
The Myth of the Infrastructure Phase - BerislavLopac
https://www.usv.com/blog/the-myth-of-the-infrastructure-phase
======
johnmarcus
The 8 comments on here are spot on accurate. Blockchain is not 3.0 and has a
very limited use case that enthusiasts refuse to acknowledge. I predict a
great failure in 1-2 years with a few surviving beheamoths that are actually
using blockchain for it's one legit use case, a ledger.

~~~
tw1010
Hopefully it won't crash the same time as the ML and javascript framework hype
explodes. Or maybe it'd be the kick in the bum this comfortable industry needs
to start innovating for real again.

------
CPLX
This article has elements of insight, but it seems oblivious to the main
direction of causality.

What drives technology is stuff people want.

In that context apps __are __infrastructure too. I want to tell people
something, so the app email helps me. And the infrastructure TCP /IP helps
email. But from my perspective “I want to tell Dan the meeting changed” it’s
all just infrastructure, a way to solve that problem.

The article implies that the infrastructure is like sitting there waiting for
apps. But apps don’t just stroll along into the story. Apps come from needs.

People have a need for a way to send money for illegal stuff, and a
need/desire for a medium of gambling. Crypto has risen to meet those needs.

Unless there are other _demonstrated_ needs that blockchain solves there
aren’t going to be more apps, or more anything.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Did we read the same article? I got exactly the opposite point from the
article: that apps preceed infrastructure, e.g. light bulbs came before the
electric grid and airplanes came before airports. The apps are made better by
the infrastructure but are still useful without it. That infrastructure
supports new apps that wouldn't be useful without the infrastructure, but the
infrastructure is always built for the previous apps, not the new ones it will
make possible.

~~~
CPLX
Yes I got that part.

The problem is that the electric grid doesn’t come from lightbulbs. They both
come from people wanting to do stuff in the dark. Airplanes and airports come
from people wanting to get places faster.

The whole concept of the article is still backwards, it’s still trying to
rationalize why there have to be blockchain apps and infrastructure. There
doesn’t.

------
encoderer
I must have missed that the blockchain enthusiasts assigned themselves “web
3.0”

~~~
Theodores
They have been able to do so because there is no agreed definition on what
'Web 3.0' means. When the blockchain believers call their work 'Web 3.0' it is
like evangelists that claim their cult-church already has the the 'third
testament'. There is implication that they already own the future.

There currently is no need for 'Web 3.0' as a phrase. The Internet of Things
is a thing that could arguably be called 'Web 3.0' but that internet connected
refrigerator is not needing the 'Web 3.0' moniker to convince people to buy
it.

------
KaiserPro
or it could be that blockchains have limited usefulness outside the world of
zero trust currency.

From a spade-a-spade point of view, blockchains are very slow,expensive and
limited log database.

~~~
jondubois
As someone who works on a major blockchain project, I agree with this
statement. Blockchain only has one major use case; cryptocurrency.

The main purpose of cryptocurrency is to replace the role of debt in our
economy. The value of a cryptocurrency is determined by the economic value
provided by entities which use that cryptocurrency as a medium of payment for
goods and services. Because anyone can issue a cryptocurrency, the underlying
tokens can behave like shares in a company.

Cryptocurrencies are better than shares in that they exist outside the laws of
any single country. The ownership of tokens is not enforced by law, it is
enforced by mathematics and your own ability to keep your passphrases secret.

~~~
otabdeveloper2
> Blockchain only has one major use case; cryptocurrency.

Currencies have value only because governments force everyone to use them for
paying taxes and welfare.

Your 'tokens-as-shares' vision is flawed, because at the end of the day it
devolves into a million little barter schemes, and barter sucks. (As we
discovered back in the bronze age.)

The only place where blockchain could provide a use is with smart contracts.
If you've experienced buying or selling real estate, then you understand how
insanely inefficient low-trust, high-value deals can be. Anything that removes
this friction would be a great boon.

~~~
KaiserPro
>then you understand how insanely inefficient low-trust high-value deals can
be.

I think you misunderstand how real estate contracts work.

Real estate contracts are more or less cut and paste, in fact you can generate
them here: [https://www.lawdepot.com/contracts/real-estate-purchase-
agre...](https://www.lawdepot.com/contracts/real-estate-purchase-
agreement/?loc=US)

The thing that takes the time is due diligence, finding and arranging money,
and/or buyers. The actual contract is the easy part, unless you are putting in
custom stuff.

Smart contracts are basically glorified escrow, but with no legal precedence.
If something _were_ to go wrong, and your smart contract doesn't complete
properly, you'll still be going to court to carry out the remediation steps.
Also, smart contract require mutual agreement to work properly, there is no
over-riding system to mediate should things become undefined. (well, there
could be, you need to program that in.)

The friction in high value deals is the due diligence. it doesn't matter if
the contract is smart. Undoing a house move is expensive, having a contract
where one party can terminate instantly without warning or redress is a
dystopian nightmare.

~~~
KaiserPro
Also, the value of currency is not because of paying taxes, its because you
agree it has value. In the same way that gold has "value"

if that were the case US Dollars would have no value in failed states.

There is nothing inherent in value, its down to consensus.

------
vinceguidry
If I go to start a personal project, I very rarely get anywhere unless I'm
approaching it from the perspective of solving a specific need. I have to hold
that need in mind and let it carry me through to completion, otherwise the
inspiration gets blunted when yak-shaving turns into distraction.

Just going home one day and saying, "I'm going to work on something" and then
looking for something to work on never yields anything of use at the end of
it.

A need has to _burn_ before I can make appreciable progress on it. And once
it's burning, it has my undivided attention until I can call my intervention
complete and I can relax.

Companies can waste all kinds of money on building things that don't yet have
burning needs. But if they want to be efficient with their spending, they need
to treat that sort of thing with the same kid gloves as any other kind of
research. As money you probably won't ever get back and won't lead to
immediate revenue growth. As something you don't understand but hope to as a
result of the process.

Because building 'infrastructure' is planning for a future that doesn't exist
yet. Either solve a need, or go looking for one. The two should never be
conflated because they require different mindsets.

------
fipple
These dweebs are trying to claim the name “Web 3.0” for blockchain of all
things.

~~~
goatlover
I thought 3.0 was going to be the semantic web?

~~~
SomeHacker44
I usually interpret Web 3.0 as “re-decentralized web applications” that
generally implies owner control of data and access.

------
DanielBMarkham
All structure is derivative. It's one of those things that once you see, you
can't un-see.

I blogged about this a while back: [http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/process-
scale-invariance-um...](http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/process-scale-
invariance-uml-diagramming/)

I'm not a religious TDD person. I think it's the only way to professionally
code mutable OO. At the business level it's the only way to manage your goals
and progress. (ATDD, that is)

But the thing that TDD brought to the table that was missing from the larger
discussion is that things exist in code (and infrastructure) for reasons. When
you can create as much stuff as you like, it's important to make those reasons
explicit. TDD is not a test discipline. It's a design discipline. You write
the test first, then the code/infrastructure/business/whatnot is created to
support the test. It's not just a fashionable thing to do. It's the only sane
way to plan out architecture. Otherwise you're just kind of looking at thing
ascetically.

And this is the reason we have such a framework explosion. You write function
that does X, then you _imagine_ X prime and X two, then you generalize, then
you imagine some more. This is the same thing we see in startups: the desire
to build over the desire to meet needs. Worst-case scenario is that people
actually like 2 or 3 things out of your 100-thing toolset. Then you're off to
the races building another 100.

Blockchain is still struggling with all of that. It's such an attractive tech
they'll probably get it worst than most. It's quite seductive to see something
you _might_ need instead of something you actually need.

------
AndrewKemendo
What the market teaches entrepreneurs is that the best thing you can do is
build and own the infrastructure, because that's how you extract rent.

So if you see applications that already exist, then you don't want to build
"just another application," you want to build the infrastructure they all live
on.

It seems like this should be the way it works, but it just doesn't. Good
products with infrastructure attract other enterprises to their infrastructure
by having a very successful product first, which other enterprises emulate.
Twilio is probably the #1 example of this.

I'd argue it's impossible to build infrastructure that others play on at
scale, without owning some large segment of users with a great product first.

------
mehh
hmm the apps infrastructure diagram for the crypto age showed what a weak
offering there actually is imho.

~~~
gitgud
I agree, it's weird that CryptoKitties is listed as a successful application
of the 'cryptocurrency' infrastructure, I thought that was a joke...

~~~
rapsey
Joke or no, it was a complete disaster as an infrastructure showcase. It
brought the etherium network to a halt.

~~~
EGreg
Just like Ashton Kutcher brought out Twitter’s fail whale.

------
decentralised
I have a casual objection to USV saying that the investment opportunities they
missed aren't good because it reminds me of the Wolf and the Crane fable.

The Wright brothers didn't need airports to build the first airplane, but for
commercial flight to exist airports must first be created. Likewise, I find
many of the Web3 apps that I use to be perfectly fine as they are, because I
know what I'm doing and I find the experience of being a trailblazer
exhilarating hence why I also make my living building these platforms.

For most people, including plenty of highly competent technologists, it's
still too far out and uncomfortable for them to use web3 apps, so we need to
build better infrastructure that can accommodate other use cases, have better
UX and dX, and bring in more people.

edit: Come and build the web3 with us!
[https://twitter.com/sserrano44/status/1048718205127151616](https://twitter.com/sserrano44/status/1048718205127151616)

------
sdeepak
I do agree with the blockchain tech still hasn't reached a stage where
'general public' can experience their usefulness. But the outright rejection
of broader scope of the technology and declaring 'ledger' as the only legit
case is equally not true. The reality should be somewhere in the middle.

------
sdeepak
For example, blockchain technology does provide a mechanism to shift the
ownership of data and ownership to the users which wasn't there in 2.0. The
ownership of data with the platforms was mainly responsible for creating
business models completely based on advertisements.

------
ummonk
What a misleading title on that blog post. It sounds like it's about economic
development, not tech / blockchain...

