What did Marc Andreessen mean by this?

Open platforms, where anyone can build anything without asking a central authority (with their own financial incentives) for permission, allow for much more innovation. As an easy example, take a look at the App Store and Apple's 30% tax, banning apps which are too "similar" to others, and compare it to the web, where anyone can try most any new idea and potentially disrupt incumbents. Should be noted that before pmarca was a VC, he was an entrepreneur at Netscape, so he knows the benefits here and has lived through opening and closing of the web.

web3, to steelman it, has the potential to get us back to that permisionless world, and in fact go even further, by allowing data to travel with users. At 10K feet I like to think of web3 as "what if instead of one central Facebook with everyone's data, there was a global shared DB of everyone's social content, people logged in with the keys to their specific rows of the DB" In theory, this could bring about a golden new era of social apps - instead of counting on FB to provide the right API endpoints that you needed for your app, and then not banning or copying you, you could build true first-class clients to people's existing social data, with the exact same DB access that the original platform builders had. This would allow for all sorts of new social apps that users would love but aren't themselves viral or funded enough to re-create the whole social graph from scratch. Incidentally, it would also be very disruptive to the FANG giants and put much more control directly in users' hands.

I think it's important to take this upside case seriously, even though I am actually a big web3 skeptic. I think, in particular:

a) the scalability concerns are inherent to the tech (and PoS etc have their own issues)

b) introducing so much financial speculation on top of the space is discouraging people from doing the hard work of building real useful apps when you have these liquid tokens and can cash out just for hyping up a project, before you have product-market fit.

c) a global shared DB means the data model will advance and iterate at the speed of eg, the HTML standard, not at the speed of a startup; this means ambitious apps will just build their proprietary side data models to give users the features that aren't approved by the core spec, and if they capture enough of the mindshare, those features then become expected by all users, and apps that don't have them become second class - the third party has now taken an open data model and turned it into something proprietary. (this is basically the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy we saw Microsoft use against open standards in Web 1.0) You are already seeing signs of this with eg OpenSea adding other metadata on top of NFTs

d) most fundamentally - I think we're kidding ourselves how much the average user likes having a centralized authority to appeal to. Central authorities can ban the person harassing you from the site, reverse a credit card transaction that you authorized under false pretenses, stop supposedly-academic organizations from getting your permission for your data and then giving it to Russian propagandists, even censor ideas you don't like. Crypto early adopters are individualist libertarian types who think of all these features as unnecessary or even outright harmful, but I think a lot of ordinary people would rather be on central platforms with these things.

You're in the middle of a much longer, larger back and forth.

Web3 -- roughly blockchain enabled technologies -- have been both promoted and questioned and there is a debate right now with Dorsey (Twitter fame), Levie (Box fame), Srinivasan (Web3), Dixon (also AZ16) and so on about what the benefits are of web3.

The debate seems to have coalesced around this idea of centralization and decentralization not of the product (the web is already decentralized) or the distribution or production (web 2.0) but of the ownership of the product.

I won't opine on it myself, but Andreessen's on the side that people will want to use products from which they derive an economic benefit.

There are many counter arguments, and counter-counter arguments and so forth.

There are plenty of "obvious" benefits to permissionless innovation, i.e. people can act on new ideas very quickly and easily. DAOs theoretically allow for very easily managed crowdsourced investment.

What I do not see web3 addressing are the obvious downsides. Society had permissionless trade. Then people scammed others. Society had permissionless investment. Bad actors then scammed people. Permissionless is very vulnerable to code mistakes, as you cannot then go to a judge and get something reversed like with a regular contract.

Well... Like you don't need permission to make something like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. You just need somebody to buy it.

Of course it's not different from "didn't need permission to make salesforce.com", "didn't need permission to make Uber", "didn't need permission to make Danbooru", etc.

I hope this does not get lost in all the dirt being spilled onto "web3". But these are the things that make me excited:

* I really _love_ the Argent wallet. It is essentially a fully non-custodial bank in my pocket. As scalability and stablecoins improve I can see myself abandoning my usual bank altogether. Sending money to my friend over it just feels right - no middlemen, truly peer-to-peer and safe.

* I love logging in with an Ethereum wallet. It's the best login experience I have had. It shifts the responsibility of protecting keys onto the user but that has been improving.

* I do not buy NFTs but I really like them. If you are a user in a multiplayer game I think you should truly own your items, not the server you are on. That idea excites me. NFTs have allowed digital artists and musician even from Iran to make money. Sorare, the European football collecting game, is doing very well at using NFTs for trading cards.

* ZK proofs are enabling a few very interesting use cases. For example where a few people participate in mechanisms with privacy. For example you can have companies bid on a contract with the winning contract being revealed but nobody else's bids. Cryptography proves that all was carried out according to the rules of the bidding process. This can safely put things on-chain that are otherwise very privacy dependent. For a very interesting example of such private inter-company communication protocol check out Baseline[1].

* As digital identity improves and so does ZK research one could even more interesting things. For example prove to services something about their identity data without giving the actual data away. Here is an interesting proof of concept of this[2].

* Decentralized storage is still in its infancy in my opinion but can do lots of cool things. For example Mirror is a blogging platform that stores data on-chain and on decentralized storage platforms[3].

* Decentralized finance. From my crypto-wallet I can lend out or borrow stablecoins and get an OK return on it. But there is a myriad of systems emerging of options, bons, derivatives, synthetic assets, etc. Automatic market maker systems work super well for trading. Basically what humans do in banks the machines do more efficiently. I know people say that the "coins" passed around on-chain are bullshit. I don't want to argue with that cause its a quagmire, but the systems themselves are sound.

EDIT: * DAOs. I know its a buzzword nowadays. But having the on-chain communal bank and voting has made ye olde co-ops more streamlined and people are doing cool things. 1Hive is pretty much a company of builders. CityDAO buying and managing real estate together. Cabin DAO organizing creative retreats (and doing excellent research on organization procedures). OlympusDAO is a defi building collective that is ever creative with their products. ENS runs a domain registration system. And many more.

[1] https://www.ey.com/en_gl/news/2020/03/ey-launches-baseline-p... [2] https://github.com/kevinz917/zk-NFT [3] https://creators.mirror.xyz/

I was a crypto skeptic, and for the most part still am, but I also own a bunch of NFTs, and I see the value in it. What I own are tokens that represent ownership in a bunch of LLCs that own houses in the USA. Now you might say, "but shared ownership of houses has existed forever!" and you'd be right, but the NFTs have some advantages:

1. I can trade them on the blockchain any time I want to, I don't need permission for any entity to do so.

2. Anyone in the world can buy and sell these assets -- they don't have to US citizens or even hold any US currency.

3. Decisions about governance are made via the token holders having a vote.

4. Rent is paid out daily in crypto using smart contracts. Although this gets complicated because the rent comes in once a month as USD so it goes into the company bank account which then distributes it daily in equivalent crypto. So you can trade the crypto, or you can trade your crypto with the company for USD, but then you run into US banking regulations where you have to give up your identity and follow all the usual KYC rules and all the other requirements for foreign holders.

Overall it's been a positive experience so far, and I'm making good returns (about 9% annual return on my cash).

It's definitely made me slightly less skeptical of the promises of Web3 and crypto, but it also has shown me that a purely permissionless system probably won't work -- this only works because we own a stake in an LLC that follows US law and is subject to US courts.

My speculation: perhaps he means that the potential energy tied up behind financial regulation is enormous, and that web3 is a practical way to tap into that.

(If I'm correct about his intended meaning, you're confused because he's being oblique. It would be clearer for him to say "the enormous payoff of impossible-to-regulate financial products".)

Note that this is a 4chan meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-did-he-mean-by-this

I get the payoff from decentralization and permissionless innovation! That's why I build $5 VPS servers on ${cheap_provider}'s hardware and manage my own DNS records.

So what does web3 give me that's better?

He means to say there is huge potential(hand waving) to change humanity..

It’s a way to say he owns a lot of crypto and no way he’s gonna sht and on it.

It's replicating the things that the early internet based its success on: open protocols and decentralized authority.

Nobody can tell you: "no, you can't build that".

It's the opposite of closed platforms, such as the app/play store, facebook, etc. Where a central authority can set the rules and on a whim, shut you down.

It means he has a lot of investments in the space that he wants returns on.

What I truly don't understand is the ubiquity of self-validating platitudes in crypto and web3 twitter. It's constant and, to me, unbearable.

Feels like a shadowy handwave keeping you from looking at, or really thinking about, the "join us or else" mentality.

decentralization and permissionless is all fine, but the web3 as envisioned by the blockchain crowd is not decentralized and hence permissionlessness is illusory...

In 2014 he said that Bitcoin was the future of Micropayments. In 2028 he will be saying that some other buzzword is the future.

He has a crypto fund that he needs to make returns on, so he has been shilling crypto / web3 / "decentralized" / blockchain hard with his personal brand.

What he doesn't say, that I find obvious, is that open source has been doing decentralized and permissionless innovation for a long time. Many closed source companies are also building APIs and ecosystems around their products which is much better than in the before times.

He's borderline lying saying that web3 is decentralized. Only its expensive data layer is, and maybe a bit of smart contracts, though those are moving towards permissioned calling, because malice... who thought making your code easily callable with arbitrary inputs and subroutines was a good idea... smh

Investors hack your mind with ambiguity disguised as genius. It's just a guy marketing himself and his investments on social media. Why do you care?

What Marc Andreessen said:

> The enormous payoff from decentralization and permissionless innovation. I cannot believe more people don't understand this. It's so obvious.

What Marc Andreessen meant:

> The enormous payoff for a16z from centralization of our platform and fees from both innovators and users to run on on our platform. I cannot believe more people don't fall for this. It's so frustrating.

The cynicism on this thread shows how far HN has fallen since the time I first visited back in 2008.

MA is clearly talking about products that can be built with the technology. Believe the worth of web3 or not, there is no need to talk about his fund or indulge in bad-faith mind-reading.

This place used to be full of hackers and founders, now it’s full of the grumpy and the jaded. RIP.