'Unconvincing Bible For Blockchain Solutionists'

Molly White of Web3 is Going Great fame reviews Read Write Own, a book by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz lead crypto partner Chris Dixon. According to its own description, the book seeks to offer an exploration of "the power of blockchains to reshape the future of the internet." Writes White: After three chapters in which Dixon provides a (rather revisionist) history of the web to date, explains the mechanics of blockchains, and goes over the types of things one might theoretically be able to do with a blockchain, we are left with "Part Four: Here and Now", then the final "Part Five: What's Next". The name of Part Four suggests that he will perhaps lay out a list of blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real problems. Dixon speaks of how in the early days of "web1", or the "read era" (a period he defines as 1990-2005), "anyone could type a few words into a web browser and read about almost any topic through websites". This completely ignores that few people -- hardly just "anyone" -- had access to a computer, much less a computer with internet access, in that time. By 2005, around 16% of people globally were online. This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the "casino" projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making "ethical entrepreneurs ... afraid to build products" in the United States. In fact, throughout the entire book, Dixon fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale. The closest he ever comes is when he speaks of how "for decades, technologists have dreamed of building a grassroots internet access provider". He describes one project that "got further than anyone else": Helium. He's right, as long as you ignore the fact that Helium was providing LoRaWAN, not Internet, that by the time he was writing his book Helium hotspots had long since passed the phase where they might generate even enough tokens for their operators to merely break even, and that the network was pulling in somewhere around $1,150 in usage fees a month despite the company being valued at $1.2 billion. Oh, and that the company had widely lied to the public about its supposed big-name clients, and that its executives have been accused of hoarding the project's token to enrich themselves. But hey, a16z sunk millions into Helium (a fact Dixon never mentions), so might as well try to drum up some new interest! Further reading: How Tech Firms Made a Crypto-Boosting Book an NYT Best Seller by Gaming the System.

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