The other night I was sitting at the bar in my favorite restaurant, enjoying steak and martinis with a friend. It’s an effortlessly chic spot, hypercompetent in the casually reserved swagger that only New York can pull off. There is a fortune teller upstairs, strange curios lining the walls and a tall, elegant bartender who wouldn’t look out of place slinging drinks in Casablanca with a pearl handled revolver tucked under his apron. He always remembers my order but nevertheless takes the time to ask me what garnish I want in my martini. A twist, please. Always a twist.
My dinner companion is asking me about cryptocurrency, he knows I’ve been looking into it. He’s a photographer and dispositionally quite far from an engineer, but he’s bright and thoughtful and before long he’s revising his opinion of some of the most commonly held misconceptions about bitcoin and web3. Apropos of nothing, I feel a sharp elbow in my ribs.
I turn slowly, wondering who exactly that is and whether they want to fight or fuck. I’m greeted by a very young, blandly attractive Asian American girl wearing the ugliest shoes I’ve ever seen and a mean-girl grin that immediately puts me in a defensive crouch. I would have preferred a drunk guy trying to punch me in the face. She opens her mouth: “do you work in web3?”
Over the next 90 seconds she tells me that she works for a web3 startup whose product downloads peoples’ social media data and stores it on IPFS. They call this completely useless service “decentralized social media” or something, I don’t know, I was blessedly drunk. For those of you who are already lost, this is kind of like telling people you build boats when in reality you toss empty bottles in the sea and watch them float out of sight.
TO BE CONTINUED
-
Security relies on single key encryption - All code and data is immutable and publicly visible - Schema is predefined - Usage fees are very high, grow with adoption - The processing power of a high end refrigerator.