“Missionaries build better products.”
– Jeff Bezos
Q: Do you need a new internet?
The business model that enters information into the World Wide Web is creating content, attracting traffic, and selling advertising.
But now, we often get better aggregated information from large language models.
Soon, most traffic on the web becomes bots and therefore impermeable to ads (and tragically uninterested in subscribing to newsletters).
This can damage the web business model. The best search results come from AI language models, but these AIs retrieve information from human-written content that could be present immediately if the creator is not paid.
(Side note: Please click on the ads on this web page.)
As more web traffic becomes “agents,” or automated, machine-based, and impermeable to monetization, the entire incentive structure for entering information into the web begins to unravel.
But Ben Thompson proposes an ambitious solution. Create an entirely new web economy where AI agents pay for information they obtain.
Thompson believes it is possible to “build a whole new market for content,” but this requires a new layer of protocols that includes “digital currency, that is, the mechanism of payments via Stable Coins.”
Unlike existing web protocols, this new protocol allows language model providers like Openai to “build an auction mechanism that pays content sources based on the frequency cited in AI answers.”
This “is the best way to not only keep the web alive, but also create better and more convenient AI,” says Thompson.
However, creating such a “agent” version of World Wide Web with Internet-native payments is not a small task.
Thompson is passionate about “MCP as a protocol layer” (a type of machine-to-machine version of HTTP) and “NLWEB as a mark-up layer” (a type of HTML in the language model).
It took me years for HTTP and HTML to become the global standard for web traffic, so I don’t know if I’ll see MCP and NLWEB anytime soon.
But if that’s the case, Crypto has a new mission. Save the internet.
Q: Is Crypto too far from what is worth?
In a recent discussion with Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, Lex Fridman states that Crypto is “really powerful technology,” but “a lot of people use it to make money and create these bubbles, and because (it’s) it’s far from what’s worth.”
Many people share his frustration, even within the code. This is mainly because Memecoin still accounts for such a high percentage of crypto activity and mind share.
(The actual Bitcoiner doesn’t even approve Ethereum.
However, Fridman has a definition of memo coins of value.
that’s right! Some of Crypto’s promises are My own Rather than borrowing it from an epic game, its outfit.
But to own something digitally, it must be tradeable, which leads to speculation.
Fridman appears to be unhappy with this. He wants Crypto to create a “standard definition of money,” but “let’s become this hype.”
Walking is a great line (and it’s impossible if you want to make “things” something that is not allowed).
“People try to buy and sell to make money rather than get closer to something that’s actually worth it,” complains Fridman, whose five-hour podcast needs to make a fair amount of money on him.
“Forget the money,” he advises. “It’s about exchanging valuable experiences.”
Of course, buying and selling things is an old way to make money.
But that aside, how do you allow people to exchange “valuable experiences” without having to buy or sell them?
You probably can’t: Making everything tradeable makes everything speculative.
I think that’s a characteristic of cryptography, but many people naturally think it’s a flaw.
Q: Is Trump bad for codes?
There were positives and negatives.
On the plus side, Bitcoin today created its highest ever high. The SEC has defended its enemy by turning its head over and over, legal costs in the crypto industry must fall by around 99%, and stubcoins can quickly become legally recognized and at some point they can even get the invoice of the market structure.
But it doesn’t really capture the oceanic changes in perception we have experienced. Economists last week pointed out that the crypto industry was “suddenly at the heart of America’s public life.”
Unfortunately, they didn’t mean that as a plus.
Instead, the economist warned that “the Trump family’s crypto frenzy makes it even more difficult for the industry to gain adequate support in Congress,” and that “Trump’s enthusiasm for crypto could be harmful to the industry.”
The argument is primarily about politics and there is much less political support for codes, so I don’t know how it quantifies “harm more than good” Lost election.
However, I think if Crypto was forced to be developed in a hostile environment, then in the end it would have been better.
Of course, it is impossible to prove counterfactuals, but it is impossible to imagine that the economist is right. And the single issue code voter may have voted in the wrong way.
Q: Is ideas important in cryptography now?
Recently, I feel that mission-driven is not very noticeable. Centralized exchange, centralized stubcoin, Bitcoin “finance company”, BlackRock ETF – Crypto’s biggest drivers have come a long way from Bitcoin’s Saipanpunk roots.
“Bitcoin was supposed to be a rebellion,” sums one blogger. “Instead, it has been redesigned by the ‘Empire’. ”
But perhaps the mission of the rebellion is just changing?
Crypto was a detailed look at building software without permission and centres around dark side intermediaries like central banks and social media companies.
Now it’s about building money-making startups to be acceptable.
Instead of focusing on Defi Legos, where cooperative complexity was the goal, there is fierce competition for Pump.Pump. Building an exchange to capture Raydium profits and Raydium is building a launchpad to capture Pump.fun profits.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s just not.
Or if you like startups
“The code is very different today,” Ryan Connor confirms. “Crypto has legitimate builders that are commercially oriented and non-ideological.”
Nonideology is good in his book. “In the past, there were people who had to spread everything to the fullest extent, they either had no history of building successful startups or they didn’t have a really important Web2 orientation to get the market.”
Web2 should be the bad guy, I know.
However, this is a normal evolution of early industries. Just like when the red hat jumped the industry of for-profit companies built on open source Linux.
In Cryptography, old-school ideologues can continue to build open source, decentralized, censor-resistant apps and blockchains. Also, new startup types can build their business on top of it.
