Web3: A VC-funded gig economy of securities fraud
I think it&#x27;s fair to say that most tokens are effectively trash, and there are many scams in crypto.<p>Relative to other speculative manias in history, crypto is a mechanism for mania and speculation. You can&#x27;t trade tulips on tulips. But you can trade crypto on crypto.<p>For example, in the British railway mania of the 1840s, many patterns occurred similar to today&#x27;s crypto frenzy, such as stock exchanges created expressly for the purpose of trading railway stocks and publications to talk about and advertise railway stocks. But railways lack crypto&#x27;s reflexivity because you can&#x27;t trade railway stocks on railways. Crypto mechanizes its own speculative mania.<p>But what&#x27;s the other side here? Does it even exist? I think it does exist. In my view, a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of crypto often seems to elude the HN community.<p>HN is a community of technologists, right? So what&#x27;s the actual technology here? At the root of crypto are two technologies, 1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run and 2) zero-knowledge proofs.<p>By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity, where you can send money digitally, similar to handing a $20 bill to a friend. And the transfers can include rigid, sophisticated logic that offers the potential to reduce transaction costs for many kinds of routine economic activity.<p>So, while it&#x27;s fair to say that most crypto tokens are effectively trash and crypto mechanizes scams and speculation, it&#x27;s also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history.