around crypto and they're trying to decide, you know, is this actually a good place to invest my money, you know, should I be taking big bets on crypto? Are all of those really

sparkling headlines actually true? You know, so I think it's kind of a multifaceted approach. So would you say that you are like anti-crypto or are you just seeing that there's an imbalance in the narrative space and you're trying to counterbalance it? I would say that I am anti-crypto. You know, I, for what it has been promising, it has not lived up to a lot of those promises. And the promises have been really big lately. You know, I mean, crypto's been around for a while, but the sort of web three hype and a lot of the talk, you know, around it becoming a really mainstream part of the financial system and even society, you know, those are really big promises. And so far, the technology doesn't seem to have really lived up to that, nor have a lot of the people who are

building in the crypto space. Can we talk about some of those promises high level, Molly, just to get kind of your framing of it? So from your perspective, what promises do you think crypto has made to the world? What checks has it written? And not cashed. And how many of those checks have been cashed? Which ones are falling short? Well, I mean, like anything, it really depends on who you talk to. So there are some people out there who will say that, you know, crypto is really just for speculation and, you know, that's it. Which I would probably say, okay, it has served well as a speculative asset for people who are interested in that type of thing. But when you start to look at some of the promises that are being made by really big names in the crypto space, by some of the VCs who've been jumping in, it's stuff around becoming a major part of the financial system. In some cases, even replacing traditional finance when you get to some of the more extremes. There's a lot of talk around banking the unbanked and fixing the widespread inequality in the financial system, providing services to people who have not had access to them.

serving as a better store of value than some stores of value that we have today. I mean, the list kind of goes on depending on who you're talking to. Becoming a pillar of the web as we know it is a big one with Web3. People talking about blockchain is really underpinning every service you use online. And so far, I don't think any of those checks have been cashed. There have been instances where you could argue that Bitcoin or something like that has served as a store of value, assuming that you're willing to take two, specific points on the timeline and compare them rather than, you know, the highs and the lows

or, you know, depending on when someone actually needs that store of value. But besides that, you know, it's not replaced web technology. It is not banked the unbanked. What would you say to the statement just like, you know, it's early. Like Bitcoin was created in 2009, but also Bitcoin didn't really open up many of the doors that created those narratives, like replacing parts of the internet. That came after a theory. So Ethereum brought that in like 2015. So like what? We've got like seven years of Ethereum history.

And most of Ethereum's history and development has really happened in like the last four or five years. So what would you say to the response of just like, yo, we're still trying to figure it out, but the vision is still here? Like the foundation is still here? Yeah. So that comes up a lot. I think in the tech world, you know, five or ten years is actually a pretty long time. Things move faster in technology than they do in a lot of other industries just because of, you know, You know, you don't have to set up a manufacturing plant or something like that.

You know, there isn't that sort of upfront cost. And so, you know, I still would have expected a little more by now as far as, you know, becoming a really stable part of technologies that people are using day to day that are actually deployed and, like, being used by real people. I also think that, you know, there hasn't been a great explanation of even how we will get to the point where crypto banks, unbanked or, you know, underpins the whole web. You know, there's a lot of people who will say things like, well, once we fix the scaling and the transaction costs and, you know, the privacy issues, then it'll, you know, be something that everyone uses every day. But that's a big leap, you know, to say, well, when we just fix all of those problems, it'll be perfect,

which, like, that's true of a lot of things. You know, once we fix all of the emissions problems with fossil fuels, then we'll have no climate change problems. But, you know, that's actually not possible, right? At least today, we have no clear way of getting there. So most people aren't seeing things like that. What would you say, Molly, to some of the success that maybe, I'm sure you wouldn't argue that there haven't been some successes in crypto, but some of the successes, maybe a few notable things. Of course, the total crypto market cap is over a trillion dollars, right? I know that's price. But if you pick an asset like Bitcoin, for example, for any like four or five year period that you've held Bitcoin has appreciated relative to the dollar. And for, you know, a Bitcoin

advocate, they are not promising no volatility, certainly, right? Hoddle has been an adage for that community from the very beginning. They are promising that it will hold up to the dollar, which is going through kind of a debasing type of experience. And Bitcoin is not. So something like that. But we could also take decentralized finance, and we see a use case like stablecoins, which are like borderless dollars. There's, you know, over 100 billion in stable coins out there. The Ethereum network itself did about the value transfer of the Visa network last year. Uniswap, a smart contract protocol born, what, three, four years ago, did over a trillion in value, kind of this permissionless open ecosystem. What would you say to some of those successes? Do you just think that they're just

kind of niche and not significant compared to the promises, the checks that were written? Or do you think that there could be something early that might manifest later and you're still holding out hope? I mean, I think a lot of the successes of crypto are a little bit hard to measure, I think. You know, things like market cap are really hard to measure in crypto where things can be double counted pretty easily and tokens are often being overinflated. So I have a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to things like market cap. I think that there are people using crypto. I think that's sort of hard to argue. But as far as the use cases that are being promised and the idea that stable coins are a better option in some cases or for things other than trying to get into the crypto ecosystem,

I think that's a little bit hard to argue. I also don't know if stable coins on the whole or have been purely successful, there have been a lot of issues with stable coins and there are a lot of questions around a lot of remaining stable coins. You're probably referring to Luna and Tara as one of those quote unquote stable coin failures that happens earlier this year. I'm curious from your perspective,

as you've watched crypto more closely over the last year or two, what are some of the most colossal failures that you've seen? What's kind of the biggest evidence to support your points? Well, I think Tara Luna is a pretty good example. Not only the collapse of that specific coin, but also all of the sort of ripple effects that it had throughout crypto where other projects were using the anchor protocol or had exposure to Terra.

You know, I think the failures of some of the other institutions like Celsius, that's been pretty spectacular. You know, people having a lot of money locked up in Celsius and who truly believed that it was like a safe place to put their money and it was better than banks in some situations. So I think that's another really good example. And then, you know, some of the huge hacks that have been happening lately, especially when it comes to crypto bridges. is, you know, I feel like every time I read something about a blockchain bridge, it's because, like, a hundred plus million dollars were just exploited. There have been a couple of those. So, yeah, I think those are probably my top three. I think we definitely as an industry should take responsibility and ownership over why people in the outside part of the world are considering these things like

defy and Web3, right? Celsius, in hindsight, was a bank. And this guy, Alex Michinsky, wore this, like, shirt that said, like, you know, let's bring down the banks. And it was like, it had defy on the back end, but it was like a centralized institution that took customers deposits. And as an industry, we kind of just like let it go on because nothing really bad was happening, but nothing bad does happen when prices go up, right? It's always when prices go down. And then there's also like kind of the issue, the definitional issue of all of these cross-chain bridges, which use multi-sigs, which is kind of like a bank with some limitations, but not enough limitations, right? So as an industry, we do have this like, definition problem where we don't actually know how to label these things because they are new.

They are net new to the world. And so as a result, it's labeled like crypto. It's what crypto is. It's what DeFi is. It's what Web 3 is. Even though like these things have gotten like blurred and honestly like bastardized some of the pure crypto native products that are supposed to not do these things. What do you think when you hear this? Well, I would say that I wouldn't call them a bank because I think that's actually what got a lot of people really drawn into Celsius is that they were told that Celsius was a bank. And when they read that, they were like, great, my money's safe. You know, if you put money into a bank in the United States and the bank suddenly explodes, you don't lose all your money, right? It's insured by the FDIC. And I think people thought that they were getting those kinds of protections with Celsius, and especially with Voyager,

which had actually sort of implied that they were protected by the same FDISC insurance. And so, like, when you say bank, people get a really specific. idea in their head that is not what Celsius and Voyager and other sort of centralized exchanges are providing. I think from a terminology perspective, when we talk about bank on bank lists, which is what the show is called, like we're trying to go self-sovereign without banks. What David was referring to is there's kind of a, when we say bank, we have sort of a negative connotation in it. And not applying this to outside of crypto, although we do often apply it to financial institutions that are banks outside of crypto, but crypto banks themselves,

When David says banks, it means that there is a hidden trust vector there, that it is a siloed institution that doesn't have transparency where you're actually depending on a set of individuals. In this case, Alex Mishinsky, you had to trust. And so David was using it in a, well, it turned out to be a bank in that a lot of people thought what they were doing was self-sovereign. And I just deposit here. And, you know, it's transparent. It's fully open the way decentralized finances. it would have turned out is they were, you know, depositing funds into a closed bank that Alex Mishinsky could like trade with, deploy however he wanted with his group of executives and

withdraw funds to. So it implies this trust vector. But I think I take your wider point, that is, a lot of these, and we've been critical of this as well, a lot of these interest accounts, whether it's an anchor or whether it's in Celsius, are marketed as if they are risk-free to retail in the terminology of bank, which people think of as FDIC, insured, this thing is completely safe, and they're certainly not those things. Yeah, and I think there were sort of people in both camps in this Celsius instance. You know, I've read a lot of the letters that people sent to the judge in the bankruptcy case, and there were some people who absolutely believed it was like a bank in the sense of like stability and, you know, you're not going to lose access to your funds.

there were also definitely people who thought it was more of a self-sovereign thing. And there was one person I remember who wrote in and said that like, because USDC made all of these guarantees around being tradable one for one with a US dollar, how is it possible that her money was locked up in something like Celsius? And it's like she almost didn't realize there was an intermediary there that was, you know, controlling her money. So I think it's, yeah, I think it maybe goes both ways. Do you think that that makes this more of an education problem than it is really like a structural Web 3 crypto problem? I think there's always an education problem in finance and technology actually. You know, crypto especially is really, you can get in the weeds really fast. And, you know, even with the project that I run, you know, I find people who follow the project and who are clearly like pretty interested in crypto either because they like it or they don't, but, you know, who have a fairly decent knowledge of it, who also sort of misunderstand things. You know, I've had, I posted about the Celsius disclosure of all their customer names the other day.

And someone was like, wow, so much for defy. And it's like, well, no, Celsius isn't defy. You know, but those are a lot of, to a lot of people, that's like, they have no idea what that means. Can I just pause and say, I very much appreciate that you're getting to that level of detail, even with the critiques. Because many crypto critics do not do that. I think, you know, in addition to all, of the grifters and scammers we see in the crypto community. I think there are many crypto critics who sort of don't actually take the time to understand what they're criticizing. And I've read countless articles after the Celsius implosion about how this was an example of defy and look how broken defy is. And I just wanted to go to the reporter and say, hey, this is not defy at all.

Like, don't throw us in with those people. Like, this is not what. what this industry is about. In fact, nothing was transparent or decentralized about this entire operation. And so there's that element as well, but I definitely appreciate the work you're doing here. I guess one high-level common I'd say, Molly, is I think you'll find that many people in crypto, David and myself, and I think a lot of bankless listeners included, will look at all of the events that you just mentioned, the scams, the grifters, the Celsius, the irresponsibility of the blockfi, the three arrows capital, like margin. craziness shenanigans, the Lunarra, Doquan, you know, Die Must Die, the Stable Coin.

Ronan side chain, all of it. Wormhole side chain. Like, you know, we can go down the list. You will find many of us have been calling these things out the entire time. And also after the fact, also, you know, emphasized how this does not represent crypto values is not what our community and our industry stands for. So we kind of stand, I think, in support with you on that. But one difference, I think, and I want to get some clarity, is, as David mentioned, he called us perma bulls, right, at the outset of the show. And that's because, like, it doesn't mean that prices won't go down and think you can't, you know, it doesn't mean that you won't lose 90% in a certain cycle. But we are bullish over the long run, over the five to 10 to

20 year time cycle that this entire thing that is being built in crypto is not only going to appreciate in price, that aside, but it's actually going to be good for the world, is going to be a net benefit, is going to actually help humanity in ways that are not the same, but are similar to the level of the internet. This is another wave of the internet, if you will. And so we are long term, even though we see all the scams and the grift, we think crypto is a net positive for the world, not a net negative. But I'm wondering if you disagree with that. So we talked about like, you know, current state, even some in crypto might argue. That's been a net negative so far, but they're still in crypto because, and I would argue that's still net positive so far,

but that aside, some people would say it's net negative, but they're still in crypto, still building because they think we are building a brighter, better future. Do you think that this possibility even exists, or do you think, are you kind of thinking that crypto is a net negative, not only now in its current form, but into the the future as well. Like, it's never going to be worth more than all of the effort and all of the the grift and all of the negative externalities that have been pushed out by it. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah. So I don't have strong hopes, I guess, for the future of crypto. But, you know, I would say that anything is possible. And, you know, I've said this before that, you know,

my goal with the work that I'm doing is not to be able to look back, you know, 10 or 15 years from now and be like, ha, I was right. Crypto had no purpose. Nobody's using it. There are no blockchains in existence, you know, or whatever. Like, say, you know, to be able to say that, my goal is really to try to make sure that the web is a better place for the people who are using it, you know, and if that means that in five years, you know, 10 years, all the problems are fixed. Crypto's amazing.

Everyone's using it. You know, I've got my wallet and I'm paying for my groceries with crypto or whatever it might be, that's fine. Like, if it's better and fixed, that's great. But, you know, in the same vein, if five or ten years from now people aren't getting scammed and, you know, they're not losing all their money and these things aren't blowing up every other day, because crypto turned out not to have any promise, that's also fine. You know, I just want to sort of make sure that everything is moving in a better direction. So, you know, broadly speaking, I don't have strong hopes for crypto. You know, I think that for, you know, I would need to see pretty strong evidence that the technology has a lot of promise for the applications that it's being, I guess, advertised for.

And I haven't seen that yet. I haven't seen really compelling use cases of it yet that aren't doing things like, you know, basically taking advantage of the lack of regulation. But, you know, that's also something that can change, right? Like if someone finally comes up with that one Web 3 project, it's like, dang, that is actually better than the alternative and, you know, is providing a useful service and isn't just taking advantage of the fact that it's being poorly regulated, then yeah, like I'm open to changing my views. I'm not totally stuck in the mud here. But I don't share your permable, I guess, perspective. That's probably pretty clear. Well, from a values perspective, you mentioned one thing. You want to see the web be in a better. place for those who are using it. So maybe you are a maximalist. You're bullish on the web as a technology. And that seems to, I'm guessing here, Molly, because we don't know each other well yet, but like, I'm guessing your contribution to Wikipedia, contribution to kind of open source tools,

as an engineer, as a developer, are all based on that belief. I'm curious your perspective on, like, is there anything wrong with the internet today, do you think? Like, what are the problems with the internet? What would you solve if you could wave a magic wand? Yeah, I mean, I've gone into this a little bit before in some of my writing where I actually share a lot of the same goals as a lot of the people who are working on Web3 projects. You know, people will talk about the extreme levels of surveillance that are happening on the web, the capture of the web by just a few small companies, you know, the lack of access to web projects and even to the Internet in general. You know, I think there's a lot of issues with the web that Web3 advocates talk about

that I also really care about, you know, the really crazy way that platforms are being governed these days. You know, I would actually point to those same things. The difference is that I sort of don't see crypto as a great solution to those problems. You know, I tend to feel that problems with the web are really, they tend to come down to problems with like society and the way that these communities are being built. And it's really tough to sort of fix a really societal problem with just a technology. You know, I think that it's going to take something like societal sort of change and regulatory change on the web to really help with a lot of those issues. And crypto, I worry, tends to go in sometimes the opposite direction with really sort of hyper financializing a lot of

things and sort of trying to take sort of the side route to fixing those things without actually addressing a lot of the underlying issue. And so you have common ground with the stated problems that the Web 3 community might say about the existing internet. How about the stated problems with the money system, right? Because there's almost like two sides of crypto. There's kind of like tech, Web 3 crypto. And then there's also like money crypto, which is like central banks, are broken. Banks in general are kind of broken. They're inefficient. You can't program against them. They're not open. And so we have this thing called a non-sovereign store of value. And we have other primitives that we can create. We want programmable money and we want a bankless money system.

Are you sympathetic to some of the problems that they point to? Or yeah, what are your thoughts on the money side of crypto? Yeah. I mean, so the money side of crypto is definitely further out of my area of expertise, I would say. You know, I come from sort of a software background, not an econ background or a policy background. But, you know, I think that, again, a lot of people in crypto are identifying serious issues with banking. You know, there's a lot of issues with access to banking. There's high fees. It's slow. You know, there's all sorts of stuff. But I think also they tend to sometimes ignore the reasons for some of those issues. You know, a lot of the slowness is coming from regulatory intervention, for example.

And so, you know, it's like you can make a faster system that's completely unregulated, but you also end up with a lot of the chaos that we've been seeing in crypto where, you know, your funds are gone, they're gone and there's no, you know, recourse there or, you know, pick your example. So, you know, again, I think there are issues there. I think there are improvements that could definitely be made in the financial system. You know, some of the slowness, for example, does not need to exist. We live in a world where, you know, banks probably don't need to be on a nine to five schedule or, you know, other financial systems. But, you know, I also sort of question crypto's ability to just sort of circumvent those issues and end up in a better state rather than

address the issues themselves. So putting on my crypto optimist, crypto apologist hat, which fits very nicely, by the way, there's two sides of this crypto conversation. There's like the web conversation, whereas like our platforms are owned by some like tech elites and they dictate what we say. They don't make us feel very empowered. And then there's also like the banking situation, which it kind of feels like there's just these banking elites and they just like use our money as a way to generate revenue from themselves and not pass it back to the consumer and not really enable the consumer very well. And I think the crypto take is that we've had these web two apps, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. and their trajectory doesn't feel good for most people. Like, their trajectory is bad.

Facebook's causing civil wars. I don't know. That's the Web 3 take. I think that may be the general take. Yeah, that's a general take, right? But the Web 3 take is that, like, there's kind of no fixing Web 2. There's no way to, like, hit the reverse button on Web 2 and like, oh, that didn't work. Let's go back and go in a different route.

And that's kind of the same take that we have with banking because of regulation. These regulations have entrenched winners in the banking system that has calcified the banking system. And I think the Web3 take might even extend that to the political system. The political system is entrenched and not changing. And so while so many crypto people talk about, look, we got all these use cases, we're going to fix the banks. We're going to fix the Web 2 platforms. We're going to fix social organization systems. It's because we see like the trend of what the current state of the internet is is heading towards a dead end.

And we also feel that with finance. And we also feel that with politics and like social cohesion. And so like while crypto is coming in and not really necessarily like fixing things right off the bat, what we are kind of doing is we're like taking the cage and we're like rattling it. And like, hey, we need to like shake some things up real quick. And yeah, we're going to like break some stuff. But that's kind of what we need to like go backwards to then progress forwards again into the future. How do you feel about this take?

Well, I have said that one thing I think crypto does succeed in doing very well is highlighting issues that need to be addressed, whether it's with traditional finance, the web, whatever you want to call it. I think it has really made people more aware of issues in banking, which like most people probably don't think a whole lot about. But now that people are focusing on crypto, I think they sort of do think about those things more, same with the web. But, you know, I think it's also, I sort of, I sort of of question the idea that the web is unfixably broken, that society, banking, politics are unfixably broken, because those are not things that really just go away. You know, like, it sort of depends how you define web two, but like if you talk about going from web two to web three and you

say that web two is unfixably broken and web three might be a path forward, a lot of web three relies on the current web that we have today. So depending on how you're defining Web 2, I guess, like I don't really see how that follows. You could definitely, if you're defining Web 2 as like large platform companies that are really controlling social media or something like that, then you could definitely make an argument for those going away in some form and being replaced with something else. But if you're talking about Web 2 as just sort of the web that we use today, like websites are still going to exist with Web 3. You know, there's still going to be just sort of the underpinnings of the web. And so, you know, I don't really know how you can say that the web

is intractably broken and should be replaced with something else unless you're talking about, like, kind of getting rid of the whole thing, which is definitely not what Web3 is trying to do. I think we're mainly focusing it on our social media platforms, our web platforms, like the big ones that, you know, used to be when I would go on to the internet, there would be like 20 websites that I would visit. And now it's like three. Yeah. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. So if that's, if that's sort of the way you're approaching it, you know, then I sort of see what you're saying, you know, like those things are really broken and we should replace them with Web 3 or something like that. But by the same vein, like if that's a possible way forward, why can't we say that those things are unfixably broken?

Let's replace them with something else. You know, social communities with a better governance model regulations that prevent companies from forming those, you know, enormous monopolies, you know, federated social media, things like that. that. In all of my years in crypto, I've never been hacked, scammed, or lost money to a thief, and a lot of that credit goes to my ledger hardware wallet. The Ledger NanoX and the Ledger Nanosplus hardware wallets allow users like you and me to secure and manage all of our crypto assets and our NFTs, all with the security of storing users' private keys offline and out of reach from hackers. The Ledger NanoX is the perfect hardware wallet for managing your crypto and NFTs on the go because it connects to your phone with Bluetooth and has a nice big screen for easy transaction

readings. Ledger has also upgraded the iconic Ledger NanoS and made the new Ledger NanoS device more Defy and NFT-friendly, making it the perfect hardware wallet for beginners. Ledger has truly maximized for both ease of use and security. So discover which Ledger device is best suited for your journey by going and visiting shop.ledger.com. If you've been listening to Bankless, you know that we're fans of the modular blockchain thesis. The idea that blockchains will separate execution from data availability and consensus, allowing all three to become the best versions of themselves. And Fuel has built the fastest modular execution layer in the industry. By supporting parallel transaction execution, fuel unlocks significantly faster throughput

for the web free world. Fuel also goes beyond the limitations of the EVM with its own Fuel VM, which is more efficient and optimized, opening up the design space for developers. And lastly, Fuel brings a powerful developer experience with its own domain-specific language, Sway, and a supportive tool chain called Fork. With Fuel, you can have the benefits of smart contract languages like solidity while adopting the improvements made by the rust tooling ecosystem, letting the fuel development environment go beyond the limitations of the EVM. If you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to see how you can get involved with a fuel network. So one take on crypto for those is because what's really interesting, Molly, is that we see

so many of the same problems that you do, right? And crypto is saying, hey, we're trying to build something to fix some of these things. And at times, many times, I would say, crypto is overly ambitious in its promises. And I don't think that, like, token incentives don't help this, right? Because it incentivizes projects and founders to overpromise and then undeliver, right? And yet there is something here that I think is fresh and kind of different because crypto at its best can, we hope that it does, offer a different kind of governance model, if you will, at the root. It's similar to me to, I know we've made this comparison in the past on bankless, but like a constitution, right? If you're trying to replace kings and dictators and emperors,

what do you do? 1700s United States. You have to create a governance framework. You have to write a protocol. You have to put in some new legal code that gets social consensus, that balances out power and is more credibly neutral. And at its best, that's what we see the hints of in technologies like Ethereum. It's credibly neutral. It's censorship resistant. It's peer-to-peer. It's decentralized. Anybody with an internet connection has the ability to open up a bank account, essentially.

All they need is a private key, and it's theirs, right? And this is a hopeful substrate. I personally don't know, Molly, if we'll ever get to the level of, like, replacing Facebook, right? Like, I remember the early days in crypto, it's like people, my early days in crypto, people are talking about let's just put Uber on a blockchain, right? and it'll be better Uber and the world will be magic. And of course, like, it doesn't work this way at all. But there is hope and we've seen some evidence, I think, at least us crypto bulls have,

us perma, you know, optimists and evangelists, that what we are able to do is instantiate some of our values of decentralization, of credit neutrality in the base layer protocol. And something that David and I often say on bankless is, if they adopt crypto protocols, they adopt crypto values. like it's a new type of constitution. And this isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to try in our existing nation state governance frameworks to fix things and reform things, right? It's like I encourage people to buy crypto and vote. Like you should still vote. You still need to participate actively in your democracy. This is not kind of a, you know,

I'm sure you've heard sort of the Bitcoin Maximilist tribe of a little bit like, we're going to buy a bunker and the world's going to like be destroyed. And like, That is one subset of crypto that at least bankless, David and I, do not resonate with at all. Like, let's try to fix the problems in our existing governments. But also, we have this other approach that is exploring a new frontier in kind of the digital landscape. It just feels so much, Molly, like there's something there. And I guess I'm curious twofold. My question here is, one is, do you think that there might be something there or do you just think,

look, your starry-eyed dreamers, like, it's not going to work? And then secondly, if it's not this, Molly, like, what is it? Because to be honest, I don't have a lot of hope in our existing political system. I mean, like, we've tried these things. Our existing frameworks, our existing companies, Silicon Valley, like, what's going to shake the banks up unless it's some external startup technology that's like, hey, we can outcompete you. You know, Hayden Adams can create a decentralized exchange with $60,000 grant that can be. the NASDAQ in like five to 10 years, right? I don't know what the range is. Some people have told me 10,000, 60,000, 120,000 in some range. There may be multiple grants, David. Regardless, what do you think about this idea, Molly? Yeah, so I think I probably share some of your starryite optimism around substrates when it comes to the web, right? You know, I think that a lot of what has been enabled by crypto has been enabled thanks to the web. You know, if someone has an internet connection, they have access to the web and to building communities there and to organizing

without needing to be within physical proximity to people and, you know, to participating in systems that are built in various ways that will allow them to do really powerful things. And I really do share that underlying system of thought. And, you know, decentralization is possible on the web without crypto. You know, there are ways of building, you know, collaborative governance systems on the web. You know, I like the sort of positive things that crypto is trying to do, but I also try to acknowledge some of the really negative things that I think threaten a lot of its future. You know, when we talk about governance and crypto, for example, so far a lot of the government structures have operated around the token-based model where you really, your power in that

project is completely, you know, correlated to how much money you've put into that process. project, which I think is the wrong direction for us to be going these really pay-to-play models where if you don't have the capital, you can't even participate. And if you don't have a ton of capital, you can't have an impact on a project. And so I started doing some research, you know, because I was reading about a lot of these Dow's that were set up in that way. And I was like, boy, that seems bad. And so I was trying to do a lot of research into, you know, okay, so how are other projects, you know, clearly there are people in crypto who agree that that's not a great way of doing things. I don't think a lot of people think that's the optimal way of doing things.

So I started, you know, doing a lot of research into so, okay, so how are projects trying to solve this problem? And things got worse when I started looking at that, you know, when I was looking at ways that projects were trying to do, you know, one person, one vote, that type of thing, it got really scary as far as privacy and some of the sort of sacrifices that you had to make in order to do those types of things. So, you know, I sort of worry about those types of, you know, trying to basically predicate everything on crypto because you start with an obvious governance model that has serious problems and you start trying to circumvent those problems and things just get worse and worse and worse is what it seems like to me. You know, my thought is to

build systems where you're not immediately fighting against the token-based model. You know, when you talk about how to replace banks, you know, and the best way to do that is to out-compete them with, you know, some startup that's doing things in a really genius way, you know, that seems sort of to be really leaning into the sort of capitalist model that we're already stuck with at this point and saying, okay, the only solution to capitalism is hyper-capitalism and, you know, just got to compete and, you know, let the free market decide and then we can overthrow the banks or whatever. And again, that seems like the wrong direction. You know, I feel like financializing everything, making everything that people are doing into this really, you know, hypercapitalized,

financialized transaction feels antisocial and, you know, detrimental to society, to community, to the web, you know. So, yeah, I think, you know, I'm starry-eyed about the future of the web. I am not starry-eyed about the future of crypto. One of the stories that crypto, proponents will like to bring up is the story of Uber. Uber tried to issue equity to all of its Uber drivers, but they just couldn't for a variety of reasons. There was too much overhead. The regulations for doing this were too ridiculous. They just couldn't figure out a way of transferring equity from company to contributor to the drivers. And then this like air drop meta happened where a uniswap air dropped like 30% of its token supply straight to.

users, previous users, previous contributors to the protocol, and they did it with like the snap of the fingers. And so we like to use this example as like a contrast between like the previous systems, the systems without private keys, because there was private keys that specifically enabled this. We had this Ethereum address, so you could just like as a destination to deposit a symbol of equity, a symbol of ownership, a symbol of power to the users. And so yes, one take is that yes, this is kind of like hyperfinancialization. We're creating more financial assets and providing them to more and more people, but also at the same time, like, the paradigm that we came from wasn't really able to support a large diffusion of capital and power to a wide number of

individuals. And to us, this is like just a huge success story. When you hear that story, like, what do you hear? I mean, that Uber wasn't able to do it doesn't seem all that compelling to me. You know, there are plenty of examples of co-ops that function pretty well, you know, so I guess, I don't know a lot about the Uber story, but it does seem like we probably don't need crypto to make that happen. We might need better, you know, better, you know, changes to basically the financial and regulatory framework to make that smoother. But, you know, co-ops do exist and mutual organizations have been operating for a really long time. What about this idea, Molly, I know you've come back a few times to this idea of like hypercapitalism and being

kind of a negative, right? And like, you know, plutocratic token votes. And we certainly, like, agree with your point and take your point about that. What about this idea of public goods that we're creating? I mean, the internet protocols, the adoption of protocols like TCPIP and other layers of the internet stack, they're not owned by anyone specifically, right? They're kind of a public good good for all of humanity. Open source code works very much the same way. Wikipedia, I'm going to say, so this is like open source public good for the world. I don't know, you're in the inner beast of Wikipedia, so you might have a different opinion on that, more informed opinion on that. But this idea is not just that we are creating kind of like new

corporations and LLCs and tokenized private capital entities, but we are creating new public substrate. So for example, now with Ethereum, as I said earlier, anybody all over the world, let's say, imagine for a minute that some element of the defy optimists are right. And there is this defy banking system on Ethereum. And it's good. It's like comparable to maybe better than the kind of a banking system you might get in the West, in the developed West, right, or something like this, even though I think the West's banking system kind of sucks in lots of ways. But let's say it's that. Well, now what have you done is a public good. You have somebody in India, Africa, all over the world. All they need is an internet connection. They have the ability

to spin up and access a bank account. How would they get access to these sort of financial tools, they don't have to pay anything in order to do this. There are gas fees and this sort of thing. This is the scalability conversation. We're trying to fervently and feverishly make those gas fees go down. But the idea would be they could just spin up an account. And just like they have a keyboard, they have an internet connection, they're plugged in to this communication network. While they could be plugged into this ownership network, this property rights system that is crypto-native. No one can tell them not. At some level, I guess I'm saying is there is a lens where you could look at crypto and focus on all of like the perverse incentives

that happen when money gets injected into the system. But maybe are you missing the public good side of what we're also creating here, which is like, I mean, uniswap, anyone can use uniswap. Anyone can spin up an ERC 20 and like create their own business. Anyone has access to a stable coin from any part of the world. What about this side of crypto seems much less capitalist and much more public goods. Yeah, so this kind of gets into what I touched on earlier where a lot of the arguments for crypto and Web3 end up, you end up in discussions where it's like, okay, but what if we fix all the problems and then everyone has access to this perfect banking system? And it's like, yeah, I want that too. Let's fix all the problems and have a perfect banking

system, which is great. But I have not yet seen how we're going to just fix all the problems. You know, I think that creating open source software, creating networks that everyone has access to, are great things. I think, you know, public goods are far more important than we tend to treat them as a society. But I don't think that solely because something is a public good, that it is also going to be the future of society. I mean, like, there's a lot of open source software out there that's wonderful, but I don't think it's going to overtake the banking system. And I don't think it, you know, makes the developers all perfect and wonderful people. So, you know, I think that creating a public good is definitely a good thing, but I don't know if it is the argument for why something should exist.

So, Molly, your comment is kind of like, yeah, cool, Ryan, show me first, right? Like that system doesn't really exist. I don't need to see it, you know, deployed and working and wonderful. I just need a plausible path from where we are today to where we are in 10, 15 years when this utopia has been achieved. And nothing about uniswap and a meta-mask wallet. and, you know, protocol like maker or AVE or compound, nothing about these tools that exist today kind of show a glimpse to you of what that future could be. Do you still think these things are too neat? No. So it's not to say that there aren't crypto projects that are doing cool things. You know, I think decentralized networks in general are interesting and cool. And I think there are

crypto projects that are providing value to people that are helping people. The thing that I really try to make clear is that it is the negative sides of things that I see as being almost intractable, potentially interactable, and sort of not offsetting, or rather offsetting the good that a lot of these projects are trying to do. And so, you know, when we talk about things like, you know, removing the money from the system because money is having such a negative impact, I don't see how that's possible with crypto, because crypto is predicated on being, you know, the only way you really maintain a network when you get down to it, a decentralized network with crypto. You know, the way that that happens is by paying people with money and, you know, requiring

money to use the system. So, you know, there have been people who have been like, well, what if we just ignore the tokens, ignore the crypto tokens, we'll just look at Web3. It's like, how are you going to use Web3 without the token? How are you going to use the Ethereum network if you don't have any Eath? You know, so I think there's just like, you can't just separate things like that and say, well, like, ignore all the bad stuff for a second. What about the good stuff? I see it. This is why it's a net negative to you in your mind, because you're like, hey, bang this guy, it's like the negatives are a minus 10 for the world, right? It's bad, all of these things. And you do acknowledge the positive, but maybe that's just a two. Right. Right. And so you

got a negative 10 versus a plus two and you still get negative eight. It's a net negative for the world. And you see that even if crypto is more successful, it's always going to be kind of net negative because you are seeing these sort of harmful types of incentive structures and influences and like core, I guess like core grift and scam inside of the system. Is this right? Yeah. I mean, if you just look at the history of crypto, you know, as crypto has become more successful, more mainstream, more widely adopted, the grift and the scam and the harm that it has done has also grown enormously. You'd say proportionally. It's just like. At least, I would say.

And so, you know, if that pattern suddenly stops and, like, okay, we fix all the grift and the scam and the issues with, you know, people evading regulations and blah, blah, blah, you know, fix all of that. And we just keep the good stuff, great. I think that's great. You know, it's like what I said at the beginning. You know, if we fix all the problems and we end up with only the good stuff, you know, I'm not going to still be here waving my flag about how crypto is the whole. worst thing in the world. But I don't see the credible way that we can get to that future state where all the bad stuff just magically disappears and these wonderful utopian visions continue to persist. On the note of the hyper-financialization of society, the way that I try and reframe this,

and the worry here is that, like, cool, we have this new primitive is the ERC-20 token. We also have NFTs and now people can mint all these tokens and they can go everywhere and they can inject their way into society. And a lot of people are worried about this because there's many aspects of society that perhaps finance should like stay out of. Perhaps money should stay out of. The way that I try and reframe this is that yes, there's the line we are hyper-financializing like culture. But also I try and flip it around and I say, we're actually injecting culture into our finance. We can't have one without the other. So you're putting finance into culture, but you're also taking culture and actually culture is corrupting finance.

And I'm using corrupting in like a good way. And so people are saying, yes, like we're hyper financializing our culture and finance is coming into corrupt culture for the bad. But I would like to say like actually you're allowing culture to become expressed in these financial assets. And I think we really saw this in, which was the bull market of 2021 when NFTs, while there are many like, you know, JPEGs that are collectibles and they're kind of Ponzi schemes and they're kind of just like sweet. you're buying this like picture of a monkey for a quarter million dollars. It makes no sense. Wow, that money could have definitely have gone to better use. There's also artists that are making real neat art that are tokenizing their art with

NFTs and selling those NFTs on the internet because art collectors want to collect those things. And so we are financing new culture. We're financing new art that I don't think we could have done in a Web 2 way, not without like Apple taking a 30% cut on the I. store or, you know, Facebook or Instagram wanting a slice of it. And so this era, this part is like, yes, we are putting finance into art in ways that make some people uncomfortable. But we're also, we're making a lot more art economically viable by the creation of NFTs. And while it is

definitely not the dominant use case of NFTs, a lot of it's like the monkey JPEG speculation. It is a real part that is actually putting a food on the table for a lot of new artists. What would you say to this reframing of like the NFT financialization side of things? Yeah. I mean, so I wrote a whole essay about sort of the idea of NFTs enabling digital art and, you know, empowering artists. And I can go into it if you want, but it's also kind of a long rant. You know, I don't necessarily think that it was the crypto itself that specifically enabled artists to be paid. You know, the new idea with NFTs is sort of this idea of like digital scarcity where people are assigning value to digital art in a similar sort of frame of

mind as they do to physical paintings and things like that, right? But, you know, you can do that without crypto. You know, you could digitally sign a piece of artwork and upload it somewhere, and then people could check it and see that I own, you know, some piece of artwork. And you incredibly do that. It's really the sort of cultural change that, you know, people were willing to assign enormous amounts of value to NFTs. you know, associated with digital art that has helped artists. And it has, like, you know, again, I will acknowledge that there are artists who have benefited from NFTs. But it was really the speculative bubble around NFTs that has enabled artists to get paid. If there had been a speculative

bubble around, you know, PGP signed pieces of artwork, you know, it could have been the same thing. Do I think it's necessarily likely that that would have emerged? No. But I also don't think that it's really crypto. It's the speculative side of things that sort of made that possible. I feel like maybe the thought on that or pushback on that, Molly, is you know, in the same way you're saying basically, hey, everything you guys are saying sounds great, but like show me because it's not happening yet, right? I feel like, you know, optimist in crypto could say the same thing to the existing system. Sure, the existing banking system could be better. Sure, it could, you know, serve underserved populations. Sure, artists could create a PGP signed piece of art and actually

earn an income, but that's not happening. So existing system, show us. Meanwhile, while you're trying to show us, we're going to be building stuff over here to actually make these possibilities happen. What would you say to that kind of pushback? Yeah, I mean, so I think the thing about the NFTs is that, a lot of people will say, like, well, we hate the speculative bubble. We like that it's helping artists. And my point is that, you know, helping artists was not, I don't know how possible that is without the speculative bubble, right? And so I think that that's really something that's key to focus on when it comes to NFTs.

As far as the sort of general argument around like, show me, fix it, you know, I think that that's a very reasonable point. I think there are serious issues with the existing system that we have today. But I also don't see the, you know, externalities of it. crypto adding to that very much. You know what I mean? Like by saying we're going to replace it with this other system, I would hope that that system would be better than the current system, not worse. And so, you know, although I appreciate that people are working towards creating a better system, you know, if they're doing it in a way that I think is actually net negative and is harmful

to people, I think that's important to say. You know, I think there's a lot of talk in crypto around like, just let us build. Would you shut up, Molly, and let us build? You know, I get that a lot. And it's like, I get it. I love that people want to just build stuff. But we've also got decades of history of tech companies just building stuff and then going, whoops, you know, like, guess we accidentally started civil wars, you know, or guess, you know, there's this huge issue with radicalization online that we just completely ignored. And so I think that pointing out the issues when people are talking about revolutionizing something with technology is critical, regardless of the end state.

I think it will either help to empower the Web 3 end state in what I imagine would be your best case scenario, or it will help us avoid ending up with a system that is worse than what we're already dealing with today. Actually, so my take on that is we definitely do not want you to shut up, Molly. We want you to keep speaking. Actually, so here's my hidden agenda in this is actually, like, you seem so smart and knowledgeable about things that even many people inside of crypto

who are buying monkey jpegs have no idea about that like my hidden agenda is actually to recruit you internally like we want all of the good skeptics you know as a selfish builder side of things who's optimistic about this community what we're doing we want them internal to help us fix things and yeah so keep up the good work even if you decide to always hate crypto please keep us honest we definitely appreciate that yeah i was not accusing you of being one of the shut up and let us build people, but it is a very common refrain. Let me ask you, because I know you've also been critical of, you know, energy consumption, particularly on the Bitcoin and Ethereum side of things. One example where I feel like, and I want you to keep me honest here, crypto has made tremendous

strives is recently with Ethereum. So, you know, forever it said, we're going to move to proof of stake. It's coming. It's any time. Like soon. Well, they actually did it. Six months. Yeah, six months away. They actually did it. It actually happened in September. And all of that energy use, I think you'd probably harness the same kind of criticisms you've always had against Bitcoin. But this is an example where Ethereum, a major network, a major contributor to this problem in your eyes, has actually improved. Would you give crypto any points for that? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think it's great that they pulled off the merge and that the environmental impact has been mitigated to an enormous extent. You know, I think that's great.

You know, I've always tried to keep my criticism of crypto as far as the environmental impact goes, somewhat tempered, just because I think there can be sort of a tendency that overfocus on that in the sort of critical side of things where, you know, there was a lot of people that were like, you're burning down the rainforest is terrible. And that was sort of the only argument, which, you know, it is terrible that, you know, Ethereum emissions were horrifying. So were the current Bitcoin ones. But that has never sort of been my only. issue with it. And so, you know, I think I was always very careful sort of before the Ethereum merged to sort of not focus on that quite too much because people would end up sort of shifting the discussion towards, okay, so how do we fix the environmental issue? Which, you know, seems to me like a somewhat solvable problem. So the same thing with things like scalability, you know, or gas fees. Well, maybe not gas fees quite as much, but scalability where it's like, people are like, oh, my God, you know, it's so unscalable. It's never going to scale. And it's like, well, there are a lot of things that we're never going to scale that have scaled actually pretty well, like the web.

You know, we never thought we were going to be able to stream video or, you know, record something like this, but we're doing it now. You know, so I think it's sort of important to look at, okay, so what is an issue with crypto that exists today that is, like, fundamental to the structure of it and the way that it has been designed and imagined. And then what of it's, which part of it is like, well, we just need a little bit of time for the software engineers to, you know, make it a little bit more scalable or whatever it might. be. And I sort of see the environmental impact as more of the second, where, you know, we've known for a long time that there are alternatives to proof of work that people have been using. You know, it's not like Ethereum invented proof of stake when they did the merge. So it always sort struck me as like a solvable problem. I don't know if the Bitcoin one is a solvable problem, but that's not for a technological reason. Yeah. I do appreciate the fact that we're having a

crypto-sceptic on that is saying that the energy and scaling things are actually not the things to be skeptical about. I listened to your episode with Jason Calcanus, and one of the arguments that you guys were talking about was like the Bitcoin energy consumption. And I thought that you actually actually completely nailed it. And it's rare to actually see like cryptosceptics, crypto-outs, I don't know if you accept that label or not or whatever. But just like say like it's one part about the energy consumption is its current amount of energy consumption. But it's also the mechanism itself that if Bitcoin does achieve what many of the Bitcoiners wanted to achieve, then the energy consumption also, like, rise along on those coattails in a negative sense.

And so I just wanted to give you props for being able to, like, identify unique crypto parts to be skeptical about rather than just like the easy ones, which is like, oh, gas fees and energy consumption. Molly, I want to ask about like your personality, like disposition. Would you consider yourself like a pessimist or an optimist or somewhere in the middle? I definitely sort of trend towards the cynical on a lot of things, especially really specific things. But I think generally speaking, I'm an optimist. You know, I describe myself as starry-eyed about the web. Like, I do think that there is a lot there that is, you know, could be wonderful. I'm mostly cynical about how things are today.

Sure, sure. But yeah, I guess probably somewhere sort of in the middle. Okay. And so like me and Ryan, we consider ourselves like crypto natives. We use this metaphor like crypto tourists. there's people who come in during the bull markets and then they leave. Then there's crypto settlers. And like we talked about earlier, like kind of permables. Like crypto has like baked itself into a part of my identity at this point. And so if crypto doesn't do the things, not necessarily. But like if crypto doesn't do the things that like I think it does and they starts to do the things that you think it does,

like part of my identity gets like crushed a little bit. And so like when you look at like, you know, people like me, people like me and Ryan who are just like, like, We're in crypto to see this most idealistic vision built out or die trying. Like, what do you see when you see like this type of crypto character? When you look over the fence and see all these crypto idealists who just like are so crypto-pilled that they like can't think about anything else. Like, what's your take on what we're up to? What our deal is?

I mean, I think there's always risk in taking a stance that is so strong that you're not willing to change it. I mean, and I think that's just broadly true outside of crypto and technology even. You know, I think it's important to be sort of open to evaluating new evidence as it comes in. You know, so I think being bullish on something sort of despite all evidence to the contrary is not always a great thing. But I think being idealistic about something is fine. You know, I think it's good for there to be idealists out there. You know, I'm idealistic about a lot of things.

So, you know, I think it sort of depends exactly where you draw that line. That was a very friendly way of saying, David, get some help. I'm aware. I'm aware of my faults. Well, I think, you know, I think a lot of people look at me and they think of me as, you know, bearish against all odds and unwilling to change my position and that this is a huge part of my identity, which, you know, I guess I might give off that perception because I run a website about this. Yeah, it hasn't been my perception in this conversation. It's like, we've been, honestly, can I say something? So bankless has been on a quest for a while to find good crypto critics.

And it's eluded us. Yeah. Like honestly, I feel like this is a genuine quest we've been on. And this is one of the first conversations. I think the other one, David, that comes to mind is our conversation with Rowan Gray. I was going to say Demetri Cofinus, but yes. Dimitri Cofinus, yeah, but Rowan Gray. And then, Molly, I would count you as maybe the second or maybe the third good crypto-sceptic

that we've actually talked to. So for whatever that's worth to you, we appreciate it. But one other thing, I guess, in all of this, you've gone back several times to kind of like, it's not about necessarily the current use cases. You accept the fact that, you know, crypto could clean up its act with respect to energy. It could actually, you know, scale transactions. Maybe there'll be some great defy use cases that work for, you know, a citizen in a country in Africa and actually start to bank the unbank.

You accept these possibilities. But you have this fundamental issue with the business model of crypto, this idea of, like, tokenizing everything, this idea of like, financializing and incentivizing things through kind of money. I want to push back on that idea, too. And this is kind of an idea that is certainly probably core to Web3 and also crypto. And it's articulated, I think, in some ways by I think VCs like Chris Dixon, at Andreessen Horowitz, and also at Bankless.

And that's this idea of the, but wait, the internet has a hidden business model already. And I know one of your core concerns that you mentioned earlier in our conversation is like surveillance. We are surveyed on the internet. Every single swipe, every single tap, every single click is logged in a database, even kind of the movement, the location you're in, it's all logged in a database. In the U.S., this takes the form of capitalist surveillance. And the reason is, I think you'd probably agree with this, is advertising. Advertising is the business model of the internet. That's been the business model of Web 1. It's been the business model. It's been the business model. of Web 2, and it's incented this surveillance apparatus that, fortunately, not yet in the U.S. has been used by the state, but it's certainly used by large tech companies to prey on citizens. This has caused some political instability as a result of this business model, and talk about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and all of those things going on. And so the idea of crypto is it doesn't replace advertising as the business model, but it adds a different one,

this idea of ownership, right? So you can own a specific piece of the internet and maybe pay as you go. It disincents or starts to disrupt the whole business model of advertising of the internet. And so, like, I guess maybe pushing back on this idea that financializing everything and tokenizing everything is bad, there seems to be a problem with the existing business model of the internet

in that this is surveilling everything. It's preying on us. in a way that is unhealthy. Do you see this problem? And is there any other way out besides the Web3 ownership adding a different layer in the capitalist system to the Internet, changing up the business models or any way out of this? So I would disagree that the advertising model of the internet is endemic to the Internet in the way that the token model is endemic to crypto. You know, there exist sites on the Internet today that don't advertise to you. Wikipedia is a good example of one. You know, that exists. So there is no advertising on Wikipedia. And so it's, I think,

not correct to argue that, you know, in order to succeed on the web, you need to be advertising to customers or surveilling your users. I agree that it's not the dominant form of business on the web. Obviously, I think everyone would agree that advertising is clearly the way that people tend to get to monetize their websites and things like that. But it's not. fundamental in the same way. Can I ask just because we're on the subject of Wikipedia, what's it like to contribute to Wikipedia? I imagine this is kind of like a messy process and there's probably so many things Dow governance could learn from like, you know, the nature of contribution to something like Wikipedia. But like, what's a day in the life?

What kind of things have you done there? You know, how does this thing actually work? I think people have lost their wonder for Wikipedia. But like I remember the early days of Wikipedia. It's just like mind-blowing that people would come together for free and write a freaking encyclopedia that is just like an incredible resource for humanity. So you tell us about that. I think Wikipedia is sort of partly what keeps me so idealistic about the web because like Wikipedia is one of those things that should not function, right? Like you look at it and you're like, how is that possible that people are just doing that for fun?

They're not being paid. You know, they're not experts or academics. But it works, right? You know, so that's sort of one thing that tries, it sort of tempers a lot of my cynicism around things where it's like, that could not possibly work. It's like, well, it kind of does. But yeah, I mean, I think as far as like a day in the life, it is a very messy process, especially on more popular pages or pages that themselves are controversial in some way. But it's sometimes kind of meditative in the quieter parts of Wikipedia. You know, if you find some random article on some really niche subject and you want to just like do a deep dive, that's pretty fun. I enjoy that a lot. But yeah, I mean, I enjoy, I think, all parts of it. The arguments sometimes are a little bit more than I would like to put up with. But, you know, that's sort of what you get.

What motivates you? Like, what motivates you to contribute? What motivates the average Wikipedia contributor to actually do the work? Because it's not tokens. There's no token. How could you possibly be motivated? Yeah. They've actually tried to do research on this because I just like, nobody really knows.

I think there's sort of this weird subset of people who just love doing stuff like that. You know, it's like the sort of born encyclopedist or like the born archivist almost who just get a lot of joy out of like collating data and making it accessible to people. For me, a lot of it has to do with just a really strong belief that like knowledge should be available to people as widely as possible without being, you know, stuck in expensive volumes of encyclopedia. or, you know, behind academic paywalls or behind news paywalls increasingly. And I think, you know, creating that resource is societally incredibly important. But, you know, I think there's a really broad range of reasons that people edit. You know, some people like, you know, in sort of a token-based model, they like to see their edit count go up. That just makes them happy inside.

They can't spend those edits anywhere. It's clout. Yeah, it's just like a cloud thing. But I think probably most people are just motivated by the end result, you know, that is. very fundamental. So spreading knowledge to the entire world and believing that that is an important thing to do, Molly, that's what keeps you contributing. You know, famously though, Wikipedia is blocked in many different countries around the world, right? Not sure that it gets through to China across the Great Firewall. There are other locations where it doesn't get to either. How important

in your mind is getting access to Wikipedia, a knowledge base like Wikipedia, to these places where it's currently censored. Would you rate that as very important? I would say it is. Yeah, I mean, it's impactful to be able to have access to that kind of knowledge. And I would say that the attempts to block it have been somewhat unsuccessful. I think a lot of people get around the Great Firewall to access Wikipedia. You know, Russia recently tried to block it and, you know, has also... Is it via VPN or how do they do this? Yeah, to some extent, it's largely via VPN. Or, you know, people will log on via tour or things like that. But, you know, I think that as a community, we sort of do what we can to enable people in those situations to access Wikipedia in various ways. There have been

attempts to, you know, create offline versions that could be distributed or to, you know, enable people to circumvent those, you know, firewalls to the extent that we can. Do you think that anything you've seen in crypto has a role to play in making things like Wikipedia more censorship resistance? I'm thinking projects maybe like IPFS, which is sort of a distributed file storage system, projects even like ENS, which is a decentralized DNS system. So you can go to kind of like a website URL and access it. Have you seen anything there that is interesting?

These are less talked about, I think, in crypto because it's not a JPEG token that could be pumped. But yeah, what are your thoughts around this? Yeah, I mean, I think the general decentralization idea is really interesting and important and has been, you know, far before crypto and probably will continue to be. You know, again, I don't always feel like crypto is necessary for decentralized storage, but I do think that, you know, attempts to make it available through crypto are interesting. You know, IPFS, file coin, some of those projects are really interesting. But yeah.

So far we haven't seen it. Molly, this has been a lot of fun. I guess last question for you, because as I said at the outset, David and I want to get outside of our kind of crypto bubble and maybe bankless listeners who want to do that as well. Do you have any advice for people in general in crypto, people that you've seen that are a bit maybe drinking too much of the Kool-Aid, a bit too starry-eyed, a bit too naive? Do you have any advice for them on how to break outside of their kind of information bubble? What would you say? Yeah, I mean, I think just being open to alternate perspectives

is important, you know, like I try not to read all anti-crypto stuff all the time. You know, I listen to podcasts like this one or to, you know, I read crypto media a lot. And I think that is really key to having a fairly healthy perspective on things. You know, I think there are really, I think they're probably more good crypto critics than maybe you do who are doing really, really interesting work. And, you know, I think I would just encourage people to try to just try it. You know, they're not boring to listen to. they're not trying to sell you anything. Well, maybe we'll get a few names from you after the show, Molly, and other crypto critics

we can bring on. This has been a really fun conversation, and thank you for joining us. I hope you didn't feel like you were going behind enemy lines on today's episode, but I appreciate you coming on a crypto podcast. Yeah, thanks, Molly. Yeah, I was happy to do it. Action items for you, Bankless Nation, of course, break outside of your information bubbles. You're probably listening to the Bankless podcast. Maybe it's time to also put a non-crypto podcast in your rotation.

Should we say that, David? I cross that out. Never mind. That's not an action item. Not after you're done listening to the five bankless podcast. The action item for you is to check out Molly's website. It's called Web3's going great.com.

You'll see a compilation of things that aren't going so well in crypto if you ever need to be reminded. And of course, guys, risk and disclaimers should include, as always, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is definitely risky. So is ETH. So is Bitcoin. So is D-Fi.

You could lose what you put in. You need to be reminded of that. Go to Molly's website. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.