A16Z’s unapologetic bet on cryptocurrency and blockchain companies is big for the industry. As crypto heats up again and blockchain 3.0 projects emerge (Cosmos, Polkadot, Ethereum Proof of Stake) VC will help legitimize the industry.
Can you provide a single problem where the right solution space is blockchain? Ive thought about this a good amount, and cannot come up with a single use case where current established centralized technology is not a better solution.
A lot of things with M2M communications, be it microgrids, industrial IoT networks, self driving cars that can manage payments and invoicing themselves, blockchain networks can be very effective. Fetch.ai was an interesting project that came out.
Data marketplaces are interesting, checkout numeraire and ocean network
Having non fungible assets on the internet currently is an impossibility, say having a special gun in fortnite that no one else can have. This may not appeal to everyone but I know a lot of gamers who would treat these as assets. I’m not sure but I don’t think any service on the Internet today can guarantee that only one copy of a digital piece of information exists, Blockchain’s can.
Current internet infrastructure depends on us trusting one organisation to manage critical infrastructure and I don’t think that’s really the optimum way for anything.
Governance and management of networks was something we've never thought of, but some of the best experiment in governance are running in the crypto world. I do think networks like Google and Facebook were something people never imagined, and the capitalistic model clearly rewards the builders asymmetrically. A network like Google or Facebook was built by its users and is still being built by its users. SV has propagated this stupid ideology that 10 upstarts were able to build a network that powerful and all the credit should go to them. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I do think users should receive a fraction of the value the networks make. And blockchains make it possible to build networks like this. Steem is an interesting experiment but hasn't gained much steam.
BAT is a great experiment that could change the direction of the internet. I'm not sure if their model would work, but I do think its an experiment that must happen. The future of the internet is at stake with the ad driven cess pool that it has become.
In terms on energy inefficiency, this has been a problem people have acknowledged and have been trying to solve, I think we’re less than 2 years away from a breakthrough in PoS which would make PoW redundant.
Either way, I think people obsess over payments too much. I'd obsess more over how this is the first time in the history of mankind we don't need a third party to supply trust. There is no trust premium on services, which can upend multiple services, finance being the obvious one but I think it's much larger than finance. I do think that there is a lot of noise in this space and its hard for anyone rationally observing to get a clear perspective on what's going on. I could go on all day and maybe even write a scifi fantasy but yeah, there's a lot of people working towards building the future, sadly its a small fraction compared to the number of people speculating and creating noise.