Tech Won't Save Us - Web3 is Not Going Great w/ Molly White

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Molly White to discuss the big Axie Infinity hack, what’s wrong with the New York Times’ Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto, and what Molly’s years as a Wikipedia editor have taught her about the problem with web3’s vision of total commercialization.Molly White is a software engineer and the creator of web3 is going just great. Follow Molly on Twitter at @molly0xFFF.🎉 This month is the show’s second birthday. To celebrate, we want to get 100 new supporters at $5/month or above to bring on a producer to help make the show.  Help us hit our goal by joining on Patreon. You can also follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Molly and a bunch of other crypto critics put together an (Edited) Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto.You can read Kevin Roose’s original Latecomer’s Guide here.Molly wrote about the $625 million Axie Infinity hack and harassment on the blockchain.Interest in NFTs and their values have plummeted in recent months.Tech Won’t Save Us has a new website. Check it out at techwontsave.us.Support the show

Crypto is financializing everything. And I don't see how introducing a financial incentive to the web will decrease people's hopes to profit from it and their hyper-competitive behavior that comes out of that. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And this month, April of 2022, is the second birthday of Tech Won't Save Us. I can't believe it's already been two years since starting this podcast in the midst of the first COVID lockdown. But it has been so fantastic to see the impact that it's had over those two years with listeners from more than 170 countries around the world and with a listenership that just keeps growing, that grew by five times last year alone, and that I hope to continue growing this year. Over the past year, I've done series on the history of technological systems around the world in May, where we talked about Silicon Valley, the Soviet Union, Chile, and France. And then in October, I did a series on the gig economy

around the world so that we could get insights on what was going on with the gig economies in those jurisdictions. It was so great, and I learned so much from doing it. And then earlier this week, I also launched the new Tech Won't Save Us website that was designed by listener and supporter of the show, Gabi Schaffsen, and it is fantastic. It has a retro aesthetic. You can find all the old podcast episodes on there. You can search them by keyword,

and we also have a reading list, so you can find a ton of great books to read on a whole load of different topics on technology that you might enjoy. I can't believe that we're already on episode 108 of the podcast, but there's still so much left to do and so many more topics to cover. But it's getting to the point where I can't do this all on my own. You might have noticed that the Hammer newsletter has kind of been on hiatus since the end of January. That's simply because I haven't had the time to keep that up while doing the podcast and keeping up with my other commitments. And so we've reached the point where I need to bring on a producer to help me make this show

so that I can focus on interviews and doing the research and someone else can handle the aspects of the show that I'm not as good at and someone else can handle it better than I can. And so that's why this month for the second birthday of the show, I'm asking you to become a supporter on Patreon. I'm setting a goal of 100 new supporters this month at $5 a month or above so that I can bring on that producer so that we can make the show better so that I have more time to commit to it and making it the quality show that you expect and that I really want to deliver. If you are not a supporter right now, I'm asking you to go to patreon.com slash tech

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won't save us this month, become a supporter or upgrade your pledge and help me hit that goal. Thank you so much. And now to this week's episode. My guest is Molly White. Molly is a software engineer and creator of Web3 is going just great. She also recently put together an edited latecomer's guide to crypto based on an article that was published in the New York Times that a lot of crypto critics had a lot of problems with. In this interview, we go through some of her criticisms of the crypto industry and the huge $625 million hack that recently happened of Axie Infinity, which is one of these play-to-earn crypto blockchain-based games. But Molly is also a longtime Wikipedia editor. And so I also wanted to know about her perspective

on the web based on spending 15 years doing these edits for free and whether the vision that some Web3 people have, that financialization and commercialization is a way back to the early web, whether her experience doing that editing for Wikipedia suggests otherwise and suggests that maybe there's a different way that we should think of the future of the web and how commercializing even more of our interactions is not the way to achieve it. So I won't keep this introduction very long because I already talked a fair bit about the membership drive that we're doing this month, but I was so happy to finally connect with Molly. I have such a deep respect for her work and the fact that she makes these criticisms of crypto so accessible to people. It's something that we really need and

that she is doing such a fantastic job at providing. So if you like the show and you enjoy this episode, make sure to go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us this month and help me hit that goal of 100 new supporters so I can bring on a producer for the show. And with that said, thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Molly, welcome to tech won't save us. Thank you. You are involved in so many interesting projects and I think are like one of the crypto critics that people need to be paying attention to, to understand what is going on here and all the problems that are involved in this space. So I'm really excited to dig into this with you to get into some of your criticisms of cryptocurrencies and you know everything that surrounds them. But I wanted to start with you know this game Axie

Infinity a play to earn game blockchain based based game where, you know, supposedly you earn cryptocurrencies by playing it. And the idea is that this game can like kind of become your job, right. And and it's promoted as though people in the global south can take advantage of this. And instead of, you know, working a regular job in the Philippines or something like that, they can play this game and do that instead, as though that's some sort of positive thing, as though that's contributing to anything in society. But we're recording this on Tuesday, March 29, I should say. So by the time it comes out, there might be more developments. But there's a story that came out this morning, that there was a $625 million hack of Axie Infinity and the network that it runs on. So what exactly is going on there? What have you been able to find out about that so far?

Yeah, it's really interesting what happened. So Axie Infinity is loosely based on the Ethereum sort of group of, you know, the Ethereum blockchain, basically. But Ethereum does not support much in the way of transaction volume. It's pretty slow. And so to have something like a game where you have to have a pretty responsive interface, you have to be able to handle a lot of transactions. They have a decent number of users, I would say, and so they have to handle kind of a lot of volume. They've done something called a sidechain, which is basically it's kind of Ethereum,

but it's kind of their own thing. And it's a lot more centralized than Ethereum is, certainly a lot more centralized than most is, certainly a lot more centralized than most blockchains hope to be, especially the more ideological ones. And so, you know, they sort of tried to make it decentralized-ish by having around nine validators that would control, you know, whether they would validate a transaction or not. And it turned out that a hacker was able to compromise five of them. So four of them belonging to Sky Mavis, which is the company that actually built the game, and then one belonging to a DAO that is sort of emerged around the game.

And in doing so, they were able to authorize the transaction of, it's like 130 something thousand Ethereum, and then another 25 million in a stable coin, which all together came out to be around $625 million. The craziest thing to me is that this all happened on March 23rd, which was six days ago. And they learned about it this morning when someone tried to withdraw a bunch of Ethereum and couldn't. And so then they looked and it's like, oh, it's all gone. And just the idea that they didn't detect this $625 million loss for six days is honestly just shocking. Yeah, absolutely. Like, you have no evidence of this, obviously. But do you get the impression

that they really didn't have a clue that they had lost $625 million in cryptocurrency or that, you know, they tried to keep it hush hush for a few days as they tried to sort out what was going on? Like, how does it usually work, I guess, when we see these crypto hacks happen? A lot of the time, a crypto hack will have a pretty enormous public sort of effect on a currency, like especially if someone is taking one currency and then transferring a lot of it to another one with some of these smaller currencies that can have just an enormous impact on the price. And so everyone will watch the price just suddenly tank to like zero, basically. And it's pretty clear what happened. In this case, the money was stolen from what's called a bridge. And so that's basically people put Ethereum in, but it's not Ethereum that's actually being passed around on this Ronin network. It's their own special fancy currency. And so there was no actual real impact on the price of the currencies that are suddenly were all unbacked. But as long as nobody knows that it doesn't really impact the price too much. So it's entirely possible, in my opinion, that they did

know about it, and they just haven't said anything. And that they were forced to make an announcement this morning, because if they didn't say something, then this person who tried to withdraw a bunch of money and couldn't might, you know, so they got out in front of it. Someone pointed out to me earlier, just like just minutes ago, basically, that the price of the Axie token has actually gone up a good amount in the preceding couple of days. And so there's some like, if you want to get really tinfoil hat about it, you could say that maybe they were like trying to pump the market to like absorb the loss or something like that. But I have no idea how much veracity there is in that. That's wild, though. Like, you never know, right? I'm sure something will come out,

maybe in the coming days. But anything can happen in this space, like with these companies, you can't really put anything past them, I feel like. Yeah. And I feel like either explanation is like not a great look, right? Like either they didn't notice that an enormous amount of money was just gone and that their whole system was just propped up by playing cards or they did notice and they just didn't tell any of their user base or their, you know, investors even or who knows who else. And like neither of those is a great way to handle a situation like this. You mean you don't just lose $625 million and not notice for six days? It's not a common thing. I mean, a couple million.

Yeah, but it's so shocking. And I feel like it it gives you such a good idea of like, what is going on that something like this can even happen. And the kind of wild thing, I guess, is that hacks of this size, like obviously, this is one of the more massive ones. But it's not really uncommon to see crypto companies be hacked, or I guess, in some cases, maybe it's not even right to always call them a hack. I'm not sure about the terminology. But to lose, you know, millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars like this, right? Absolutely. I have what I call the grift counter on my Web3 is going just great website that tallies up just sort of a ballpark napkin estimate of how much money is being lost in these hacks and scams. And the Axie Infinity incident was enough to bump it up above 9 billion.

So it was a substantial increase. But if you actually look at the total amount, it's like 6 or 7% of the total money lost. And my website only goes back to the beginning of 2021. So it's a huge amount of money. And this is one of the larger hacks. But it by no means is blowing them all out of the water. Wow, 9 billion back to the beginning of 2021. And then Bitcoin's been around since like 2009. And you know, Ethereum, I think is what 2014 ish? Yep. Yeah. And and so you know,

stuff like this has been happening since well before that. It's just that since the beginning of the pandemic, there's been all this attention on crypto on so-called web three companies that, you know, it's gained all this, all this increased attention. So people are noticing it more that the, you know, the values have, have gone up. They've certainly fluctuated a whole lot, but yeah, it's, it's just so shocking to see this continue to happen and then be told that we need to expect and get ready for this to be like the future of the Internet that we all need to get ready for that. This is the future of how we're going to transact and hold our money and all this kind of stuff. And it's like this is so insecure. And like the people who are involved with it right now generally need to have some, I would say, understanding of the technology.

It can be super complicated. And the idea that like, people who are not really technically savvy are all going to be getting in on this and are going to have to like, protect their money and, you know, their keys and like all this kind of stuff. It's just wild, like it's not going to happen. Yeah, it's funny, like anytime something happens, especially when it's something that happens to an individual rather than to like a big exchange or a big company, there's always people who are like, you should have taken better care of your keys, you should have used a hardware wallet instead of your, you know, MetaMask or whatever it is. And it's like, do you really think that the guy sitting on the couch watching the Super Bowl and seeing, you know, some Larry David tell him to get into crypto

investing is going to start just like self custodying his own like crypto wallet. You know, like, who are you talking to here? There are people who are technically capable of doing that there are people who are interested in doing the kind of like op sec and just general sort of security practices that are required for doing something like that. And then there's like the other 99% of the population who would like to be able to like log into their bank account on their iPad and, you know, transfer some money to their granddaughter or whatever and not have to worry that, you know, if they accidentally click a bad link, their whole life savings might be gone. It's just not a realistic thing.

And so it's really baffling when I see the sort of dichotomy between people need to somehow be so technical that they're capable of doing this. And also, this is the future of finance and everyone is going to use it. Those two things do not work together. Absolutely not. Like the idea of having my grandparents like figure out crypto and have to do all this stuff, like it's just not going to happen. Like it's not even something that I can imagine that I can say, like maybe there's a realm of possibility where this would happen in some way.

Like it's just no. Even online banking is like still pretty basic to them, you know? Right, exactly. And the idea that these centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance and all those folks who are making it easier for people to be able to do this and who provide really the sort of user friendly way of doing this. People talk about how you should never use Coinbase or you should never use Binance because you're just using a centralized exchange. It's against the whole ideology. They're having to, God forbid, comply with regulations, you know, and it's like, that's frankly not going to work. You can't just tell everyone that they need to use their own hardware

wallet and like air gap it. They don't even know what air gapping means, you know? I think I'd even have trouble with that one. But, you know, so we're talking about how difficult it is for people to really get into it, right? But that doesn't mean that there's not this big push for people to get more involved in crypto and to buy crypto and all this kind of stuff. And I think a really clear example of that is about two weeks ago, New York Times reporter Kevin Roos released what he called the latecomer's guide to crypto that purported to give the uninitiated and objective presentation of the facts on crypto and all the kind of bullshit that surrounds it.

But as I think it's fair to say, we've come to expect from Roos' crypto coverage, that's not exactly what he ended up writing. What did you make of that supposed guide? And what stood out to you about the way he framed crypto and the companies that are involved in it? So Kevin Roos sort of introduced his article saying that there's no good explainer for cryptocurrency. There's no, you know, it's either really biased YouTubers who want you to invest in crypto, or it's these really out of touch crypto skeptics who are making arguments that are 10 years old. And, and finally, there someone, Kevin Roos, who was going to come along and explain crypto to you objectively, soberly and dispassionately, I think were the words that he used.

But what followed was not sober or dispassionate. It was very, very slanted in favor of crypto being the next big thing. It was going to go up in price and people were going to start adopting it day to day and all this stuff. And so he did nominally touch on some of the criticisms and the things that the skeptics will say when people start to make those kinds of arguments. But he largely glossed over most of them and treated them as though they were pretty minor sort of hurdles, just a speed bump in the way towards mass crypto adoption, which is not at all what they are. You know, the concerns that skeptics have brought up around things like, say, scaling the Bitcoin network to

actually accommodate the entire world using it, or Tether being entirely unbacked, you know, he didn't even mention Tether in the piece, which is, you know, I understand as the average reader of the New York Times may not want to go into an enormous discussion of that. But like, you can't really responsibly just gloss over it either. At the same time, you also have like 14,000 words. So there's a lot of space there to get to things, right? That's true. Yeah. If someone had told me that the New York Times was going to dedicate 14,000 words to a quote unquote crypto explainer, I would have told you they were lying. But yeah, he went into just enormous detail and it was extremely positive about crypto irresponsibly. So. Yeah, I feel like one of the things that stood out to me was the focus on,

you know, what skeptics believe and what critics believe. Right. And as you say, there was some presentation of some of the kind of skeptical ideas, but in quite a dismissive way. And that didn't really get to the substance of those criticisms. That critics or skeptics are people who are dismissing the technology instead of seriously engaging with the problems with it and actually writing really detailed criticisms of the actual foundational aspects of not only the companies, but the technologies themselves, as you have so clearly done and so many of the other really great crypto skeptics. Well, I guess, what did you make of that kind of framing of it? Yeah, it was really interesting. He went into this total sort of side argument around Facebook and the emergence of social networks and sort of big tech and all of that. And all of those, you know, sort of negatives that have come along with that around privacy and, you know, the access to enormous amounts of user data and all these things. And he sort of implied in that sort of

conversation that it was the skeptics fault for not speaking up about those privacy issues early on, you know, when we could still do something about it. And before Facebook had all our data or was used by practically everyone, which is not only a complete rewriting of history, because there were absolutely ethicists and internet privacy advocates and various others making exactly those arguments quite loudly in the 2010 era or so, which is the era that he was talking about in his piece. But it's so bizarre that he sort of dismisses skeptics of crypto now, while making the same argument that, oh, the skeptics should have just told us early on that social media was going to turn into a negative force. It's like, which is

it? Are we not being loud enough? Because I can be louder. But it was very odd. And, you know, it's another thing that I noticed in the piece too. And he actually kind of did this to both sides of the debate, where he would just sort of make hand wavy descriptions of, well, some critics say this and some skeptics say this, and then some crypto fans say this and some proponents of crypto say that without actually talking to any of them, as far as I can tell, or, you know, no one was quoted by name really on either side. There were maybe a couple of quotes of the pro crypto crowd. But it's like, if you want to have a detailed, objective argument of some of the pros and some of the cons and some of the arguments and whether or not those arguments are legitimate, then actually talk to an expert in the space. Why are you doing this all on your own? You know, you have 14,000 words, surely you can

fit in a little bit of external commentary, yes? Exactly. I'm not saying you should have talked to me. Let me say this. I think there are plenty of people more qualified than me that you could have talked to, but it's kind of just absurd to me that you wouldn't ask someone to maybe just read over it. And I've engaged with Kevin Roos directly, as have others in the crypto sort of criticism world.

It's not like he can't find us, you know, he knows we exist, but he wrote about crypto skeptics in the aggregate. So I'm not sure what the thought process was there, both for him and for his editor, frankly. Yeah, absolutely. And again, as you said, like 14,000 words, there's so much space to do these sorts of things, right? When you're given not only 14,000 online, but such a huge space in the actual physical paper to discuss these things, to really get it out there, to dig into it. And I think that if you're writing a latecomer's guide to crypto, that is something that the people who are reading that guide should really have to properly understand what's going on.

And just to come back on the social media point for a second, like this is something that Joanne McNeil, who's a previous guest on the show has talked about a lot, you know, how the narrative that we often have around Facebook is really distorted, because we like to think that before 2016, all of these criticisms didn't exist, which just isn't true. Like there were people back in, you know, the late first decade of the 2000s, writing about this stuff in the early 2010s, like all this stuff was was known and was talked about and was just ignored by a lot of journalists who are in the tech media, but certainly by the companies themselves. And so when you hear someone like Kevin Roos saying, you know, people should be louder or should have been louder. It's like, okay, maybe, but maybe part of the reason that they weren't so loud was that they weren't given

the platform to actually have their views heard because people like Kevin Roos weren't really interested in hearing them and platforming them in something like the New York Times, right? And so I think that's something that really kind of stuck out to me when I was reading it. Is it like these people weren't loud enough? Or is it that they weren't given the space that boosters were given to say, this is amazing, this is so great. And, you know, there wasn't really an interest in having that kind of nuanced discussion about it, as I feel like we're kind of seeing with crypto. And just to make one more point about that, you know, it feels like, as we've seen in the past few months, the values of these cryptocurrencies have dropped significantly from November to around January.

There was a massive drop in the values. We've seen reporting recently about how NFT trading and NFT values have completely dropped off in the past few months. I'm sure completely related to that now that the price isn't going up as we're constantly told is going to happen. And as Kevin Roos says, is going to happen. And so it does feel like, you know, a latecomer's guide to crypto coming at this moment when prices and trading volumes are down and interest is waning, feels like there's almost something more nefarious behind it, right? Using the biggest newspaper in the United States to try to send more people into the funnel to then be ripped off by the whales and the VCs at the top.

Yes. And that's one of the first things that we sort of touched on in the sort of annotated version of this. He points out the cryptocurrency ads that were at the Super Bowl, which had some big name actors in them. There were even previously big ads with Matt Damon promoting crypto.com and all that. And Kevin Roos points to those as evidence that crypto is achieving widespread adoption and is becoming a part of the mainstream. You know, everyone knows what crypto is or should and you can see ads at the Super Bowl, for goodness sake,

it's so mainstream. But some skeptics, you know, Ben McKenzie has made this point. He believes that the fact that crypto.com and all of these crypto companies are needing to buy top ticket ad space at the Super Bowl and get these huge big name celebrities to sort of promote their various technologies is actually a sign that the bubble has gotten to the point where, you know, they need new people to come in so that the people who put too much money in this have the liquidity necessary to get out. And, you know, he sees it as a beginning of the end rather than a sign that crypto adoption has suddenly become so mainstream.

I don't know where I stand on that. I can see both arguments. You know, it's certainly become a part of the mainstream discourse by all means. I mean, the New York Times, for God's sake, just published a whole article about it. But I think every argument can be seen through different lenses. And it probably would have benefited Kevin Rees to get a few of those different lenses when he was writing this thing. Totally, totally.

And I think it's really interesting that you say that because, you know, there was a period early in the pandemic and, you know, through the first year of the pandemic where I guess it was really easy to kind of get people in, right, to get people into crypto, buying NFTs, all this kind of stuff, there was all this excitement around it. And then we start to see that kind of plateau or fall off, or, you know, the number of new people coming in is fewer. And so then you need these ads with these celebrities that are going out into a more mainstream audience that isn't just really extremely online and on Twitter and stuff like that, to try to drag them in as well and say, look, you know, there's plenty of these people you've been hearing about this for two years. Why aren't you in yet? Why aren't you buying?

Yeah, the latecomers guide is I love that. Even though I would several times in the piece, he kept talking about how it was so early days for crypto. And it's like, which is it, Kevin? I don't understand. But as you mentioned there, you did put together an edited latecomers guide with a bunch of top crypto critics who are the kind of people that Kevin Roos probably should have talked to for this kind of piece. So how did that edited guide come about? And what was the goal that you wanted to achieve with it? Well, I saw Kevin's piece was published and there was immediately some notes on it from the crypto skeptics, I would say, around it was just like very puffy and basically an advertisement, it felt like, for crypto. And I was seeing, you know, everyone had a take on it. You know, every single person, it seemed like, was at least just annoyed that it existed if they didn't go into more detail.

And I was just chatting with some friends and I had sort of thrown the idea around and I was like, man, I just want to go through and edit that thing. My friend was like, do it. So I was like, all right. So I just copy pasted the whole thing, threw it in a Google Doc, and then just started inviting various people that I've talked to, you know, on Twitter, or, you know, I've known them through their podcasts, or they've done some really good blogging or whatever it is about crypto. And I didn't think anyone was going to agree to it. You know, like, it's a lot of work. It's a long article to read, and then going through and leaving comments and stuff. But 15 people or so

agreed to do it. And it ended up being a pretty spectacular piece of work. I think I was really happy with it. I thought it was fantastic. You know, I went through it in preparation for this. And it was great just to see like Kevin's words and the article, and then like all the little highlights and the notes and everyone's comments on it. It was I thought it was fantastic. My mother is an editor. And I think it's sort of in my blood a little bit to do that kind of thing. So it comes a little bit naturally, I think. Now, next Sunday in the New York Times is going to be the edited Latecomer's Guide. Yes.

If only, if only. Yes, if only. I think there are a few points that you have written about on crypto that I do want to pick up, though, because I feel like, you know, some of these things maybe don't get the attention that they should get or are things that we haven't talked about on the podcast with other guests who have discussed crypto. I want to start with that idea that it's still early days that you just mentioned, right? You know, on one hand, this is a latecomer's guide, I guess, in the sense that, you know, the past two years, it's been quite popular, and people have been getting into it. So if you're not into it yet, you're a latecomer. But then at the same time, there's this assertion that it's early days, it's still early in crypto,

you know, these companies, these technologies are still developing, they're still advancing, it's not matured yet. What is the problem with framing it as early days? Yeah, so that's something that comes up a lot. You know, it's still early, give it time, we're just working out the kinks, you know, it's basically any criticism, you can react that way to it. I get very frustrated by that, because Bitcoin has been around since the late 2000s, you know, 2009 or so is when that all sort of came to be. Ethereum, you know, the mid 2010s. And in technology, that's forever. You know, that's a really, really long time. If you look back at some of the technologies that were actually coming out in 2009, or 2014, or whatever it is, they look pretty

old compared to the stuff that we're looking at today. We're talking like some of the earlier iterations of the iPhone, you know, some of these big tech platforms were still coming to be and getting to be, you know, widely adopted, like Twitter was still sort of getting to be off the ground. And, you know, all these things that now look radically different from back then. So the argument that it's early days, and that we just need a little bit more time, they've had a lot of time and they still haven't even found really a viable use case for this technology, right? So I find that really frustrating. I also find it frustrating, you know, not only do I disagree that it's early days, but even if we take it on faith and agree, okay, sure, it's early days.

Early days is exactly when we need to be talking about the problems with the technology. I mean, Kevin Reese said it, right? We should have all been fixing the problems with Facebook back in 2010 when that was first coming to be a big player in the scene. Why would we wait until it's already a pervasive part of society and my grandma has her life savings stored on there to say, hmm, you know, maybe we should really do something about the privacy issues or the scalability issues or, you know, the enormous expense involved in sending a transaction. Why would we wait? That makes no sense. So I get I get really frustrated by the argument.

And understandably so. Like, I think you've made the point perfectly that it's not early days, but even if it was, this is the time to be criticizing it. And even if it's not early days, it's still a perfect time to be criticizing it always because there's still a lot of money flooding in. There's still companies that are trying to reach this point where they have a dominant position in a certain segment of the tech industry, I guess. We obviously want to ensure that if that happens, we probably don't want it to happen with these certain companies and technologies, but that we actually know what we're getting into if we allow that to take hold. And if there are certain changes or regulations that would need to be put in place first to ensure that it's done in

a responsible way and in a way that, as you say, doesn't exploit people, rip people off, things like that, that is really important. Yes, personally, I much prefer the regulation to happen before the ripping off happens rather than as like a response after people are losing tons and tons of money. But this seems apparently to be an unpopular opinion. Yeah, well, you know, when you have VCs in there who are getting unregulated securities, I guess you can understand why they wouldn't want regulations. But you mentioned privacy there. And I feel like one of the aspects that you wrote about in a really compelling way that I think doesn't get nearly enough attention is how building these public immutable blockchains into everything we do online,

not only decreases privacy for many people who will be using them, but also increases the threat of harassment with how some people can use these technologies if they really want to. And we can already see on social media that enables harassment to a degree that we're already uncomfortable with, I think rightfully so. So what do you see happening there? And how does blockchain even make that worse? Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways. Part of it has to do with the actual sort of currency side of things. And then there's sort of another aspect of it when we get into the web three world where we're talking about building every technology potentially on top of a blockchain. So to start a little bit with the currency side of things. So some people

are saying that crypto is going to replace traditional finance, or slightly more moderate people are saying that crypto will be widely adopted and used alongside traditional finance, but in a pretty significant way. And so if we sort of continue down that hypothetical road, where everyone is using, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum, or one of these big players to do their sort of everyday purchases, we're going to have to suspend reality a little bit about the usefulness of crypto as an actual currency, but like, let's just go with it. Anyone can see when you make a transaction using Bitcoin or Ethereum, it's all public, your wallet address, the recipient wallet address, the amount that you've sent, any sort of notes that you put into the transaction,

there's a whole text field there. That's a great idea. Anyone can see that. And so I mean, just imagine if everyone, you know, your neighbor, your mom, your teacher, your employer, the person who really dislikes you can all see every single transaction you make, every credit card transaction, every Venmo transaction, every wire transfer, every loan payment. I mean, everything. That's bananas, right? Like that alone can enable so much harassment. You know, if you've got a stalker, and you move to escape your stalker, and then they see that you're going to the same grocery store, they probably can figure out within a pretty decent margin of error, basically where you live, or God forbid, you have to buy a house using your Bitcoin,

then they can see a lot more, you know? It's really shocking just to think about the implications of that, right? Like, I'm pretty sure we've already kind of had the discussion about Venmo and how it had a lot of public transactions. And that's something that not everyone uses. You know, your bank account is not on Venmo. It's just what you use sometimes for, you know, sending money to friends and things like that. But then the idea that now everything you do financially is like a Venmo situation where everything is public. And I believe they've changed that now where you can make your transactions private and you have like no real choice over that. And as you discussed in your piece, there is also the aspect where people say like, oh, but you can keep your account or your code or whatever private. So people won't know that it's you. But actually, once you start to assemble the

history of someone's transactions, you can probably figure out who someone is, or you need to be very, very careful about what you spend and how you use that account. Because as soon as it's compromised, people can know everything about you. Right. And it gets back to that same thing around people self-custodying, right? Like not everyone has the level of attention to devote to something like that, the capabilities to keeping, you know, such a thing private. And not only that, but the technologies to sort of un-privatize a lot of this stuff are growing stronger and stronger every day. There are these chain analysis tools that are becoming available largely to governments and to very powerful companies, which is like, oh, great, let's go back to the government surveillance that we're trying to escape. But those are getting more and more powerful every day. And they're able to make links between these

wallets that are supposedly anonymous, but controlled by the same person that maybe the everyday researcher probably couldn't do. And so, you know, I don't want to account for the fact that my publicly available transactions won't suddenly become tied to me as technology advances, and that becomes easier and easier to do. It's just not feasible, I don't think. And, you know, people will talk about, oh, you can use a privacy coin that does some masking of this so that, you know, they can't see who you're sending it to or where it's coming from or how much you're sending. But overwhelmingly, we've seen these exchanges and these sort of off ramps and the people that, you know, Coinbase and these big exchanges that are willing to take your crypto and bring it back to fiat currency. They don't want anything to do with those because they can't see what you're doing. And so they can't tell that you're not laundering money and they can't tell that you're not using

crypto that was stolen from an exchange at some point and is considered to be dirty. So that's not really feasible either, right? Unless you are going to accept that everyone will always use crypto and keep it in crypto and that not only that, but the people who are accepting crypto are also okay with handling possibly dirty money, which history so far has not shown them to be, then what are we supposed to do here? It's either the publicly visible one, or the one that you can't use for anything. Neither of those is reasonable. You also mentioned there's the financial side of this, the transaction side of this, but then when the blockchains get built into this whole other range of applications, what's going on there? So people have started to talk about Web3, which is this sort of idea that blockchains will begin

to underpin the current web that we know today. So you'll have Twitter, but it'll be built on a blockchain. You'll have all these different things built on a blockchain. That's the big VC rallying cry. And let's say that a lot of people promoting these ideas of web three applications are usually using Twitter or discord or these like existing applications that are not decentralized and on the blockchain to promote all this stuff. Yes. In fact, discord is probably one of the most centralized and difficult to like own your own data. Like you can't even export a discord log. I could go on about that. But anyway, so people are starting to talk about taking sort of standard current technologies, but doing them on the blockchain. And that way, you know, all the buzzwords, they can be decentralized, you can own your data, all these all these big hand wavy things. And that's where I start to get really concerned. Because if you look at the

actual technology here, you know, the whole exciting thing about the blockchain that makes it different from other data stores is that it is an immutable ledger that is distributed. And so if you add something to it, you can't change that you can't delete it. You can't even shut down the computer that's storing it, right? Because it's being stored on these nodes that are who knows where. And so as soon as it's on there, you can basically consider it on there forever. And that's a really, really scary thing when we're talking about user generated content, right? So if I send someone $5 and there's a transaction saying that I spent $5, like probably not the end of the world that

that's public, that that never goes away. If I post something on social media, like, am I willing to sort of accept that risk that that will be there forever? And that's what they're starting to talk about doing is things like social networks. So I try to make this distinction because there have been social networks that have used blockchain technology for a while now. The primary example that I know of is something called Mines, where you make posts and you upvote things basically, and you get tokens in exchange for that. I have no particular issue with that. I don't like cryptocurrency. I don't like to engage with it. But if that's what they want to do, go nuts. And that's because they're not storing the content in the blockchain database, right? They're using a standard database, and then they've got the tokens sort of glued on as an

incentive. But people are starting to talk about using the blockchain to actually store the data itself. And that's the concern. Because if you post something by accident, that say, I use the example, you baked some cookies, you want to show them off to your friends, you snap a picture, you upload it to your blockchain social network, and you don't realize that in the background is that envelope you brought in when you picked up the mail that has your home address on it, right? That's an innocent mistake that anyone can make. Today, if you do that, you know, there's still risk, right? It's not good to put that on Twitter, someone could download it really quickly or whatever, but you can delete that and mitigate that risk.

If you do that on the blockchain, good luck. I guess you're going to move, right? Or everyone's going to know where you live. And that's like the best case scenario. If we start to talk about like the intentionally malicious side of things, it gets even worse. We start to talk about people uploading doxing or revenge porn, child sexual abuse material, basically anything that Facebook's moderation team or Twitter's moderation team is tasked with dealing with. And it's some pretty horrendous stuff. And so, you know, I start to really, really worry about anything user generated

that just is not a good fit for something like a blockchain. And yet we're being told that that's the future of the web. Yeah, I think you've put it so well, right? On the one hand, it's the stuff that maybe you're drunk and make a post that you're going to regret later, and you just want to make disappear. But now because of the blockchain, you can't do it. But then on the other hand, you know, as we've seen, Gamergate is one example. And, you know, there's so many other examples of, say, journalists being targeted by people who don't like them online, women journalists in particular, and even just not women journalists, but just women and a whole load of other people who can get targeted by people have stuff that

they don't want online about them uploaded. And then, you know, there's no way to take that away because not only has someone else been the one to upload it and to post that online, but B, it's on the blockchain. So you can't remove it anyway. So you have like, your power is gone completely over all those things then. Yes. And I, you know, people talk about various proposed solutions

and they all basically are proposing things that are all sort of fighting against the fact that they've used a blockchain. So they talk about creating these distributed social networks that are, you know, the actual blockchain piece. And then, oh, but everyone will just have a client on top of that, that they use to make their posts and view their pictures and all this stuff. And those clients can handle the filtering. And it's like, have you seen NFTs? Because if someone steals your artwork, right? Very benign example. Someone takes your painting that you work really hard on and they mint an NFT out of it and you want that taken

down. You have to go and talk to OpenSea. You have to talk to LooksRare, who ignore these takedown requests, by the way, they just don't respond to them. There's like XYXZ now, there's Rarible, there's KnownOrigin. I mean, I could go on. The number of platforms built on top of just the Ethereum blockchain is endless. And so it's like, you want this person who is just doxed or whatever to go and contact 15 different companies. And even then the data is still going to be available on the blockchain for anyone who's, you know, clever enough to go access it directly, or to find a decentralized looks rare adjacent platform that doesn't honor these requests. That doesn't make sense. You know, what you're really advocating

for here is centralization, which is what you're purportedly opposed to, to begin with, right? You're talking about having a platform be the one to filter out the data that you're not supposed to see, which is kind of exactly why we had the blockchain to begin with. So what if we just skip that and went with a traditional database that's faster and cheaper and scales better and supports moderation, which is actually a good thing, moderation, that seems like a better option to me. Yeah, me too. You sold me. No, I completely agree though, right? And, you know, you have so many other good writing and

great points that you've made about cryptocurrency and blockchains in this space, you know, that people can find on your blog. But one of the other projects that you have worked on that I think hopefully everyone listening to the show has seen and visited by now, but if they haven't, they should go check out that is obviously your website. Web three is going just great where you chronicle so many of the stories about cryptocurrencies and Web3 that are things that we should be paying attention to that I think some boosters would say, oh, you're being too critical. You're only choosing the bad stories. But, you know, I think that's completely justified.

I would ask them why they only look at the good ones. Exactly, exactly. So this website, I think it's fantastic, personally. Where did you get the idea? And how did it come about? Yeah, so when I first sort of started to pay attention to this stuff a little bit more towards the end of last year, it felt like, you know, I'd be on Twitter and I would see something about like, whoops, there and used it as an NFT. And then, oops, someone, you know, tried to sell their NFT for $200,000 and they typoed it. So it sold for two cents or whatever. And it felt like I was seeing a lot of these things, you know, on Twitter or in the news or my friends would talk about it, you know, because they're kind of funny, right?

Some of them can be funny. All my apes gone. Yeah, all my apes gone, right? I mean, there are definitely some sad ones in there or some really concerning ones, but some of them are pretty funny. And so I was seeing a lot of these, but they were very sort of ephemeral. Like I would see a tweet about it and everyone would talk about it for a day and then sort of the collective attention span would run out and we'd move on to something else.

And so it felt like there was sort of no understanding of the actual frequency with which these things were happening and sort of the amount of money that was being lost to it and the number of people who were being victimized by hacks and sc through and see, okay, we had two hacks and three phishing attacks. And then there was that scam and actually see that Web3 is not going so great. It's actually hurting a lot of people. And one thing I really liked about the project is that it doesn't require the amount of sort of background knowledge that some of the longer form writing does. I've done explainers on things like abuse on the blockchain, we just discussed it. But like, in order for you to understand that you have to go into what's the blockchain? And why is it immutable to begin with? And what do you mean, it's stored on all these different computers, which is kind of a high

barrier of entry for someone who doesn't really know what's going on. And so showing instead, just sort of these quick descriptions of the ways that this is actually hurting people and people are losing money and maybe it's not the good investment for your retirement money that people have told you it is, I think has been pretty powerful in that way because people can just read an entry or two and then go do something else. But, you know, it still sort of drives home the point of like, maybe it's not all as good as the hype is saying that it is or that the New York Times is saying that it is. throwback vibe to a time when, you know, the web did have more like fun and just like dedicated websites like this, that you could visit and find out about a very specific topic instead of just having everything like on your feed on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. And so that's one of the

reasons that I really gravitated toward it when when I found it, I was like, this is just wonderful. Like, I love it. Yeah. And it's actually funny. I find that, you know, when I'm talking to people who are really interested in Web3, we actually share a lot of the same ideals. You know, I love the idea that anyone can just throw together a janky website and put it out there for everyone to see without having to sign up for a Facebook account or whatever it might be. I love that. I used to run IRC bots off my Raspberry Pi in my

dorm room when I was in college. And that's like a very web one thing that's very decentralized. I wasn't paying anyone to host my bot for me. It was like an $8 piece of hardware, however much a Raspberry Pi costs these days. And, you know, I love that stuff. And I would love to see almost a return to that where, you know, everyone can have their website if they want. You know, if they love collecting coins, that's maybe a bad example given this. They like collecting stamps, then they can make their stamp collection website just like they did back on GeoCities or whatever. And like, it's at least marginally decentralized in that way. I don't think that financializing everything in order to achieve ostensible decentralization, which you could really make some arguments against actually, you know, being true in practice, I don't think that is a utopian future. You know, I think that if everyone was able to sort of spend their free time doing whatever they wanted without feeling like the economic pressure to have to monetize everything they do, you know, if they can play that video game because they enjoy it and not because it pays them in cryptocurrency, I think that's a good thing.

I think we need more space in our lives for these types of things. You know, I'm a really dedicated Wikipedia editor. That's something I do for free, not because I am paid by anyone to write encyclopedia articles, for goodness sake, but because my weird brain enjoys those kinds of things. And I think a lot of people are not able to do that kind of thing, because they just don't have the financial freedom to do that. They're working three jobs. And when you come home, all you want to do is just take a shower and fall asleep, right? I think if we can solve those problems, we might be better off than if we solve the problems by saying, well, instead of having three jobs, you can have four jobs. And one of them, you're going

to be grinding Axie tokens along with your team of other people in the Philippines who are doing this for minimum wage or worse. I don't think that's the utopia that we're all going for here. And I certainly don't want to see it come true. But Molly, we can all be creators now. Wonderful. I did want to get to that point, though, about you being a Wikipedia editor, though, right? Like I completely I should say, I completely agree with everything that you've just said. That completely captures how I feel about this as well. And I would love to see a return to more of that like fun web one atmosphere where it's easy to throw together a website and put it up there for people to come check it out on

your specific interest or topic. Find your guest book. Yeah, exactly. Make your little counter go up, you know, on the bottom. But, you know, as you said, you are a Wikipedia editor. And I feel like Wikipedia is one of these kind of websites that comes out of that early web era, web 1.0 era, whatever you want to call it, that has resisted this commercialized pressure because it doesn't really work like that.

And it relies on this network of volunteers like yourself to keep the website updated to ensure these pages are up to date. And certainly there are criticisms that can be made of the way that model works as well. But as you said, one of the things that a lot of people who are involved in Web3 would say

is that they also want to kind of go back to something that's more like that. But their way of doing it is through this commercialization and all these other incentives that are that are built into crypto. What do you think of that kind of proposal? And do you think something like Wikipedia can actually exist this kind of currently decommercialized service, if you add in all of these incentives toward commercialization and making a token for an editor or something like that. I think this is one thing that sort of is common around a lot of these sort of idea people in the web three space where they see something that works, you know, at least works, if not, well,

we could have arguments about that. And they say, let's just do that. And it'll be better if we put a blockchain on it. And if everyone gets paid for their work. And like, if you think about that for about a second, it's like, sure, that makes sense. Everyone should get paid for what they do. And then if you actually think about it a little bit longer, or think about, you know, what happens when you add an entire economy to something like Wikipedia, things start to fall apart a little bit, right? The whole incentive model for contributing to Wikipedia basically relies on the fact that people are not paid to do it. We've had huge discussions among the community about whether

we should actually just completely outlaw the practice of editing Wikipedia for payment, right? Because there are so many companies out there that see Wikipedia as sort of like the ticket to legitimacy. You know, if you have a Wikipedia article, then you've got to be a pretty trustworthy business, you've done something reasonably interesting, you know, you you've made it. And so there's this sort of incentive that, you know, a lot of companies want Wikipedia articles, or people want Wikipedia articles. And if they have them already, they want them to only say good things about them. And so, you know, people hire PR firms or freelancers working on Fiverr or whatever to write Wikipedia articles that are just extremely biased, often don't meet the criteria for notability, those types of things. And it's been really disruptive to the project because that's

not the type of content that we're trying to achieve. We're trying to be an encyclopedia, not, you know not your resume host. And so we've talked about banning it completely. At least the English Wikipedia is currently allowed to edit for pay, but you have to be very clear that that's what you're doing. And you have to very carefully follow a bunch of different restrictions. And the people who do a good, responsible job of paid editing are few and far between. It's just a difficult thing because it's a very different incentive.

And so if you basically take that incentive that we're already trying to deal with and struggling to deal with, and you apply it to everyone who's editing Wikipedia, the whole project changes, you know, the whole incentive changes. People are not editing because they're interested in something. They're editing because they want to make money. And no matter how you try to monetize that, there's going to be sort of externalities of that that are just disaligned with the incentives of the project. So like if you pay per edit, then people are motivated to make a lot of edits, regardless of whether they're good or not. If you implement some sort of voting system, say to only pay for the good

edits, then you encourage people to game that system and conspire to, you know, give each other the tokens. And there's this whole new axis of complexity that you're adding to a project like that. You know, Wikipedia is one I can speak about particularly carefully because I've been involved in that community for 15 years now. But I think there are a lot of different existing projects that would suffer in the same way. It reminds me a lot of a lot of the Dow projects that are starting to come about where there's sort of ostensibly trying to do something for social good. So it could be saving the rainforest. That's kind of a big one.

They're going to reforest the Amazon. Or, you know, people have talked about organizing labor unions with DAOs, all these different things. They're like, I love that. I love labor unions. I love planting trees in the Amazon. What could possibly go wrong? But when you start to talk about a DAO, which is controlled by money, basically, right, you have to buy a token to get a vote. And then your monetary gains or losses or whatever are predicated on how well the Dow does. You've got two very competing use cases, right? Because then you have people who really want to plant trees at the in the Amazon, even if it's expensive. And then you've got people who don't actually care that much about the Amazon,

but are hoping that the number goes up on their token. And those are very sort of diametrically opposed things. It's like trying to be a shareholder in a company, while also trying to have that company provide a bunch of value for its users. It's two opposing things. You want the users to sort of have a good enough experience, but at a cheap price if you're a shareholder, because then there's more value in return. But if you're a user, you want the company to spend all the money on you having a good enough experience, but at a cheap price if you're a shareholder, because then there's more value in return. But if you're a user, you want the company to spend all the money on you having a good experience, right? So it's another one of those things where it doesn't work the way that they hope it

will work. And I don't think there's anything that would cause it to just suddenly work the way they hope, which is honestly something you could apply pretty broadly to a lot of the cryptocurrency space. Absolutely. In this conversation, I think we have touched on a whole load of different topics related to cryptocurrency. And I think I want to end with this question. I feel like Wikipedia is often used as a model for a lot of people on the left for, you know, what websites could look like, what the future of the web could look like in a more kind of decommercialized way. And as you've been talking about there, there are

people who are interested in crypto on the left as well. But as you say, that brings in a lot of incentives that kind of distort what is trying to be achieved. Because as soon as you add money and finance into things, then you know, people start acting differently, which I think is very understandable. But I wonder, you know, from those 15 years as a Wikipedia editor and from the past few years of paying attention to what's been going on with crypto, what lessons do you think the left should take from, you know, the experience of Wikipedia, but also what you've learned from crypto when we think about what the future of the web and what a web that is more socially beneficial, that is more oriented toward

public goals versus, you know, increasing profit should actually look like. Yeah, I think there's a lot I could go into there. With the Wikipedia side of things, I think the one thing that I wonder about a lot when I see a lot of these DAOs and sort of these communities that are forming is why they don't seem to have taken much lessons from existing communities. Because, you know, a lot of people will talk about DAOs as though they're this revolutionary new way of organizing people. And it's like, we've had those, you know, we've had co-ops, you know, if we're talking about the business world, there's cooperative organizations, there's mutual organizations. I mean, leftists should know this more than anything, that there's plenty of like non-stratified community governed organizations. Occupy Wall Street tried to do that.

You know, didn't go super well, depending on who you ask. But, you know, they tried. You know, mutual aid organizations are usually very flat and have community governance and voting and all that. So it's like, why don't you look at those and some of the struggles that they've had to comport with, and some of the things that they've put into place to handle those dynamics that can be very difficult, and apply those to what you're trying to do with your DAOs. But that doesn't seem to be happening very much. And to go again back towards the idea of a web where it's sort of less commercialized, where as a way of doing that, because crypto is financializing everything. And I don't see how introducing a financial incentive to the web will decrease people's hopes to profit from it and their hyper competitive behavior that comes out

of that. That doesn't make sense to me. And I have a lot of questions, honestly, for people who are leftists and who are embracing crypto. I think it seems to me that a lot of questions, honestly, for people who are leftists and who are embracing crypto. I think it seems to me that a lot of them are just hoping for something that's different from the existing system. And to be clear, like I firmly agree that there are problems with banking and the government in general and access to, you know, everything, basically. I firmly agree with that. But I don't agree that anything different is always going to be better. And I feel like adding crypto to all of these things is really moving us in the wrong direction. Because crypto itself is hyper capitalist. It is libertarian, you know, there should be no government intervention, you know,

it's a whole thing, there should be no restrictions on what you can and cannot do. It's a free market and the free market will decide, all this kind of thing. I don't see how leftists are looking at this and saying, great, we're going to take that, we're going to put it into our society, and then it's going to be a more just society. It's going to democratize access to wealth and to banking and to whatever else they think crypto is going to do. That does not make sense. There's a step in there that you haven't explained in which magically everything that's very right wing about crypto and its whole ideology will become leftist. I need to know more about that before I agree that that is what my future should entail. I completely agree. And I think if we've learned anything from the past couple decades, it's just layering technology and financialization on top of problems does not

make them better, but actually just tends to make them worse. And we should pay a little bit more attention to that. Molly, it has been so fantastic to speak with you to get your perspective on this whole range of issues. But also, you know, the projects that you've been working on with the website that you put together with the edited version of the latecomers guide that you helped to assemble. It's really fantastic to see the work that you're doing and how you are contributing and making criticism of cryptocurrencies accessible to people. So yeah, it's really fantastic. Keep up the great work. And thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks so much for having me.

Molly White is a software engineer and creator of Web3 is going just great. You can follow her on Twitter at Molly0xFFF. You can also follow me at at Paris marks and you can follow the show at at tech won't save us. Tech won't save us is part of the Harbinger media network, and you can find out more about that at Harbinger media network.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week and to help us hit our April goal of getting a hundred new supporters to bring on a producer, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.