Suspending Disbelief

We need to keep experimenting

Dec 08, 2022

👋 Welcome to the 38th issue of The Syllabus from Invisible College — a weekly(ish) newsletter that helps you navigate the fast-moving world of web3. To get this newsletter delivered to your inbox, subscribe here:

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The first raffle is live now! You’re eligible to enter if you’re a registered Decentralien NFT holder and you’ve earned at least one POAP from attending or listening to our live events. Head to the #offers channel in the Invisible College Discord server to learn how to enter. The entry deadline is tomorrow morning, Friday, December 9th at 9:00 am PT.

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Now onto this week’s post…

There’s a phrase that Andy Page kept saying during our recent Intro to Web3 cohort-based course at Invisible College: “Awesome if true”

The idea is that in order to learn the often counterintuitive concepts of web3, starting off as a default optimist is the best approach.

Here’s how he put it during the first session:

“A lot of what we talk about will sound crazy.
The vast majority of it will sound like it’s sooo good that it’s bound to fail.
In this space, I’ve found it helpful to start with an optimistic and open mindset. Don’t automatically disqualify a project that sounds too amazing to exist.
Try to understand a world/situation where it could be true and then work backward.
‘Awesome if true…’”

This is the right attitude to have when it comes to just about any emerging technology, both as a user and builder.

What makes web3 different—and what can make it feel riskier—are the financialization and programmable incentives that are inherently involved. Things like the crash of FTX don’t help matters either, of course. But as I wrote recently, FTX was not really crypto.

Because of FTX and all the other debacles in crypto this year, it’s no wonder that users—and even builders—are feeling gun-shy.

But if we want to live in a more decentralized online future where there are digital property rights for all of us, it’s critical that we keep experimenting.

Bitcoin Pizza Day

On May 22nd, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid for two Papa John’s pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoin. At the time, the transaction cost him about $41.00. It marked the first time Bitcoin was used for a real-world purchase.

Today, that 10,000 Bitcoin would be worth $171,908,800 at the time of writing.

That is the typical story that gets parroted around on Twitter and crypto media outlets every year on May 22nd (now referred to as Bitcoin Pizza Day) with whatever the updated crazy-high number is at that time. They give off the impression that Hanyecz is still kicking himself for spending his Bitcoin on something seemingly so frivolous in hindsight.

But that’s not the whole story.

Hanyecz prefers to remain relatively private, yet he eventually became well-known in the very small world of crypto as one of the top Bitcoin traders, and he remained so for many more years. So there’s every reason to believe that he has done just fine for himself.

In a New York Times piece, he expressed no regrets:

“It wasn’t like Bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool.”

In other words, he looked at it as a fun experiment with a new technology he was excited about. Bitcoin was a mostly untested technology at the time. Hanyecz's willingness to use it to make a real-world purchase was an important step in its development, and it helped to prove that crypto could potentially be used for more than just speculation.

This isn’t anything new

It’s just different.

Think of the dot-com boom in the late ’90s, or, more recently, the mobile app craze in the latter half of the 2010s. Both examples started with nascent technologies and a small group of people who were excited about building projects and companies—most of which failed miserably. And both examples had plenty of critics who wrote them off before they had even really started.

Pets.com and Webvan might’ve failed spectacularly, but Amazon didn’t.

There are hundreds of thousands of random mobile games that never made a dime, but Candy Crush prints cash like there’s no tomorrow.

There are myriad factors that contribute to a startup’s success, but none of the failures should necessarily be attributed solely to the technology. Maybe they were too early and the tech wasn’t widely adopted yet. But that’s not an inherent problem with the tech itself.

When Satoshi released the Bitcoin whitepaper, a new small group of enthusiasts started experimenting with it. They couldn’t possibly know that the price of Bitcoin would grow 40,000%+ over the next 12 years, especially before there wasn’t a proper crypto exchange available.

Early on in Bitcoin’s existence, there were even experiments with NFTs and DeFi—activities that mostly subsided as the price skyrocketed. That is until Ethereum launched with the explicit purpose of being built upon via smart contracts.

The initial wave of experiments looked like Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and NFT projects. The vast majority of projects failed or were blatant cash grabs, especially when it came to ICOs. But some emerged as viable projects that still exist or hold some value today. For example, ICOs such as FileCoin and Tezos, and early NFT projects such as CryptoPunks.

The biggest difference between crypto-based experiments and those of the ‘90s and 2010s is that everyday people could invest in crypto-based projects (for the most part), whereas angel investors and venture capitalists typically invest in early-stage startups. This, of course, brought along issues and unintended consequences, like the aforementioned cash grabs.

The last bull run

Fast forward to 2021 and the energy around the crypto space was electric. The ICO mania had had a few years to dissipate and a new bull run had emerged. People ventured into web3 in droves because the excitement was infectious. In fact, that energy was likely the catalyst that led many of you to Invisible College and to subscribe to this newsletter in the first place.

Sure, a lot of that energy was related to price movements. Bored Apes selling for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars will do that. But there were also tons of other small experiments being launched across NFTs and DeFi. I mean, even the Bored Ape project was a small experiment at first. It just happened to strike a chord more so than other ones.

People were forming DAOs left and right. They were trying to buy a copy of the Constitution. They were launching weird and fun NFT experiments. These were all bigger, more well-funded experiments than the Bitcoin pizza purchase Hanyecz made way back in 2010. But they were experiments nonetheless.

I had been a passive investor in Bitcoin and Ethereum ever since the ICO days in 2017. I even invested in one ICO myself, which actually still exists, albeit with a much lower token price these days. But 2021 was when I really went down the web3 rabbit hole as so many other people did. I surrounded myself with friends who were building. We said gm (good morning) to each other every day. We said wagmi (we’re all gonna make it) too. And the default was to suspend disbelief for a moment and experiment.

To keep building the future of the web, we need to start with “Awesome if true”.

The Syllabus