The Next Big Idea8 Feb 2024

BLOCKCHAIN: Why Chris Dixon Still Thinks It Matters

Seventy-two billion dollars. That, according to the Grifter Counter™, is the amount of money that's been swallowed up by crypto and blockchain scams and crashes. It's an enormous sum — but one that may not surprise you if you've kept up with the news. Bitcoin lost more than 60% of its value in 2022. FTX, once the world's third-largest crypto exchange, collapsed, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was later found guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. And it's not just crypto that has seen dark days. Remember NFTs? They were once touted as a revolutionary new form of digital ownership made possible by the blockchain. Today, however, 95% of them have lost all of their value. That's right. All of it. So it would seem like a suboptimal time to publish a book arguing that "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 that can be used for good. Today on the show, he makes that case.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(376)

AI Has Gone Rogue. Here’s What We Should Do About It.

"This Is Really Bad." That's the not-so-comforting headline of Stephen Witt's mega-viral New York Times essay about a dawning realization among Silicon Valley researchers that "AI may no longer be ent...

24 Sep 57min

You Don't Have Free Will. That's Good News. (NBI Vault)

Do we have free will? Do we have a choice in what we do? Philosophers and theologians have debated these questions for centuries; Robert Sapolsky answered them when he was 14. Free will, he concluded,...

21 Sep 1h 7min

The Art of Fighting

We’ve gotten very good at cutting people off. But have we forgotten how to work through our differences? In The Art of Fighting, bestselling author and conflict resolution expert Priya Parker challen...

17 Sep 1h 7min

Is America a ‘Country of Lords’?

America was founded on a radical promise: all people are created equal. But for 250 years, some of the country’s most powerful thinkers have been arguing the opposite. In Country of Lords, historian ...

14 Sep 53min

A Storytelling Masterclass with Will Storr (NBI Vault)

Will Storr is the author of the dazzling books The Science of Storytelling and A Story Is a Deal, and in this episode, he tells us everything he knows about humanity’s greatest invention: story. More ...

10 Sep 1h 34min

What Can Henry David Thoreau Teach Us About Work?

Henry David Thoreau was a philosopher, poet, and pencil-maker. He was a great resigner and, above all, a superb writer whose masterpiece, "Walden," is considered by many to be America's first environm...

7 Sep 45min

How French Philosophy Wired Modern Thinking

How did a group of notoriously difficult French philosophers become intellectual rock stars on American college campuses — and how much do their ideas matter today? In The Frenchmen, writer and edit...

3 Sep 1h 4min

A Nobel Prize Winner’s Plan to Save Democracy

Democracy is in the dumps. OK, that's a bit dramatic. But it's definitely not working as well as it used to. Good thing Daron Acemoglu — Nobel laureate, MIT Institute Professor, and one of the world's...

31 Aug 57min