All the perverse incentives that warped the previous generation of ad-targeted, user-tracking tech companies, including Dorsey’s Twitter, will come into play again if Andreessen’s vision of crypto is realized.

In the past decade and a half the institutions that people were told had their best intentions at heart have failed them, and the cypherpunk ethos of distrust of institutions and prioritisation of personal liberty has become a compelling story. The appeal of cryptocurrencies is the promise of the creation of new institutions that are resilient and

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By yielding a generational wealth creation opportunity that was a strange hybrid of a lottery jackpot and self-made fortune, crypto created an ideological hold on its early entrepreneurs and workers. It had all the euphoria of a gold rush and all the self esteem of high tech meritocracy.

By shape shifting between utopian global computer and Ponzi dispenser, crypto both indoctrinated New Internet practitioners and implicated them amongst a crowd of day traders that they otherwise would have been repulsed by. In crypto's effect on the New Internet, we see the subtle ways that access to capital can simultaneously accelerate and mutate... See more