We recently discovered the Grifter Counter™. It’s a running tally of money lost to crypto, blockchain, and web3 scams and crashes. As of today, it’s at $72 billion. That number may not surprise you if you’ve followed the news in the last few years. Bitcoin lost 60% of its value in 2022. FTX, the third-largest crypto exchange in the world, collapsed, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. Ninety-five percent of NFTs have lost all of their value. Yes, you read that right — all of their value.
So it would seem like a suboptimal time to publish a book arguing, “blockchains and the software movement around them — typically called crypto or web3 — provide the only plausible path to sustaining the original vision of the internet as an open platform that incentivizes creativity and entrepreneurship.”
But that’s precisely what Chris Dixon, founder of a16z crypto, has done with “Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet.”
Chris, who spoke with Rufus in a live taping of this show last week, says that while blockchains have been “maligned and associated with grift, casino culture, and fraud,” they are “tools, and they can be used for bad but also for good.” Today on the show, he makes that case.