Hello, and welcome to episode 71 of Linux Downtime.
I'm Joe.
I'm Gary.
I'm Marmalith.
And I'm Molly.
Nice to talk to you all and welcome Molly.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
So we should tell people a little bit about you.
You are probably best known for web3 is going just great.
What is that exactly?
Yeah, so that's my website that sort of keeps track
of all of the examples of how web3
is really not going just so great.
I sort of was trying to get a sense
of what the industry was actually accomplishing
versus a lot of this sort of future casting
around what web3 might eventually become.
And my sort of overwhelming feeling when I started
to read about it was, you know,
all of these hacks and scams and things like that.
I was like, wow, web3 is going just great.
So that's sort of where the website came from.
All right, well, we definitely want to talk more about that.
But you are also a Wikipedia editor.
And you've been doing that for over 15 years,
according to your website.
Yeah, I think it's actually closer to 17 or something
like that at this point.
It's kind of forever.
Yeah.
So it is kind of free culture and creative commons
quite important to you then.
Yeah, I've always really cared about,
especially open access and just sort of free access
to information online, you know,
this sort of Wikipedia ethos, I guess,
has always been really important to me.
And so I've always been really involved with that project
and also just tried to push for following that sort of ethos
in my own life.
You know, like, I don't pay well any of my content
and I open source all the code that I can at least.
And yeah, so I would definitely say
that's important to me.
All right, that's cool.
Cause yeah, like this podcast, for example,
is Creative Commons.
And yeah, I try not to pay wall anything as well.
It just, I don't know why it just kind of feels like
not something I want to do.
I couldn't tell you why that is.
It just feels inherent to me.
Like it just, I guess growing up with the internet
from my late teens onwards,
just everything was free and just free in both senses,
not necessarily free as in beer,
but just kind of open access.
And it's kind of sucks when you see, you know,
people might link to an article
and then it's beyond a paywall.
And it's like, oh well, I guess I want to be reading that then.
Yeah, I get really frustrated when I run into paywall.
It's just like day to day.
And so it just feels really wrong to pay well
in my own content.
And I also just feel like it hasn't really been necessary.
You know, I think a lot of people are willing to support
journalists or writers or essayists that they enjoy
regardless of whether or not there's a barrier
to them actually reading their content.
Yeah.
So let me just start with my position that blockchain
is a solution in such a problem.
Cryptocurrency is a Ponzi schemes.
NFTs are straight up scams
and the whole web three space to me seems like either you are
a grifter or a mark if you're involved with it.
Is that kind of roughly where you are
or is there more nuance to it than that?
I mean, I would say there's probably a little bit more
nuance than that.
You know, I try to avoid saying that like,
oh, every project's a scam because then someone's gonna be like,
no, look at these guys.
You know, these particular guys are doing something really
benevolent and you just get really sort of bogged down
and that stuff where like my general opinion is that
a lot of projects are not necessarily intentionally scams
but they have sort of negative consequences on people
that doesn't, you know, it doesn't really matter
what the intent is ultimately if people are getting harmed
by it far and wide.
So my general opinion is that there is a lot more harm
than good coming out of web three and just the blockchain
space more broadly.
One of the things I struggle with with web three is it seems
like they're trying to lock everything down.
It's like, oh, you have access to this because it's allowed
via this site and it seems to be completely the opposite
of the open access and everything.
And it's just like, why would you wanna do that?
I mean, like, I understand there's financial reasoning
that people try to go through and do this stuff
but it just, it seems completely against the ethos
of like the open web and the way the web has been
since its creation kind of thing.
So I don't know, it just rubs me the wrong way completely.
I really dislike artificial scarcity and the idea
that everything should be monetized.
Some things don't need to be monetized.
Some things should be open, but that seems to be,
like you said, counter to everything that they're going for.
Yeah, it's strange because I feel like a lot of people
who are sort of in the web three movement
as much as you could call it one really talk about open access
and open source and all these sort of concepts
that we're familiar with.
And then they sort of gate everything financially
where you have to own the token to be able to participate
which it seems really contradictory to me honestly
and really frustrating just because, you know,
I think that people underestimate the extent
to which owning tokens really does exclude a lot of people
from being able to participate or access
whatever the information is.
You know, people will say, oh, it's a token,
it's just a couple, you know, pennies or a dollar
or something like that.
And they don't realize that like that can be a lot of money
for some people.
And especially when you factor in transaction fees
and things like that, you know, it starts to really add up,
especially if people are living in, you know,
the global south or something like that
and they need access to something
or want access to something.
And they don't have, you know, the wages that we might have
in the US or in the UK or, you know, in various other places.
What about the environmental aspect to it?
Because that seems pretty open and shut to me
that blockchains like Bitcoin just burn a ton of energy
that they otherwise wouldn't need to.
But then the enthusiast, shall we say,
tried to throw out ideas of hydroelectric power
becoming economically viable
and renewables generally being economically viable
because of Bitcoin being able to kind of even out the demand.
That has never really seemed logical to me.
You must have heard that argument, right?
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of the arguments around Bitcoin's energy
consumption being a good thing are pretty ludicrous
to anybody who is not a Bitcoiner.
But I think they stem from the fact that Bitcoiners
come at it from the argument that Bitcoin is good.
And so they have to sort of justify the position somehow.
And so they often will sort of tie themselves in knots
coming up with these arguments that, oh, you know,
this enormous, useless energy demand is actually good
for the grid or something like that.
I don't think any of them are really compelling.
It's just sort of a way to try to move the goalposts a little bit
when it comes to the fact that Bitcoin burns
just an enormous amount of electricity.
I like to point out now that not all blockchains do that, I guess.
And there are some that are not as disastrous as Bitcoin,
but you really can't overlook the energy consumption
and the waste of Bitcoin.
We get Ethereum, for example,
switched recently after a long time debating it
and, you know, going back and forth on it
to proof of stake rather than proof of work.
Is that really an improvement?
In terms of the environmental cost it is, you know,
the change there is pretty immense as far as
how much electricity it was using.
It was very similar to Bitcoin and now it's, you know,
marginal on the scale of other types of web services, I would say.
But there are trade-offs that are made when you switch
from something like proof of work to proof of stake,
which is partly why Bitcoiners are so opposed to the idea of doing so
with Bitcoin.
They worry about security issues and centralization issues
and things like that that can be made worse by proof of stake.
And one of the things they purport is that
blockchains and cryptocurrencies as a whole
promote democratization of finance,
but proof of stake just completely goes around that.
You can't get in unless you have something to stake
and some people don't.
Yeah, I mean, you can't become a validator without having
something to stake is very accurate.
Although I would argue that proof of work is
similarly difficult to become involved in because, you know,
it used to be you could mine some Bitcoin on a laptop
and your basement and now you have to have ASICs
and, you know, the very specialized hardware
and access to electricity and things like that.
So there are similar barriers in place there too.
And what about this idea that you've got Bitcoin,
which is legitimate, and then all the other
ship coins which are not?
Do you draw any distinction there?
Yeah, that's kind of a Bitcoin maximalist perspective
where Bitcoin is the one true coin and everything else
is just a cheap knockoff pretty much.
I mean, Bitcoin is unique in some ways,
mostly in sort of social ways, I think,
where it has this mystique because it was the first
and people really love it for that reason.
But, you know, there are tons of other cryptocurrencies
that are exactly the same as Bitcoin in sort of the code way.
You know, they're just forks of Bitcoin
and those are really no different other than adoption
and sort of this social value that's been ascribed to Bitcoin.
But, you know, there are things that make different
cryptocurrencies unique from one another.
For example, you know, Ethereum has a very robust
smart contract ecosystem where you can build all this software
on the blockchain, whereas Bitcoin doesn't have quite that
to the same extent at least.
And what about the Lightning network then?
Yeah, Lightning is the process solution
to all of Bitcoin's problems right here.
Yeah.
Lightning has its own issues.
So, you know, Lightning is, I guess,
for people who are not terribly familiar,
it's a way that people hope to circumvent
some of the issues around transaction speeds with Bitcoin.
So, you know, there's only so many transactions
that the Bitcoin network can handle.
Lightning is a way to make transactions much faster
than if you just did a normal Bitcoin transaction.
But it also introduces a lot of centralization
that you wouldn't necessarily have
with just the base Bitcoin network.
And there are a lot of issues around how it could scale too,
because, you know, it sort of relies on solving
what is an unsolved problem in computer science
in order to sort of compute the optimal paths
to perform a transaction.
And so, as a Lightning network grows,
there are issues as far as actually completing transactions
that are gonna become more and more prevalent, I think.
And I mean, I could go on.
There's kind of a long list of issues with the network
that people sort of like to just gloss over.
Well, please do, because I've heard from Bitcoin maximalists
that Lightning is the solution to almost all of the problems
that people throw at Bitcoin.
I think it suffers from the same problems
that a lot of these solutions have.
You know, you can kind of generalize a lot of the problems
with the Lightning network to problems that we see
in like the Ethereum ecosystem
with all of these layer twos that are coming out.
And it's the same sort of thing
where they've identified issues
with the core, you know, Bitcoin or Ethereum technology.
And so they're applying this second layer of technology
to the problem to try to sort of bandaid those problems
with what they've identified.
But there's no solution to the actual problems really.
So they're just sort of adding all of this clutch to it
to try to fix things that are kind of inherent
to the network, you know, around transaction speed,
transaction cost, network congestion, things like that.
And you see the same things happening in the Ethereum world
as our concerns with Lightning.
You know, there's enormous centralization happening
in these L2s.
Some of them have security issues
that are not necessarily, you know,
existing on the Ethereum chain and things like that.
So I think you just end up with problems
when you're sort of starting with a technology that is flawed
and you are sort of just building on top
of a flawed technology, just adding layer after layer.
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Where did it all go wrong?
That's what I want to know.
Did it just go wrong from the beginning
and was I just too dumb to see it
because I wasn't like super into it
but I did mine a few dogecoin early on
and a bit of Litecoin and traded that for Bitcoin
and I've got like a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin
somewhere backed up,
not that I have any interest in doing anything with it
but it was really NFTs that opened my eyes to it
and this was kind of around 2020-ish.
It was locked down.
Everything was going a bit strange generally in the world
and NFTs came along and that was like
just a freight train that hit me like,
whoa, this whole thing is just bullshit
because NFTs, right, yeah, let me just get this straight.
Our NFTs just a straight up scam slash money laundering
or is there more nuance to it than that?
Well, it depends very much who you ask
but I don't see a whole lot of legitimate potential
for NFTs besides just pure speculation
which was kind of the majority of the activity that we saw.
I guess money laundering is a use case.
I can give them that.
So, you know, you can't use them for something.
Yeah, but you know, that was the point for me
that really woke me up and I think it woke a lot of people up
especially in the open source community
because that's the kind of problem here
that all of this stuff is open source.
It's all decentralized.
It all checks a lot of good boxes in theory
but there's just that inherent problem
or a set of inherent problems with it
and I think that's why it was given a pass for so long.
At least by me.
And I feel really dumb for not seeing it before NFTs
came along and opened my eyes, I think.
Yeah, I mean, I think Bitcoin in particular
started out with some ideology that is pretty appealing
to people who are in the open source community
or who care about privacy or, you know,
it's sort of, it has very good stated goals around,
you know, allowing people to transact privately.
You know, financial privacy is not really a thing
in, you know, the US or in basically
any financial system at this stage.
So it claimed to try to introduce that
but I think it fell victim to the sort of economic forces
that were inevitable which is that
if you have this highly speculative asset,
especially one that is not well regulated in any sense,
people will use it for fraud and scams
and, you know, they will try to pump the price of it
at any cost in order to make a profit.
And that's what we've seen basically ever since.
You know, there were early days of Bitcoin
where people were using it for, you know, buying pizzas
and things like that, fairly innocuous stuff.
And that has all sort of gone by the wayside
where these days the primary purpose of cryptocurrency
is the naked speculation and, you know, the fraud
and that type of theft that is really prevalent
in the ecosystem.
And I don't think, you know, despite the very pure ideology
that it started with, I think it was somewhat inevitable
that it would turn into this.
Just by the way it was designed, you know,
there wasn't really a way for it to become a currency
in any real sense of the term
and any way for it to be used for, you know,
the types of activities that people,
I think, envisioned early on.
There must be a lot of the earlier projects
that started off stuff like Devcoin
which is supposed to, you know, go through and get pay,
open source developers, via cryptocurrency,
all that kind of stuff.
But then there's name coin, which I think is also dead now.
And now there's file coin, which is, I think somehow
is tied to IPFS or something.
I don't remember trying to keep track of this stuff
is not fun.
They're not easy, I should say.
But it's like, you know, you're talking about
how was it wrong for the start?
And it seems like everyone was like,
oh wait, there's a bunch of ways
that we can try to make this work.
But like none of them have succeeded, right?
And like you were saying, like Bitcoin has pretty much
succeeded mostly because it's a social thing.
And it's become speculative.
And I think that's really,
strikes at the heart of the matter there
that it's just like, yeah, it's just a security now
that people are going to speculate on.
Like regardless of what type of cryptocurrency it is,
that's just inevitably what it's gonna become now.
Because a bunch of people have tried to do good things
with it and none of them have succeeded,
at least as far as I'm aware.
Yeah, I mean, there have been a bunch of projects
that aim to use cryptocurrency to fund
some ostensibly good thing.
You know, you named a couple,
there's there's Bitcoin and other things like that as well.
But there's a challenge when it comes to using crypto
for that, which is that unless the goal of the project
is just purely financial,
then you end up with these competing incentives
where on the one hand, you want to do whatever it is
that your project is trying to do,
you know, pay developers who are writing open source software
or incentivize file storage or whatever it might be.
But then you have this other incentive,
which is get as rich as you can from these tokens,
you know, hoard them, drive up the price,
whatever it is you need to do.
And those two things are often, I think,
at odds with one another where, you know,
people will sacrifice the goal in order to pursue
the financial aspect of it.
And a lot of the projects that I've seen
in the Web3 ecosystem tend to sort of fall apart
at some stage when those two things become
just completely untenable in terms of them competing
with each other.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense too.
So like, I've gotten crypto donations
for my open source work, but like,
I will hold that stuff until the price is really high
or I really need to cash it out.
So, you know, ultimately, like you're saying,
the motivations are how do I get as much as I can
out of this cryptocurrency, even from somebody
that's actually receiving a donation?
And I think that drives home more to the point
that like from the start, this is all just a vehicle
to try to make money.
I actually had the opposite approach.
I used to have a few coin wallets listed on my website
and I received some sizable donations.
But my strategy was not to hold them and hope
that they might eventually become worth more.
I cashed out immediately.
So I, whatever the donor intended me to receive,
that's what I got.
So that's very fair.
Full disclosure, I actually worked as a demo
up on a Bitcoin exchange for about a year and a half.
So like, I've seen the swings.
Like I've seen them firsthand.
So it's like, all right, I see what it's at right now,
but if I wait, you know, it's that whole,
just seeing it and being in it full time for a while,
maybe it's just the ecosystem in general, right?
But it really makes you try to like get the most value out of it.
Right, it's made from the future cutting in here.
We're gonna wrap this up for now.
But there's gonna be a part two of this.
What happened was we ended up talking to Molly
for way longer than we'd planned to.
And rather than trying to cut it down
to the length of one episode,
I thought we may as well just do it as two.
So stay subscribed to this feed
because in two weeks, you'll get part two of the episode
where we talked about all sorts of central bank digital
currencies, AI and loads more.
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Once it's finished, I'll make sure it's up
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In the meantime, if you wanna learn more about Molly,
mollywhite.net is her website.
I'll put a link to that in the show notes
as well as her Mastodon where she's pretty active.
Also just a quick note to say that Amalith will be a self
southeast Linux Fest, which is June 9th to 11th
in Charlotte, North Carolina.
So if you're going along to that, do say hello to him.
If you wanna get in contact with us,
you can email show at Linuxdowntime.com.
So until part two in two weeks, see you later.
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