#33 Mini-Essays Part II
on what web1 can teach us about web3, "The Merge", why the little things matter more than the big things, and #lifegoals
I received a **TON** of great feedback from last edition’s mini-essays so wanted to share my next batch. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming for next time but I’ll def plan to sprinkle these in from time to time.
9. What AOL & Yahoo teach us about the future of web3
It’s easy to forget, but once upon a time, AOL and Yahoo represented the most prime & sought-over real estate of the Internet. During that era, the Internet was largely seen as the Wild West: a place that was unsafe and difficult to trust. The walled gardens of AOL and Yahoo provided a safe haven where curated, high quality content was readily available. Then the script flipped. The Internet blossomed. Yahoo and AOL’s centralized curation model couldn’t keep up. Google made it simple to search for high quality content. And it was game over.
“History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” —Mark Twain
Today in web3, it feels like we’re in the AOL and Yahoo era. Most users are comfortable within the confines of curated experiences such as Coinbase, Binance, or OpenSea. But as web3 grows (likely even more aggressively than the Internet given the focus on decentralization + user participation), experiences built on decentralized, permission-less protocols are likely destined to win because of their ability to scale to the changing landscape more quickly than curated ones.
10. The Ethereum Storytellers
If all goes well, “The Merge” will go down as one of the most impressive technical accomplishments ever. Swapping out a blockchain’s most important property (it’s security mechanism) without any downtime on a chain that supports billions of dollars of value across countless use cases will be incredible. I’ve led technical redesigns that are 1/1000th as complex, and it’s so friggin’ hard to get it all right — and incredibly thankless. We’re all rooting from the sidelines.
That being said, “The Merge” will also go down one of the more impressive PR campaigns in recent memory. It’s now a foregone conclusion in most people’s heads that Ethereum is moving from something no so great to something substantially better. Even the name is genius, as you could quite accurately call it “The Fork” if you were a ETHPOW maxi. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing, but between this, EIP-1559, and ultra-sound money 🦇, the ETH community remains 👑 at storytelling.
11. Unexpected Post-Merge Narratives
What might be some unexpected narratives that gain steam post-Merge?
“Pristine BTC” — Will BTC be seen as now even more so the hardest form of value because it’s the last remaining major chain to use PoW? Despite that the concentration of mining and staking is roughly equivalent (top 3-4 entities combined control 50+% of the network), it’s easier for ppl to wrap their heads around a malicious government/actor obtaining stake over hashrate.
“Crypto is still bad for the environment” — While the PoS chain will use 99% less energy than the PoW chain, the existing ETH PoW chain will continue to run (probably at ~30% of the power it used to consume).
“The rise of Solana” — As ETH moves towards a multi-chain, modular architecture with consensus happening on L1 + data avail / execution moving to L2/L3 (not that dissimilar from Cosmos/etc), the value proposition differences between high-throughput L1s like Solana become more and more stark — and may serve as a meaningful catalyst for the SOL ecosystem.
12. The Little Things
We spend an inordinate amount of our energy and focus on the big things. Career, money, our passion project, parenting, the list goes on. And rightfully so. These things give us direction, purpose and ambition. But they also make us overlook the small things.
One of my favorite NBA writers Jonathan Tjarks passed away last weekend from cancer at the age of 34, leaving behind a wife and a young son. I didn’t know him personally, but hearing the news was a gut punch. I have young kids of my own and I can’t even begin to comprehend what that must have felt like to know you aren’t going to be able to see them grow up.
Death has a funny way of helping us recalibrate to appreciate the little things. Gratitude for good health. For smiles from people you love. For the things you do have. So don’t forget about the little things. They matter more than you think.
13. Goals of Life
Just about all of us have #lifegoals. They’re usually related to attaining something tangible (e.g. a particular job, amount of money, status, etc). And they’re important. They provide a North Star for how you spend your time and the choices you make.
But as I get older (and wiser?), it’s become clearer to me that one needs to also orient themselves around the goals of life — even if they conflict with your personal life goals. From my experience, there are two goals of life that stand out above the rest:
Experiences Matter Most — Optimize for the experiences you want to have above all else. Bezos’s regret minimization process serves as a good framework here. Figure out what things you want to do (even if they incur short-term pain), and do them.
Make the Future Better — A hundred years from now, the only things that will matter from your life are the ways you made the world better. This doesn’t have to be anything individually grandiose. But if we each do our part to make our children more empathetic & curious, hold our institutions to higher standards, work on problems that improve the future — and let long-term compounding work its magic, I think we’ll be alright.