Since officially leaving Twitter, now full-time Block (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey has become immensely more vocal and opinionated about block
Since officially leaving Twitter, now full-time Block (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey has become immensely more vocal and opinionated about blockchain and cryptocurrency debates. That’s a really great way to get entangled in extremely heated online fights – and wouldn’t you know it, Dorsey’s aggressive dismissal of “Web 3″ as nothing more than a venture-capitalist (VC) enrichment scheme has turned into a vicious airing of grievances, just in time for Festivus.
But many new entrants who have become interested in crypto over the past two years are left scratching their heads. Web 3 is about blockchain, somehow, right? And Bitcoin is a blockchain – so why are Mom and Dad fighting?
Well, young ‘un, therein lies the long tale of a great feud. Think Capulets versus Montagues. Hatfields versus McCoys. Harkonnen versus Atreides.
Add to the list of history’s most intransigent clan-on-clan grudges: Bitcoin versus crypto.
Yes, Bitcoin will
— jack⚡️ (@jack) December 21, 2021
Bitcoin vs. Web 3
We’ll get to the question of why Dorsey thinks VCs control Web 3, but first we have to back up quite a bit. The Dorsey blowup is a high-profile eruption of a fight that has been raging pretty much constantly since 2013, if not earlier, and has really heated up since the 2014 unveiling of Ethereum.
On one side of this debate is a loose alliance sometimes confusingly referred to by insiders like Dorsey as “crypto,” but which might be more accurately dubbed “Ethereans” – not because they all use or build on Ethereum specifically, but because basically all of these systems broadly mimic or parallel what Ethereum does. These are the folks behind the recent explosion in innovations like decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), play-to-earn gaming, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) – and very notably, decentralized social media, which Twitter began working on when Dorsey was CEO.
These applications largely rely on “smart contracts,” lines of code that live on blockchains and set the terms for transparent, irreversible and open-access transactions. As part of these structures, smart contract-based projects often require their own unique token to use, and these make up a large portion of the crypto market on exchanges like Coinbase. “Web 3″ is, very roughly, the idea that the web should integrate more smart contract applications, and their various tokens. NFTs aren’t inherently reliant on smart contracts, but they’ve become deeply enmeshed in this ecosystem, and they’re now a large part of the pitch for both Web 3 and the metaverse.
And yes, Web 3 and the metaverse are structurally synonymous. Both at their core are about building front-end interfaces and systems that use blockchain assets, which can be shared across a variety of these front ends. That includes things like having NFT-based game assets usable in a variety of games, or tokens that unlock a variety of services.
(This is what makes Facebook rebranding itself Meta and claiming to build “the metaverse” such terminal, drooling idiocy, if not an act of outright malice. It’s just as comically thickskulled as a company claiming to build “the blockchain.” I mean, it’s right there in the name: “Meta,” derived from Greek, means “beyond” or “transcending,” in this case as in “transcending any single iteration of a virtual world.” Interoperability is inherent to the metaverse, and what Facebook is building will be at best be a shard of something much larger – though knowing Facebook, it will much more likely be a walled garden that smears on just enough metaverse-colored greasepaint to hustle the rubes.)
Bitcoin bites back
On the other side of this Stalin versus Trotsky barroom brawl are Bitcoiners like Dorsey. This loose but passionate faction believes that the original cryptocurrency is also the best cryptocurrency, or maybe even the only legitimate one. The most extreme Bitcoiners are known as “Bitcoin Maximalists,” and they essentially believe that Bitcoin’s sturdiness and universality will make it a shared global currency, with democratized access benefiting humanity as a whole.
Maximalists (though not all Bitcoiners) also believe that other cryptos are a threat to that vision (“an attack on Bitcoin,” as they often put it), primarily because of their compromises on decentralization. Some Maximalists feel that opposing other cryptos justifies, let’s say, a wide diversity of rhetorical tactics. Their willingness to go for the figurative throat has often led to Bitcoiners being tarred as “toxic,” probably one reason the backlash to Dorsey’s comments has itself been so heated.
While advocates are still working to define the precise benefits of “Web 3,” Bitcoiners have concise bullet points for the benefits of truly decentralized cryptocurrencies: extreme data security (you can’t hack the Bitcoin network), censorship resistance (anyone can use Bitcoin and nobody can…
www.coindesk.com