Moxie & Dorsey: Fired By Web3
The founders of Signal & Twitter have absolutely no idea how Web3 works and yet they keep writing about it as if they do. This chronic lack of knowledge explains why they had to be replaced recently.
Signal sold out their entire community by trying to integrate the $MOB—one of the most short-sighted and out-of-touch teams in crypto. Twitter tried to shove Lightning down their customers throats with a broken tipping integration that no one used.
What both these product launches show is that neither Moxie Marlinspike nor Jack Dorsey have a damn clue about how Ethereum or the Web 3 movement works.
What irritates me about their latest diatribes on crypto is that they both demonstrate absolutely no curiosity about history or the future. When they were young and poor, they wanted to build wealth by building new tools for people. They used the technology they had to had and won. Signal proved its point. Twitter helped turn the world into Twits. Both founders rode the mobile computing wave to secure their financial and repetitional future.
Here are Moxie’s first impressions of web3 where he states:
I don’t think it would have taken off because this is a gold rush. People have made money through cryptocurrency speculation, those people are interested in spending that cryptocurrency in ways that support their investment while offering additional returns, and so that defines the setting for the market of transfer of wealth.
Then in the same post goes on to say:
I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3. Looking at it through the lens of these small projects, though, I can easily see why so many people find the web3 ecosystem so neat. I don’t think it’s on a trajectory to deliver us from centralized platforms, I don’t think it will fundamentally change our relationship to technology
This is absolutely hilarious. He admits he has not built anything of consequence and then concludes it is not the future. Never mind the fact that his one smart contract he shipped had a critical bug:
Web3 is frothy: like literally every single technology trend
App Stores, Web 2.0, Dot Com, PCs, TVs, Film Studios, Aviation, Cars, Railroads, Oil & Gold
Every technology wave has had a gold rush. It is how we fund innovation. Jack is forgetting that his extraordinary fortune was built on the speculation of the telecom and dot-com bubbles. He then deftly rode the mobile and fintech waves to perfection.
His own companies have enriched Silicon Valley venture capitalists far more than Ethereum ever has. I know this because I watched all of them turn down Vitalik in 2014. Yet, in his post firing ire, he still shares anti-semitic memetic images like this:
Twitter was notoriously stingy with stock. The company violently destroyed several acquaintances’ options packages after they left. Their exercise policy was so bad that the company ended up giving billions to an overly smug wannabe cowboy who constructed an options financing racket which enraged senior engineers.
Jack is projecting. He has built his career and companies on venture capital. He is the pinnacle of Silicon Valley soy boy turned wannabe Bitcoin Jesus Guru—it is cringe.
Signal & Twitter are crap apps
They have strong brands, deep network effects, and terrible design
Both Moxie & Dorsey should be ashamed of the software they built. Signal looks like it is designed by high schoolers and Twitter is responsible for enormous political turmoil across the world.
The teams behind these products demonstrate—time and again—what happens when the users are separated from the shareholders. Signal sold out to Mobilecoin. Twitter sold out to shareholders. Both needed the money to survive. Both founders caved.
Neither of these products has any developer community around it. Signal constantly rejects the help of interface engineers who try to fix it. Twitter knee-capped all of their developer community when they restricted their APIs.
That will be the legacy these two men leave behind. Appallingly bad apps with second rate user bases. Both of them lost to Mark Zuckerberg and the web they created is worse for it.
Now it is time for them to retire to their next ventures. Jack will be removed from Square when stable coins threaten his payments company. Then the two of them can both go and focus on pure cryptography and #Bitcoin.
Do you want to help make Web3 mobile?
Instead of complaining about the current state of affairs, a small group of people are working
The Safari Wallet community is deeply familiar with the problems in Web3 because all of us have actually built things in the space. We have made wallets, interfaces, dapps & infrastructure for the community. We are now working hard to create a great tool for dapp developers and users that is focused on mobile.
If you want to help us, we would love to have you! Join our Discord:
sorry man, this sounds like the stuff that comes out of the CCP when they get criticized. you make sure to slur the people and denigrate their past accomplishments, and only refute the weakest part of their arguments.
i think a lot of people were surprised to see their NFOG breadsticks disappear because of a DMCA- isn't this not supposed to happen in this ecosystem?- so moxie is on point that there's still SPOFs here for injection of control, and that that's probably counter to most people's understanding of how all this stuff works.
I appreciate your contrarian takes and view points on crypto, so I was hoping you'd write about Moxie's article. But outside of criticizing his persona and experience in the space, you don't elaborate on any of the points he made in his post.
I, for example, had not considered that most crypto apps call centralized APIs to access decentralized databases. He's the first person I see write about it! And it was one of the many valid points he made, that I would love to see people more bullish on web3 counter-argue and expand on.
Every creator starts out experimenting and playing with a new technology, without any experience, and maybe even disbelieving the potential. And we all write bugs along the way. So even discounting the fact that Moxie is well-versed in tech and a proven entrepreneur, your post seems to make these universal flaws in creating the reason to discount his point of view on web3, which seems totally counter to the community-focused mindset I derived from your past posts.