When the chain becomes the product: Seven years inside a token-funded venture

▲ When the chain becomes the product: Seven years inside a token-funded venture(markmhendrickson.com)

32 points by mhendric 3 days ago | 13 comments

▲ jcfrei 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Lots of similarities to the Bitcoin investment thesis. Where the chain itself becomes the product and not any utility derived from it. You have to believe in a future where all fiat money crashes and becomes worthless, evil states confiscate other forms of wealth, like stocks and bonds but for some reason will be powerless to prevent bitcoin transfers. At the same time the hard limit of 21 million BTC will never be revoked despite continuously declining miners revenue. And only within that strict narrative does a long-term investment really make sense.

	▲	mothballed 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		FATF and the government were desperate to eliminate/immobilize bearer bonds, bearer shares, high denomination notes, and hawala. It does seem like at least part of it is they think they have less control over oversight of their transfer for certain instrument or asset classes.

▲ drdrek 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love the ending footnote, its the perfect statement to prove his thesis. Just because you understand the problem does not mean you are immune to it. Just because you know smoking is bad for, and you understand the mechanisms of addition, does not mean you manage to quit smoking.

▲ codechicago277 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember Blockstack from the first crypto bull run. It was the product I thought had the most potential after Ethereum, building off of tools like Sia. The white papers [1] laid out a technical plan for fully building an internet on blockchain. It felt like the “decentralized internet” from Silicon Valley (the show), and must have inspired that plot point.

For an industry that was full of hype and fake products, it was one of the few you could download and get some use out of. I remember a very janky Google Docs clone running on the chain. Sad to see that they’ve lost their way. For now crypto still only has one value prop: token go up.

[1] https://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci2390/2019/readings/blocksta...

▲ aurareturn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

  Good products come from tight cycles: ship something, listen to users, iterate. Token economics break that cycle by introducing a competing optimization target. The team stops asking "what do our developers need?" and starts asking "what supports the token narrative?"

In other words, the team starts asking "How can we maximize the token price while delivering as little product value as possible"?

This is why 99.99% of crypto projects are a scam.

No, your token investors don't give a damn what you deliver. They only care about the price of the token. Lie if you have to. Hype up your project like it's the greatest thing in the world. Do whatever to enable security fraud.

When teams discover that lying does more for the token price than actually building, they quickly switch incentives. Now they'll just lie, sell tokens, repeat, until a final rug pull to scam the remaining bag holders.

	▲	pavlov 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The weird thing is that this outcome was always obvious. Token-driven projects were clearly just penny stock boiler room scams dressed up in a trenchcoat made of jargon whitepapers.
	▲	kevinak 15 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yep! People in the Bitcoin space have been screaming at the top of their lungs about this for decades at this point, but it's hard to work against the marketing machine that comes from these ICOs.
	▲	pjc50 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes - but the sad thing is how badly this has bled back to the real markets. That's how you get things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation I'm concerned we may not be able to pull back from low-trust society in which most investments are fradulent; eventually it will become impossible to raise money for real ventures!

▲ brazzy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So... his takeaway after taking 7 years to realize that "blockchain ecosystems" are an empty hype machine... is to start a project that brings blockchain into LLM coding agents.

▲ stuaxo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does anyone else find this kind of LLM written stuff tiring to read.

Admittedly I only read the titles.

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the__alchemist 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The author even copied ChatGPT's website design!

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Tklaaaalo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

'read the title' is not the same as reading an article.

Im also not sure why this would be LLM written and i have not seen a lot of / relevant amount of LLM written articles especially on hn

	▲	ramon156 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have a feeling that people who shout this (I gotta be careful, I call out a bunch of articles as LLM-written) do not always know what to look out for. Em dashes aren't inherently LLM, neither are some of the phrases it uses. One pattern I look for is; how is the end part written? Does it tie into the whole story? Is it extremely generic? Did the author put something real / raw / personal in it? If not, its a grey area, any other hints will lean my conclusion to real or fake.