As a data point, I remember reading that Twitter thread and thinking it didn’t make a lot of technical sense (I remember also being worried about the lack of forward secrecy since he wanted to store DMs encrypted on the blockchain).
But the goal was to make a lot of money, not to make a better product, and seeing that DogeCoin and NFTs (which also don’t make any technical sense) reached a market cap of tens of billions, it didn’t seem completely absurd that shoehorning a blockchain in Twitter made business sense.
My understanding was that crypto should often be thought of as a social technology that enables people to be excited about things that have been possible since the early 2000s. At least that’s how I explain to myself how I missed out on BTC and NFTs.
In any case, at the time I thought his main goal must have been to increase the value of FTX (or of Solana), which didn’t raise any extra red flags in the reference class of crypto.
Re:
that the EA community may have hard a hard time seeing through tech hype
I think it’s important to keep in mind that people could have made at least tens of millions by predicting FTX’s collapse, this failure of prediction was really not unique to the EA community, and many in the EA community mentioned plenty of times that the value of FTX could go to 0.
As a data point, I remember reading that Twitter thread and thinking it didn’t make a lot of technical sense (I remember also being worried about the lack of forward secrecy since he wanted to store DMs encrypted on the blockchain).
But the goal was to make a lot of money, not to make a better product, and seeing that DogeCoin and NFTs (which also don’t make any technical sense) reached a market cap of tens of billions, it didn’t seem completely absurd that shoehorning a blockchain in Twitter made business sense.
My understanding was that crypto should often be thought of as a social technology that enables people to be excited about things that have been possible since the early 2000s. At least that’s how I explain to myself how I missed out on BTC and NFTs.
In any case, at the time I thought his main goal must have been to increase the value of FTX (or of Solana), which didn’t raise any extra red flags in the reference class of crypto.
Re:
I think it’s important to keep in mind that people could have made at least tens of millions by predicting FTX’s collapse, this failure of prediction was really not unique to the EA community, and many in the EA community mentioned plenty of times that the value of FTX could go to 0.