Screaming in the Cloud - Web3 Ain’t All Its Cracked up to Be Molly White

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

About MollyMolly White is a software engineer and team lead. She's also a longtime Wikipedia editor and advocate for free and open knowledge, and has more recently become an outspoken critic ...of cryptocurrencies and web3 more broadly.Links:web3isgoinggreat.com: https://web3isgoinggreat.comlasttweetinaws.com: https://lasttweetinaws.commollywhite.net: https://mollywhite.net@molly0xFFF: https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF@web3isgreat: https://twitter.com/web3isgreatponzl: http://ponzl.com

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vulture. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vulture
Starting point is 00:00:37 to deliver lightning-fast processing power courtesy of third-gen AMD Epyc processors without the I.O. or hardware limitations of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just $28 a month, users can deploy general-purpose CPU, memory, or storage-optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across 5 continents. Without looking, I know that once again Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vulture optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems or bring your own.
Starting point is 00:01:15 It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever. Vulture delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. Screaming in the Cloud listeners can try Vulture for free today with $150 in credit when they visit getvulture.com slash screaming. That's G-E-T-V-U-L-T-R dot com slash screaming.
Starting point is 00:01:43 My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and it's spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means I reveal. Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Ravello has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not.
Starting point is 00:02:17 They're exposing a new talent pool to basically those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes but isn't limited to talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability as well as, you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone
Starting point is 00:02:56 overlap with what we have here in the United States. So you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service. So you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service. So you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io slash screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. For a while now, I have resisted the siren song of doing an episode covering the wide world of Web3.
Starting point is 00:03:47 So if you're deep into that space, you can rejoice because it's finally time to change that. Now, the other side of that, for at least some of you, is that my guest today is Molly White, who's a software engineer, but more notable as of recent days for running a collection of interesting stories coming out of the world of Web3 at web3isgoinggreat.com. Molly, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me.
Starting point is 00:04:14 So by day, you're a software engineer, which means you're already predisposed to writing things that humans find very difficult to understand. And now you're in your spare time, apparently, writing about Web3, which is a topic that humans find very difficult to understand. For some reason, you have a flair for telling stories about this basically impenetrable-to-outsider space in a way that makes it look, first off, simpler to understand, and secondly, let's be clear, patently ridiculous.
Starting point is 00:04:46 How did you find your way into this part of the world? Well, I think as a software engineer, it's a little hard to avoid the Web3 thing. You hear about it from your colleagues or the people on tech Twitter, or you see it in the news and it's- Or people behind you at Starbucks who won't stop talking, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:05:03 Yeah, they sneak right up on you. And so people, you know, when you hear about something that's supposed to be the future of the web, you know, if you're a web software engineer, I think it's sort of natural to try to figure out, oh, what's this thing? You know, I need to learn more about this. And that's sort of how I got into it. You know, I tell the story about how I've known about cryptocurrencies for a long time. You know, Bitcoin has been around for a while now, and I was just extremely uninterested in them for a very long time.
Starting point is 00:05:34 But with the sort of rebrand recently, I've sort of been forced, I think, to pay a little more attention to it, since it seems to be one of those things that people have to engage with, whether they want to or not. Or at least people hope that that is what the Web3 thing will become. I come from a background of being a grumpy old Unix administrator. And I've been around long enough to see the inevitable cycle where this shiny, exciting new technology of today is the legacy garbage I have to support in production tomorrow. And this breeds more than a little bit of cynicism, where whenever someone says, we have this new thing, it's all right, let me get out the checklist. What happens when jerks get involved? How is it going to break? How am I going to hate this thing? How is it going to
Starting point is 00:06:21 completely ruin my week? And people building technologies, and this is probably no surprise, don't generally like questions like that. And I get it, because they're trying to do something creative and build something that solves a problem that sometimes they're the only ones who can define, but also tends to be this sort of love with the technology where I see nothing wrong
Starting point is 00:06:44 with the technology I've built whatsoever. It's, yeah, you probably wouldn't. And that's okay because that doesn't bound itself to cryptocurrency or blockchain stuff. It runs the gamut from databases to messaging protocols to someone's sketched out version of an iPhone they wish that someone would build, et cetera, et cetera. No technology is perfect. There's an ancient place on the internet I used to hang out that had the motto of all hardware sucks, all software sucks, varying degrees and to different levels, but they all suck. And they're not wrong. I love aspects of the Web3 community. Their optimism, for example,
Starting point is 00:07:21 is something that I find inspiring. Their ability to stay on message is also incredibly, honestly, it's admirable. I just wish the message were slightly different. What is your take on how all of this stuff is, I guess, not just the what you just said. I think optimists have a great role to play in the software world. And I think cynics also do. And I sort of wish there was a to get involved in this stuff, I really admire and I think are really passionate and like really smart and, you know, have the right motivations. But it's a little frustrating sometimes to see that the optimism can turn into very aggressive, sort of almost protectiveness around the technology where they are almost unwilling to, you know, examine whether or not there might be flaws behind the product that they are almost unwilling to examine whether or not there might be flaws behind the product that they're hoping to build. And that's where I get really worried because I think in order to build software responsibly, you need to be open to the skepticism and the criticism and the questions. And it overwhelmingly has felt like the sort of Web3 community has not been,
Starting point is 00:08:47 which I find really worrisome. Spare me from the cascade of do your own research whenever you say something negative. It seems to be a pervasive ale of our society where you're just going to believe what people tell you. What, you mean legitimate experts who've been working in this space for decades? Yeah. What research am I going to do on YouTube in 20 minutes that is going to outweigh that it's, it's not do your own research. It's carefully curate the bias of the media you're consuming until you come around to my worldview. And that's not the same thing as research. I agree. Yeah. And it's, it's weird how we see that same thing cropping up in like
Starting point is 00:09:23 COVID-19 conspiracies and QAnon. And then it's like, and also crypto. Okay, that's a little weird. It's very odd watching the rise of this. Blockchain is an interesting technology. Absolutely. And this recent extension into non-fungible tokens or NFTs, the first time I saw it was relatively recently. And then it very quickly became impossible
Starting point is 00:09:46 to avoid if for no other reason than I keep getting tagged by brand new empty Twitter accounts doing replies of tag three people to wind up getting airdropped on this. And I sure do love the fact that Twitter can find no way whatsoever to stop this from happening. Lovely. And it's this, it's okay, looking at this, what is what is this like look at how much money these things sell for and i have extensive background in finance so i can spot it from a mile like oh yeah that that's a money laundering scam like wait that that doesn't seem fair like you tell me everyone involved in nfts is a money launderer oh absolutely not that's a terrible money laundering scam you need to have people who are not money launderers. Otherwise, the entire thing gets shut down and everyone gets arrested. You need to have
Starting point is 00:10:29 people who are not themselves criminals basically interspersed in the dominant party in this. So the rest of us can money launder. And it's like there's nothing new under the sun. And the idea that regulators are somehow complete naive fools does not usually pay dividends. And people have a long time to reflect on this in federal prison. Right. Yeah. And I think we've been seeing this sort of trailing regulation coming in a little bit. You know, there's a lag between when someone does something blatantly criminal and then when the, you know, the U.S. Attorney's Office announcements come out a year or two later saying that, oh, and we just charged this person with, you know, fraud or whatever it is.
Starting point is 00:11:11 I sort of every once in a while I read some of those announcements from, you know, the Department of Justice or the various other groups. And, you know, they'll describe what someone has done in the crypto space or, you know, financial fraud. And it's like, oh, boy, that looks similar to a lot of these projects that are just launching now. I wonder if anyone's getting a little bit uncomfortable reading these. The thing that I understand as well, that I am I am a cynic and I have been basically down in emerging technologies a lot, which means I've been wrong an awful lot. In 2006, 2007, I thought virtualization was a very niche thing that was only going to be suitable for a couple of weird workloads because how many underutilized computers could there really be in the world? Yeah, I was wrong. Then I said that cloud was absolutely not going to take on. And through about 2012, I was very anti-cloud because, oh, you're going to trust
Starting point is 00:12:05 your stuff on someone else's computer and give your uptime to them and their security over to them. It'll never catch on. Yeah, I was wrong there too. I thought containers were ridiculous and they are in some ways, but they're also the way the world works. I'm actually very bullish on serverless, which means it's not going to succeed in the market because I'm invariably wrong. Exactly. But people are saying, well, what makes Web3 or any of these blockchain technologies any different than all the other things that I was wrong about? And my feeling around this is that at least I could understand with those other technologies what the problem they were setting out to solve was. It continues to shift depending upon the narrative line that people are pushing on this. And I also remember the response I got
Starting point is 00:12:46 in every case previously, which was, you'll see it sooner or later. It'll be fine. There was never this urgency baked into it of you have to get in now or you're going to lose out and be poor forever. And I was extraordinarily gullible growing up. So when I see this, it's like, okay,
Starting point is 00:13:04 when you're trying to pressure me to doing something, it's because you're deriving some benefit if I do. And I'm very cynical these days, perhaps unfairly so. When you grow up being constantly made to fall for pranks and whatnot, because you have no sense of guile, then great, you sort of have an overreaction the other direction. It's mostly served me well.
Starting point is 00:13:25 But I look at this and, okay, ignoring the entire bubble of that ecosystem, and I'm hoping you have an answer for this, what is the real world problem that I, as an individual or as a business, have that Web3 solves for me? Well, it's been great for ransomware. So if you're doing that. Oh, yes. Yeah, no, I have a very similar feeling to this around, you know. Ransomware is ridiculous, but there's already ways to do that. It's like, we're going to take your data and we're not going to give it back to you unless you pay us enormous piles of money.
Starting point is 00:14:00 Yeah, that's called cloud egress charges. It's been done and it's a lot less computationally intensive. I'm mostly kidding, but not entirely. And yeah, it's so much easier now to wind up extorting money from people through this thing. Yeah, I don't find that often to be a feature. And frankly, people who do, I don't really want them within a thousand miles of me. Right. Yeah. And I mean, I think a lot of the problems, you'll even see people saying this, you know, with very thin veils of legitimacy, but a lot of people are basically saying, well, we want to do something that we can't do with traditional money because it's regulated. And so seeing that it's like, really?
Starting point is 00:14:40 You know, the regulation. What are you trying to do over there, buddy? And yes, I admit there are certain things that I find obnoxious about the way that in, you know, non-crypto society that we deal with money and the challenges we have with it. Some of the fees attached to things, some of the way that it takes. Wow, we could send messages at the speed of thought in real time, but it still takes how long for a payment to clear through these systems? I get it. There are reasons the things are the way that they are, but it all mostly works to be clear. Are there opportunities for improvement? Absolutely. Do I think that the way to do that is to basically come up with an entirely new form of money? Maybe if you're starting from scratch, but I kind of have a hard time accepting that it's going to work that way for everyone.
Starting point is 00:15:26 Right. And I also think there's sort of this pervasive issue with a lot of the that there's fees or that, you know, there are people who are making an enormous amount of money off of people just trying to send small amounts of money. Like, I get that. And I get that you might want to solve those problems. But overwhelmingly, it seems like there's sort of this opinion of like, okay, so we have this bad thing now. We have this different thing here. So this different thing has to be better than this bad thing. And it's like, no, no, no, no, wait, hang on. It's possible to like replace a bad thing with something that's worse. And I think we need to consider that what we're trying to do here looks a lot like that.
Starting point is 00:16:16 And so, you know, people are talking about, you know, oh, we'll bank the unbanked. They don't have access to banking. And so we'll fix that with blockchains. And it's like, no, I think what we'll do actually with the blockchain is we'll probably end up scamming the unbanked because this place is totally unregulated and regulations actually protect people a lot of the time. You know, so that I think that's really worrisome. The sort of just idea that we have something different and so it's better. The thing that always catches my eye when people talk about this, oh, it's the new form of money. It's going to solve all of the social injustice problems.
Starting point is 00:16:54 Okay, maybe I stumbled upon this secret hidden community of altruists that are out there. But generally speaking, looking at the broad sweep of human behavior, you can make a few observations. And one of them is that the rich generally do not desire company. And the idea of, oh, this is going to magically fix systemic inequality, I don't know that that's necessarily true. And a lot of the, say what you will about problems with the existing financial regulations that are out there. If I screw up and I accidentally wind up doing a wire transfer of rent or for buying a car to the wrong account, there are established ways that that gets reversed.
Starting point is 00:17:36 And between large institutions, it's basically a phone call, a letter, and it gets done within a day or so. Whereas with crypto, it doesn't. It sucked to be you. And that just becomes, well, is there any recourse? None. Right. That doesn't strike me as a feature, to be honest. That strikes me as a bug. Right. And I was actually, it's interesting. I was recently rereading the Bitcoin white paper because it's one of those things that people are constantly like,
Starting point is 00:18:02 well, read the Bitcoin white paper and you'll totally understand it all. And it's one of those things that people are constantly like, well, read the Bitcoin white paper and you'll totally understand it all. And it's interesting how in the Bitcoin white paper, they talk about how this new system will prevent fraud. But if you look at what they're talking about as fraud, they're talking about people illegitimately reversing transactions. So like, you know, take the example, you buy something on Amazon, you receive whatever item it is, and then you do a charge back and you then you have your item and you haven't paid for it. That is like the one thing that this, you know, person who came up
Starting point is 00:18:37 with Bitcoin is describing as fraud. And that's like the one thing that is hoping to be prevented. And it's like, I kind of get the idea that like, at some point, you know, someone scammed Satoshi in this way. And it's just like, this is what came from it. But it's such an odd perception that that is like the only kind of fraud. And that like, that is always a bad thing to be able to reverse a transaction. I find that really fascinating because it's just like, that's actually a really good thing a lot of the time. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vulture. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vulture to deliver lightning fast processing power,
Starting point is 00:19:20 courtesy of third gen AMD Epoc processors without the I.O. or hardware limitations of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just $28 a month, users can deploy general-purpose CPU, memory, or storage-optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vulture optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever.
Starting point is 00:20:06 Vulture delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. Screaming in the Cloud listeners can try Vulture for free today with $150 in credit when they visit getvulture.com slash screaming. That's G-E-T-V-U-L-T-R dot com slash screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast. I will defend the Web3 community, which I know is somewhat surprising, because again, my feelings on this stuff are nuanced.
Starting point is 00:20:34 But everyone says they have this massive problem with InfoSec and the rest, and I don't believe that that is necessarily true. I do not believe that the people writing the code that powers these blocks chain or however that pluralizes improperly
Starting point is 00:20:51 are somehow much worse developers than everyone else. But the incentives are radically different because if I screw up on some of my Lambda functions, great, you can get access to, I don't know, the API tokens for my last tweet in aws.com Twitter client. Okay, great. Now you can spam Twitter. It's not that interesting to people and it's not considered high value. Whereas, yeah, if I wind up breaking through this little thing, I can wind up getting, what, $200 million? Yeah. Suddenly it's probably worth spending significant time on security reviews. So I do think that folks are being a little unfairly maligned there,
Starting point is 00:21:32 just because the way that they're approaching this, it does not match the rigor that is taken and care that is taken to systems that in the fiat finance world, as they love to call it, that wind up haphazardly in those money. There's oversight. There is planning. There is testing. There are entire teams of people doing nothing other than InfoSec review rather than, well,
Starting point is 00:21:53 it's on GitHub. My job is done. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard people refer to it as self-paying bug bounties before, where the bounty is the money that you can pull out of these exchanges or whatever project you actually are able to exploit. And I think that's very accurate.
Starting point is 00:22:11 And I think you're right. I think that there's nothing that... I mean, I'm sure there are particularly incompetent developers in Web3, as there are particularly incompetent developers in any sector. But I do think that you're right, that it's just an enormous incentive to find any small bug. And I think also part of it is that a lot of the concepts that people are working with are extremely difficult
Starting point is 00:22:37 to sort of wrap your mind around. You know, this is a little bit of a tangent, but a lot of the attacks, we just saw three attacks in one day that all relied on something called a flash loan exploit. And trying to wrap my head around what a flash loan is, it doesn't jibe with current financial systems. And so it's really hard to comprehend. And I think it's probably hard for developers to code against because it's just a very different way of thinking about loans. You know, like a flash loan is basically a loan that you take out the loan and you pay it back in one transaction, which in real life has no purpose, right? There's no reason you would go to a bank, borrow $10,000 and then immediately give them
Starting point is 00:23:19 those $10,000 back. But, you know, there's no financial equivalent of a managed NAT gateway that winds up just transferring for every cent that's passed through it. I've seen stuff historically before they fixed bugs like this in credit card reward systems, where basically you can just cycle spend through and it doesn't do anything other than suddenly starts cranking your point balance into the stratosphere. So you could save up your point, your freaking flyer miles to go to space or whatnot. Yeah, exactly. Right. And I think, you know, that's the sort of same idea here. You know, people use these flash loans for all sorts of weird, you know, yield farming and just sort of banana stuff. And, you know, I think trying to code against
Starting point is 00:23:56 a lot of stuff, you have to really understand that thing, those things very well and not necessarily just be a good developer, but also understand the economics behind it and the incentives that people are, you know, chasing. And that's tough. I will say that you are far from alone in criticizing crypto, but I've patterned a lot of my own cynicism and trepidation around the space after the way that you engage with it.
Starting point is 00:24:23 And by what I mean by that is not that I build hilarious websites about these things that chronicle its shortcomings, but rather that you don't personalize it. You don't take the step that so many folks do and say, oh, this person is now going to work at a crypto company. Therefore, they're a sellout. Therefore, they're out to scam people. Therefore, they're just the devil incarnate.
Starting point is 00:24:43 And it's, no, I don't believe that either. I'm curious to hear their reasons for it. They don't owe me an explanation, and I'm certainly not going to harass them on Twitter about these things. But the idea that someone is somehow now working for a company that engages in this stuff, therefore they are now to be written off as a human being, is something that I just find distasteful in the extreme. And I've never once seen you cross that line. Yeah, I also really disagree with that, which, you know, may be controversial to some of my fellow skeptics, but I think we can agree to disagree on that. I don't think that it is,
Starting point is 00:25:22 you know, I think that people have very good reasons for going to work for companies that I don't necessarily personally agree with, you know, and I think there are a lot of examples of people who work for companies in spaces that are, you know, look at the recent exposes around Facebook or, you know, all that, all those things. You know, there are people who work for defense companies, which I don't necessarily agree with, you know, those kinds of things. And I think everyone has to do their own sort of personal math around what makes sense for them, where their ethics lie. You know, a lot of these companies, I will say, pay a lot of money. And I can't necessarily fault someone for needing to pay the bills, right? Even if it means working for a company that I think is maybe not the best. But I used to give people who work to Facebook tremendous amounts of crap. I don't do that anymore.
Starting point is 00:26:17 I was wrong. I'm not going to personally harangue people for where they work. You never know someone's individual situation. I'm not apologizing for the company. I want to do no business with them, but I will no longer be going after people individually because they work there. Because until you walk a mile in someone's shoes,
Starting point is 00:26:34 you don't know what's going on there. Right. And I also think there's just not much point to it, right? If we want to hold Facebook to account, for example, I don't think going after some software engineer or customer support rep or whatever is going to make any difference other than making their life particularly unpleasant. And, you know, that I think applies to the Web3 crypto space as well. You know, I will absolutely dunk on someone who I think is, you know, malicious and scammy and taking advantage of people.
Starting point is 00:27:08 And I will say the same things about companies that are doing that. But I do think that there are very well-intentioned people who are working in this space for a ton of different reasons. It's, you know, personal curiosity. Some people just aren't convinced yet that, you know, some people think this could do a lot of good and that they, you know, should engage in the space in good faith and, you know, go work for these companies and try to make sure that the companies are pushing towards good. You know, I don't personally think that there's much that can be done there. I think I think that's a tough angle, but I respect people for
Starting point is 00:27:37 trying. And I think there's also a huge amount of just I think a lot of the the hate or the vitriol that has been targeted at these people who are going to work for crypto companies is very selective in some ways. You see a woman going to work for a crypto company or a person of color going to work for a crypto company and their replies look markedly different from the white guy who goes to work for a crypto company. It's all congratulations and oh, he's going to be so rich and all that kind of stuff. And there's not so much, you know, hand wringing around whether or not they are a scammer or all that kind of thing. It's like you're only allowed to, you know, go and get that bag or whatever if you're
Starting point is 00:28:23 a white guy. Everyone else is held to a different standard. For people who look like me, the bar is on the floor. Let's be very clear here. It's good for you. Go after it, go and get it. And I, there is a, there is a systemic problem on some level that I think that we have not really grappled with as a society, which is that even well-paid software engineers still feel the pressure that in order to be prosperous and guarantee financial security for you and your family, you now also need to be a part-time trader and in various ways and invest, which very often is misused in place of what it
Starting point is 00:28:58 actually is, which is speculation or gambling. And That is the way to prosperity because we have survivorship biases. No one likes to trumpet their failures. It's the same problem we see with tech conferences. People get up and talk about, this is the thing we built and it's awesome. And you talk to people who work there. It's like, yeah, I don't recall that project going anywhere near that well. And yeah, we all tell these aspirational heroic stories of what we've done and we trumpet the things we're proud of. And it just, it isn't sustainable. It isn't something that I think we've spent a lot of time on. And this is software engineers we're talking about. Remember once growing up, at least there was the idea that, you know, you could,
Starting point is 00:29:39 there was this wild subversive idea that you could be a school teacher in a city and actually live in the city in which you taught. Now that is basically a fantasy. And we see that across the board. That's not great for anything. Yeah. And I actually blame, you know, economic circumstance for a lot of the crypto hype. You know, there are a lot of people who are in tough spots right now. You know, the pandemic has certainly had a huge impact on some people, especially people working in, you know, service jobs and things like that. Um, and so people are in, you know, pretty dire straits as a result of that. There's also enormous student loans. The housing market is bonkers.
Starting point is 00:30:21 You know, it's, it, there's so many things that are really making people, um, suffer financially. And so then when crypto comes along and people start talking about 60,000% APY and all this, you know, you're going to triple your money. You're going to buy this board, a benefit at a hundred dollars, and it's going to be $500,000 next year. People fall for that because it's enormously appealing. Right. And I think there's a lot of blame to be placed on the media for for sort of buying into a lot of that. There's been a lot of very credulous reporting, I would say, on some of the people who claim to make a ton of money off of these things. And so people, you know, when they see, you know, CNBC, for example, will highlight these, you know, people who were just scraping by,
Starting point is 00:31:09 they were going paycheck to paycheck, they put $50 into a project, and now they're millionaires, you know, and people see that, because there's no point for CNBC to talk about the person who invested their, you know, their rent payment into a crypto project and then couldn't pay rent because they lost it all. Or the person who took out margin loans and is now in debt to these various companies that are lending people money to gamble on crypto. Those are not the stories that make the headlines. And so people get a very skewed view of how many people are actually making a ton of money in this space and how many people are actually losing a lot of money in this space. And I hold a lot of, I put a lot of blame on various media companies for that. Well, take Twitter as an example. Yeah, I would classify
Starting point is 00:31:55 them in many respects as a media company. Imagine for a second that if every time someone tweeted something about AWS, like, wow, I got surprised on my AWS bill or, huh, I'm having some trouble with AWS Lambda. Suddenly 15 bots all replied and quote tweets and the rest saying, ah, this person helped me out. Talk to them or fake accounts with a, here's our support form. Please fill this out. It goes to a Google doc. It seems like the easiest thing in the world to automatically wind up detecting and blocking just because it is clearly keyword triggered. It is very obvious when it happens. And somehow it just, it keeps persisting. It makes you wonder on some level, well, it counts as engagement in users. So it makes the numbers
Starting point is 00:32:36 that we report on earnings go up. So I guess we're going to keep doing it. It just feels like on some level, Twitter has empowered a lot of this in a way that most normal places would not. Which, of course, brings us to the other project you've been involved with for a very long time, Wikipedia. Now, it seems like a weird thing to say, oh, yes, you've been an editor on Wikipedia. Yeah, so is basically everyone at some point, because it turns out it's a couple clicks away. You're something a little more than that, but I don't pretend to understand the Wikipedia structure. Tell me about that. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm a Wikipedia editor. I'm a prolific, I guess, Wikipedia editor, you might say. But I've been actively editing Wikipedia for over a decade now. I'm also a member of the sort of administrative group on that project. And I've
Starting point is 00:33:23 also served a couple of terms on what's called the Arbitration Committee, which helps mediate disputes among community members. So yeah, I'm pretty involved. How much of your involvement in that community has bled over into your, frankly, amazing coverage of Web3? An enormous amount. I think you can very, I think if you look at the entries on Web3 is going great, you can kind of see the Wikipedia voice in them. It's a little hard for me to escape that sort of style of writing because I've just been doing it for so long, and it's the majority of the writing I do. So you definitely see that a lot. And, you know, I've had a couple of people say things, you know, like, you know, how do you cover stuff in such a, you know, detached way? And it's like,
Starting point is 00:34:10 oh, well, I write encyclopedias in my spare time. There's obviously a lot more sarcasm and sort of personal bias in the Web3 is going great project, which is why I started it because I can't do that on Wikipedia and I won't do that on Wikipedia. But that's where a lot of it comes from, is that sort of that instinct, I think, that you develop as a Wikipedia editor, to sort of research and chronicle and record and share what you're seeing. It's hard to escape. I do want to call attention, though, to other long-form writing that you do, because Wikipedia, who wrote this? Well, the answer is always lots of people. But if you go to mollywhite.net and look at your long form writing,
Starting point is 00:34:49 it's pretty easy to understand who wrote this. It's not nearly as clinical and encyclopedic as you might expect from your description just now. It's very approachable, very engaging writing that reflects on topics in a way that only long form can and Twitter generally cannot. And it's great. You could read this and not realize that you're deeply involved in the Wikipedia part of it right up until the point you get to the end. And then you see the extensive list of references at the
Starting point is 00:35:16 bottom of the page because apparently footnotes and citation is a habit that you can't get away from there, but it's nowhere near as drawing clinical as you're implying. Yeah, that's true. I do take more of an essay approach in my long form writing. One thing I've really loved about Web3 is going to create is that you sort of don't need to necessarily know like what's a blockchain and what's an NFT and what's a, you know, distributed, you know, database or whatever before you start reading it. It's sort of approachable. You can read one or two entries and then you can go do whatever else and you don't have to do this sort of deep dive. But it also lacks, I think, that ability to go a little deeper into some of the problems or some of the really huge issues I see with the underlying technologies,
Starting point is 00:35:59 because it's, you know, it's very much a one hit and then you move on to the next thing. So I've started blogging a little bit on the side, I guess, to sort of go into a little more depth on some of my concerns, just both as like a technologist, but also just as someone who's been on the internet for a long time and who's been a member of communities.
Starting point is 00:36:20 You know, the Wikimedia community is very similar to a lot of the communities that you're seeing crop up in these Web3 projects, especially to do with the DAOs. And so I sort of have over a decade of experience in a community like that. And I'm watching a lot of these new DAOs who say they're coming up with this brand new model. They've invented this new form of governance. And I'm watching them. It's like, oh, you're about to step on that same rake we stepped on 15 years ago. And that concerns me
Starting point is 00:36:51 a lot, especially because, you know, with the Wikimedia community, there's harm that can be done by for sure. And it has happened. But there's not really financial harm that happens with a Wikipedia editor. You know, you're not buying to engage with a Wikimedia community, at least I certainly hope not because you're being scammed. But with these DAOs, you know, you're paying to engage with a community that is not taking lessons that it could be taking from Wikimedia, from co-ops, from mutual organizations. You know, they could be looking at history a little bit more, I think. Tech does this across the board. We're in San Francisco. We're going to reinvent and disrupt industry X. Okay, fine. Great. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. Godspeed.
Starting point is 00:37:33 And while we're at it, we're going to reinvent other things too that we think the world gets wrong, like how to interview people. And the common thing on Twitter is no one knows how to interview engineers properly. It can't be solved. Yes, yes, it can. There were multi-decade studies conducted at places like GM, Coca-Cola, etc. on how to lead to positive outcomes while interviewing and what to do. And whenever you bring that up, Twitter gets very angry about that because, no, that's different. That's a different time and a different era and the world works differently now. And great. Okay. Keep disrupting things, but you can save a lot of time by having
Starting point is 00:38:06 a conversation or two with people who've walked that road before. You don't have to go it alone. Right. Yeah. I think that's a huge thing. Kelsey Hightower has done a lot of conversations around that, around how he's doing incredible work talking about blockchains and crypto and stuff. And he's talked a lot about how it looks like a lot of these projects are sort of reliving history around, you know, he has a very technological approach to it. So he talks about, you know, the sort of security things that are not being considered and the, you know, the various infrastructure sides of things that are just sort of being reinvented without any sort of consideration to the past lessons. I think that's just a very classic, you're right, it's a very classic like
Starting point is 00:38:50 Silicon Valley way of doing things. There's sort of the running joke about how people reinvent buses every couple of years. Uber is like, we're going to make a service where a bunch of people can all get in a car together and drive someplace. It's like, oh, right, yeah, a public bus system. We have those, you know? I think there's very similar comparisons to draw in Web3. There absolutely are. And I want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?
Starting point is 00:39:19 You can find me on Twitter. I am both Molly0xFFF, and also Web3isgreat on Twitter. I am both Molly0xFFF and also Web3isGreat on Twitter. And then there's my website, Web3isGoingGreat.com and my other website, MollyWhite.net. I'll be at all of those. Yes. And for fun, I wound up pointing a domain over to you, over to your site as well, Ponzil, P-O-N-Z-L.com. It's like P-O-N-Z-I, but the I is an L because the crypto people can never seem to quite take the L.
Starting point is 00:39:50 But there you have it. It's not a Ponzi scheme. It's something different. It's a Ponzi scheme. Thank you so much for being generous with your time. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
Starting point is 00:39:58 Molly White, Web3 chronicler of our time and software engineer. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment telling me that no, crypto is not reinventing a bus because a bus can only run over someone once.
Starting point is 00:40:26 If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duck Bill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duck Bill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started. This has been a humble pod production stay humble

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