144 - Web3 Is Going Great!! with Molly White
Bankless
Bankless
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2022
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the Episode:
https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-molly-white
After many episodes, we finally brought on a crypto skeptic, Molly White! We brought Molly on to take us out of our crypto bubble, to challenge our assumptions, and to steelman the anti-crypto argument.
Molly White is an engineer, public goods contributor, and an extremely articulate crypto critic. She also runs the web3 skeptic website: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
In today’s episode, Molly gives us her central claim on why web3 isn’t actually going so great, why she thinks tokens make everything worse, and why—despite acknowledging some of the good—Molly believes crypto is a net negative to the world…and probably will be in the near future.
P.S. Keep in mind, this episode was recorded on October 7, 2022 — way before any of the FTX meltdown occurred this past week.
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Topics Covered
0:00 Intro
7:35 How Great is Web3 Really Going?
8:10 Headline Selection & Website Goals
12:50 Molly is Anti-Crypto
13:36 Crypto’s Promises
15:36 Are We Early?
17:35 Crypto’s Successes
20:23 Crypto’s Biggest Failures
21:50 Banks
26:22 Education Problem
28:10 The Future of Crypto
33:34 What’s Wrong with the Internet?
35:27 The Money Side of Crypto
37:38 Web2 to Web3
42:23 Starry-Eyed Optimism
54:04 Public Goods
1:02:00 Hyperfinancialization
1:05:55 Show Me Fix It
1:08:34 Environmental Impact
1:13:31 Crypto Idealists
1:16:52 Surveillance & Changing Business Models
1:20:40 Wikipedia
1:25:17 Decentralization
1:26:23 Advice For Crypto People
1:27:44 Closing, Resources, & Disclaimers
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Resources:
Molly White
https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF
web3 is going just great
https://twitter.com/web3isgreat
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Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | We're still here. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier, internet money and |
| 0:12.0 | internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to frontrun the opportunity. |
| 0:17.2 | This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become |
| 0:21.6 | more bankless. Guys, a crypto skeptic take today. Just some context for the episode you're |
| 0:28.0 | about to hear. We have Molly White on the episode, the title of which is Web 3 is going great. |
| 0:32.7 | David and I recorded this just over a month ago on October 7th with Molly. It's been in our queue |
| 0:38.2 | to get it out. We've had a lot of podcasts and queue. We had it targeted for release today, the |
| 0:43.1 | day that you are listening to it. So November 14th, I believe you'll be listening to this episode |
| 0:48.0 | for the first time. Molly did not have the context of the FTX meltdown as we're going into this. |
| 0:54.9 | So as you are listening to this episode, put yourself in the place of the crypto industry |
| 0:59.9 | a month ago before the events unfolded for FTX. I'm going to get into some of the claims that Molly |
| 1:06.4 | makes in this episode. But David, you want to give us some more context for where we've come since |
| 1:11.8 | our original episode, recording with Molly. Yeah, certainly. During this episode with Molly, |
| 1:16.4 | we met the person that can critique Web 3 the best. And Molly is a software engineer, |
| 1:23.2 | very experienced one. She's also a contributor towards Wikipedia. And so there's some Web 3 |
| 1:28.8 | valence, Web 3 ethos valence that she has, like contributing to the open comments of knowledge, |
| 1:34.3 | knows how to code. And she's somebody that knows the difference. And I think I really appreciated |
| 1:39.0 | Molly when she made claims that like critiquing the lack of scalability of these systems is not |
| 1:45.3 | the right critique or critiquing like the energy of Bitcoin isn't really the best critique. |
| 1:50.9 | So her critiques of what she was talking about go straight to the heart of Web 3. They are |
| 1:56.4 | real criticisms. And so that is the frame of mind that we can go into this. And like Ryan said, |
| 2:01.1 | we recorded this a month ago. We've just been holding in the pocket. And then the FTX debacle |
... |
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