#542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs

The beauty of web3 is, for the first time, all the data is actually open. The data is literally living in the blockchain or in distributed systems, but it's secured. It's actually secured far better than these corporations can secure our data ... And then who owns the platform underneath? As Chris said, it's contributors own the platform instead of corporations own the platform.

No web3 company, no crypto company, has ever spent a dollar on marketing, including Coinbase ... Why? Because tokens are self-marketing. When somebody owns something and feels skin in the game, they want to go talk about it ... I think web3's not only better for the world, but it's also going to beat web2 because it's going to be more popular because the people get really excited when they actually get to participate.

One reason why I think Joe Rogan and others make mistakes by going to Spotify is that the power of a meme, the power of an idea, is determined by how many computers it's running on. The power of a program is how much computation power it has; the power of an idea is how many brains is it running in?

Any regulator that stops the next generation of artists and musicians and gamers and game developers from owning their platforms and their work is going to go into the wastebasket of history as a villain.

We were told the Internet is bad for creative people. The Internet is not bad for creative people; web2 is bad for creative people.

Ironically, the best career of 2021 was to be a JPG collector.

An NFT is not really an object, a digital object; it is a pointer; it is a channel; it is a link; a communication between you, the creator, and the community. And any kind of value can be funneled down that—it can be access into things, it can be recognition and reputation, it can be royalties, it can be copyrights, it can be remix rights, or it could just be you're just sending them money because you want to support them.

Web3 is... an internet owned by users and builders, orchestrated with tokens.

We flipped applications from being closed code, corporations own the platform, and users are the data to open code, contributors own the platform, and users own their data.

Someone had a great tweet yesterday: 'The web2 companies convince you to give away your creations in exchange for little hearts, but yeah, tell me about how NFTs are the real scam.'

The world is moving so fast, adapting so quickly. The frontier's in crypto; it's digital. If you have a natural intellectual curiosity about any of these things, your moment will come.

The United States became the most powerful country in the world for many reasons, but recently, it's been because we are the home of creative technology. Most creative technology on the planet comes from the United States. Now, is that because we create all the entrepreneurs? No, we attract all of the entrepreneurs because we have the most freedom. Technology entrepreneurs are creative people, and they want to go where they are the most free to create new things.

I really believe very, very strongly that one of the most important things you can do is just go speak to a lot of people. That's where I get all of my information—talking to entrepreneurs, talking with people that are smarter than me.

If you want to go buy NFTs, buy the stuff you like because, at the end of the day, what you're probably going to end up with is a cool JPG.

Satoshi Nakamoto may end up being the richest person who ever lived and could have pulled it off completely anon. And that's not the only one; there are huge fortunes being made and lost on this decentralized anonymous frontier.

Why tokens are so important is they now provide a mechanism by which value and control can be given to users and builders as opposed to, simply, centralized companies.

Digital private keys enable digital private property.

There's a funny quote out there floating around where somebody said, 'Every generation invents its own new Ponzi scheme and rejects the previous generation's Ponzi scheme.'

An NFT is no different. If Bitcoin can have value, if Ethereum can have value, then, in theory, an NFT can have value as long as the smart contracts and the social contracts in the community enforcing it have value.