Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia 

Liberterians building a city in the middle of the ocean to escape government regulation is literally the plot of Bioshock LOL

I don’t know loads about Gary Vee but what I do know doesn’t make me think “yeah, I need to check out this guy’s seafood restaurant”.

NFTs and the related paraphernalia are like the masculine version of MLM grifts. It’s insane. The community around it is so aggressive, delusional and toxic.

The absolute passion in this video and the unabashed disdain for Web3.0 and everything related to it is genuinely inspirational and I adore it

Humanity is astonishingly good at coming up with ways to kill itself

"everyone in the discord is a bot or showing signs of extreme cognitive impairment so that's a great sign" God, I love this woman

rewatching after twitter removes NFT pfps, delicious

Why didn't this go viral? It's some of the best content I've seen on RU-vid in the last 10 years.

I know logically that you must have taken breaks, but the sheer feeling of pure, unadulterated rage and contempt nonstop for over an hour and a half is honestly impressive. Subscribed.

"The only real scarcity at play here is attention" Just commenting this here so I can remember but that's a fucking great line.

Always comforting that tech bros want to create Roko’s Basilisk

Oh gods that Web 1.0 recap made me feel *so* old.

It did occur to me that anyone shilling for metaverse have never played or ever been in second life or VR chat. 5% people talking 5% fetish porn and 90% trolling and fucking around

I once met a silicon valley guy who genuinely thought web3 would solve all the problems in the world. Except we already have solutions for all of that but refuse to implement them...it's not a tech or innovation problem, it's always a policy problem

your access to vocabulary, and innate ability to present information with such a sharp sense of humor, is incredible! thank you for all the work you put into this. big fan!

56:06: Something about a rich Libertarian wearing rare pokemon cards in his hat, *pokemon-side-in* so nobody can even _see_ that it's a rare one, is just so _absurd._ I love how dumb it is.

"those of you who don't have back problems might not remember web 1..." Ouch...that hurts. Mostly in the lower back region, if I'm being honest.

As an old person I've got to say that videos like this give me hope because the person who made it reflects the best of today's youth and they are our future. Genuinely a tour de force production.

The fact that the entire internet hates Web3.0 lets me sleep at night.

it's like i always say: the gains are privatised and the losses are socialised.

I always put my crime tools in a bag that says “crime tools” so I don’t forget

As a professional software engineer with nearly a decade of experience... thank you. This really hammers home what I've been trying to explain IRL for years, that the problems with the tech are fundamental, and that it crashing is the best case scenario - since "success" likely results in the kind of nightmare dystopia I used to think couldn't ever happen outside of cyberpunk novels. And even in the event of a crash, well... as you say, a lot of these people have already been conditioned to be angry at the wrong targets in the first place.

I will never be able to forget the libertarian town that found itself with a massive bear problem as a consequence of their libertarian policies.

Remember: The snipping tool is there to grab those expensive NFT's free, allowing you to save thousands of dollars on PNGs and allowing you to do more important things like watching videos, shitposting and reading. So snip away and show those nft peeps your new png that you got for free. This is a free way to teach those who purchase a NFT. Spread this out and together, we shall speard this glorious shitpost. Or go eat something and watch more videos.

As a web developer myself, "a world running on code" sounds TERRIFYING

So an economic system with no regulation, no oversight, and no accountability was a scam? This is my surprise face 😐

I absolutely HATE Peter Thiel for having the sheer GALL to name his shitty companies after things from JRR Tolkien’s books. Tolkien stands for the hope that things can get better, even when things are at their worst. Thiel takes his works to facilitate the absolute worst. Truly the most on the nose name Thiel could have picked is Palantir; the guy is Sauron with the same dream of replacing Morgoth.

I love a take that is almost 2 hours long , but only when it is this well thought out and researched while at no point being boring. Blockchain/Cryto/NFT's debunked and exposed for what that actually are. Excellent job !

I'm a fairly recent graduate in Computer Science and got my first software development job in 2020. The job was a small startup that had nothing to do with the crypto space, but toward the end of 2021 after the whole NFT blowup they suddenly decided that they needed to incorporate crypto and make their own coin which was hogwild to me because it felt so far out of left field for what we were making. When I started looking for a new job, at least 15 of the other local tech startups I reached out to were planning on minting their own coins and selling NFTs, even though their main products were not crypto-relevent. It was just insane.

I think the thing that annoys me the most is how Crytobros will see someone having legit questions and concerns and act like they were just told their whole family is inbred. the way they just scramble to write you off as a detractor or from a competing blockchain so they can pretend to justify not answering your question should be a huge red flag for everyone else involved, but they somehow don't see it.

I'm 7 minutes in, and I really like the style of the video. I don't know why it was recommended to me, but I definitely enjoy it so far! Edit after fully watching: great video. You obviously put a lot of work into research but also production. A video this length that doesn't get boring is not easy, but you managed to do it. Great job. I also really enjoyed the singing, I did not expect that going into the video.

Hey, just a very small correction: you're actually talking about Web3 and not Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is actually a term that existed long before the idea of Web3 came along. It's is (or was, since it will never actually manifest in this way I believe) a vision of the future of the World Wide Web after the current phase (known as Web 2.0., which revolutionized interactivity of content available on the WWW). It was originally coined by Time Bernes-Lee, one of the original creators of the WWW. Web 3.0 is commonly referred to as "The Semantic Web". The idea of Web 3.0 was to attach more semantic meaning via tags/metadata to data discoverable through the web (through expansion of the existing web standards), thereby making data more "machine readable" and "machine discoverable". It's actually not that complex an idea, but right now it has not really been adopted on a large scale. All this just to avoid the confusion arising from seeing the terms "Web 3.0" and "Web3" next to each other. They're two completely different things. This isn't the first time the cryptocurrency industry has astroturfed previously existing terminology. If you would have said "crypto" to someone five years ago, it would have meant "cryptography", as it has for the past decades. If you do this today, almost everyone understands this to mean "cryptocurrency and related technology". It's really, really odd.

As a former bank fraud analyst, I have come to believe that the people who are most vulnerable to a con artist are those who want desperately to be smarter than they really are. They can even be pretty darn smart, but if they are not comfortable with whatever their level of knowledge, intelligence, and critical thinking skill may be and with the fact there are people at higher levels, then they will be desperate to believe anyone who makes them feel like the smartest person in the room because of some kind of inside knowledge. I had somebody yesterday trying to tell me on social media that, for example, Walmart is owned by China. I was skeptical, because that didn't match what I had heard, but I couldn't claim to know right off the top of my head. I asked for their sources. When I looked up the 18-year-old article they named, it turned out to say nothing of the kind, just that Walmart was (18 years ago) leading the way in filling its shelves with Chinese-manufactured products, which is now true at almost any retail store in the United States. I then found a current Investopedia article that broke down the top shareholders in Walmart, and showed that when you combine both personal holdings and shares owned through their legal entities, the Walton family, heirs to the store's founder, still own the majority of the shares (a slim majority, but still, that's a controlling interest). Of course, the person had no answer to actual facts. They slinked (slunk?) off without replying, I'm sure still wanting to think they had special knowledge the rest of us didn't, and refusing to learn from any data that might contradict it. To me, the crypto bros come across as the same kind of people.

You forgot the best part of the Business Plot: it was foiled by the man they tried to hire to lead their private army, one of the most decorated Marines to ever live and super star War hero/politician, Smedley "Old Gimlet Eye" Butler. Because they didn't imagine that a guy who climbed from Private to Head of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, just before writing a literal book about how much he hated being a hired thug for corporations, might not be so on board for a rich boy coup. Dude's were literally so used to being able to bribe anyone, they thought they could just pay a guy who hated the rich enough to betray the country he got all them medals from.

Rewatching this in 2024 and crypto has died so hard

This should win the video of the year award.

I saw münecat at a grocery store in the metaverse yesterday. I told her how cool it was to meet her in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother her and ask him for photos or anything. She said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but she kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing her hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard her chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw her trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen apes in her hands without paying. The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Ma’am, you need to pay for those first.” At first she kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter. When the cashier took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, she stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After the cashier scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, she kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

50:50 imagine doing a crime then 1: not destroying the evidence, and 2: leaving the evidence helpfully itemized and labeled accurately for the police to find

The best part of this video is that every commercial YT served me was for "iTrustCapital" lol

This video has aged VERY well! I can only imagine the dark reddit holes you had to go down to research this topic. Thank you for your service. 🙌

General rule of thumb. If a thing works and has great benefits for society, you don't need to promote it in it's "early days" because the bandwagon effect that creates once it's out, will make it promote itself. Over-promotion means that you are selling the hype, not the actual product, because you know it stinks

33:57 - the irony here is that the regulators were 100% right. From an information security perspective, when email was first introduced, anyone, absolutely anyone on the network path between the computers could read what was in that email. While nowadays, thanks to HTTPS, communication is encrypted, back then it was not. Might as well put whatever confidential information there was on a piece of cardboard and walk through the city holding it above your head. Using the introduction of email here is actually amazingly fitting, but likely not in the way Mr. Brooks intended it. by the way, stellar video on all counts.

This was fantastic, and I think it's due time for you to do a follow up video connecting to this one about how the Crypto/NFT Bro's are now pumping AI and anything related to it the same way they used to do with Crypto/NFT's. And how while AI has advanced and has some uses, it's also being way overhyped in order to pump up companies involved in it, again just like Crypto/NFT's, with the help of companies like Nvidia that have massively profited from it. I wonder what they will move on next after AI.

This is a perfect video to pair with Line Goes Up. Incredible work!

Somehow, non-productive labor exploitation through NFT gaming seems a million times worse than productive labor exploitation. If nothing is even being produced then what the fuck??!

Her consistent disdain for the rich and hypercapitalism is like a salve for the pure disgust I've felt for crypto and NFTs since I accidentally fell down a youtube rabbit hole.

you never fail to blow me away with the depth and quality of your research

1:32:29 Getting some real I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream vibes from this section. Like all the computers get together and form AM.

24:03 funny you mention, a lot of small underground artists from all genres were briefly under a plague of NFT Music websites stealing our music. Like legitimately just illegally downloading the songs, and then selling them on their website. Thankfully we all dmca’d them out of business, Rip in Piss Hitpiece

As a pc build enthusiast, I will forever viscerally hate NFTs for what they've done to the graphics cards market. And as an environmentalist, I will add to that hate even more for that carbon footprint. Needless to say, it felt great seeing someone with as much rage towards them as I have.

27:40 Glad you addressed this in particular, crypto is a dumpster fire already, but this is one of the more minor aspects that’s still a fundamental flaw. Having hundreds of different cryptocurrencies floating about, and being that easy to just make another one, really should just tell the casual observer immediately that none of these are worth crap. These aren’t different national currencies like in the real world, this is play money that these people want real money for.

The amount of work you put into this video is humbling.

I really have to thank you and Folding Ideas' 'Line Goes Up' for your videos breaking down NFTs, as I was seriously considering minting some. I had no idea that it was some insane awkward fad that was tied to an already sketchy alt-coin business as its structural foundation.

On the subject of Play to earn NFT's: They're using this as a way to get around gambling laws because as long as you have an element of skill involved, no matter how small, it isn't considered gambling. The same way mobile games can sell "pulls" because you have to do something small in the game to cash them in. They're literally creating an NFT casino XD

39:30 - I am glad to encounter someone who thinks the same about my theory that those scammers' bad spelling is on purpose!

the war thing was actually an episode in startrek TOS and kirk broke the system because the syustem perpetuated war by removing it's horror. one of kirks ending lines was "i've given you back the horror of war." because wars horror is one of the deterrents to starting warts in the first place.

i once saw a sociologist making a very accurate comparison between the concepts in web3.0 to feudalism. the main concept most libertarians don't understand, is that the big heads behind these meta productions are just feudalists gaslighting you to think they're any better than state, when they're just as opressive as any goverment they critique. that's why i hate the term "anarchocapitalism". currency, capital, these are the main sources of authority in our system. dismantling states won't do anything other than making the powerful more powerful, and the marginalized truly hopeless. I'm brazillian, and tax avoidance already costs more to public vaults than state corruption in my country. we're nearing elections, and propaganda still focuses on this discourse, the agressor blaming the victim.

"It is 2027...welcome to a world of endless shilling and scamming. Everyone not in your inner circle is fair game, everyone inside of it is also fair game. There is only one rule; obtain advantage at all cost, don't let yourself be limited by ethics or morality. Embrace your inner vulture."

Where the hell have I been, only discovering this channel, now? What an amazingly informative and super researched presentation. What an amazing channel. I've come to the party, late. But I'm glad I arrived. I spoke to my long long time friend, and told her about this channel. I'm so hoping that she watches this, as she is vulnerable (so am I) to the grifter's bright lights. I can't sing the praises of this video in particular, and this channel in general, enough.

on paper, my brother was exactly the kind of person who’d fall into the crypto trap. loved money, midway through a business degree, andrew yang voter, fan of edgy humor, whole nine yards. BUT… crypto mining and NFTs just so happened to kick off right when he started upgrading his gaming PC. suddenly the parts he wanted cost 10x more and were extremely hard to find. i think it took him like 18 months to finally get everything he needed. it made him DEEPLY hate crypto bros. and it’s honestly made him a better person. he used to laugh at Edgy Jokes™️ and complain about tipping - now, he helped a homeless man set up venmo so he could send him money and sent me a video about racists dog whistles in BAYC tokens.

Anytime anyone sells you anything with the promise of it increasing of value in future, make sure to ask why they are selling it to you now instead of just waiting for the price to go up themselves.

This hate for cripto warms my heart and sustains my hope for humanity.

Wtf this video documentary monologue is a work of art. Stupid, but bloody beautifull.

omg this video is amazing. everyone needs to watch this

I just watched an extremely engaging, funny, barely comprehensible, hundred-minute video, and now I want to throw a molotov cocktail at math. Is this what being radicalised feels like?

I'd advise any proponents of seasteading to play BioShock to see how well that utopia will turn out to be. That pitch is literally Andrew Ryan's manifesto lmao.

I can't put my mind on how beautiful that "lecture" was. If you're not a teacher, you should obviously become one - you connected to me in many ways that made me listen pretty darn carefully. And while normally I'm really not much on an economist, more of an artiste (french accent) you found a way to combine those two things and that's RARE!!!!

Long but truly glorious. Superb work and thank you for producing it.

6:41 "Fudge this" 26:08 "My baby" Idk 41:22 "Crypto PR" 1:06:38 "Writing this script caused me physical pain" 1:33:39 "HODL til it hits the floor" 1:38:30 "My Man's a Hexagon" I'm just saving these for me, I like them

God... I absolutely ADORE your little mini-song interstitials... they're SO... FREAKING... GOOD... you are so damn talented. ...unfortunately... the content is fucking depressing. Dan Olsen's video was illuminating. This is a damn good companion piece that expands and goes further. As much of a horror show the reality of it is, I'm glad we've got people like you going to the trouble and effort of doing the legwork and research to inform folks. Thank you, genuinely, sincerely, thank you. This had to be SO. MUCH. WORK.

You are amazing and the daughter I never had but would be so amazingly proud of.

i stumbled across this channel after watching some coffeezilla videos about loser crypto bros and i have enjoyed every second. you are wickedly funny and explain concepts in easy to digest ways. keep up the good work.

Dropping this on Saturday at noon ET was a pretty cool thing to do. Gives me something to work through the Friday night hangover to

Münecat, I must say, as someone who works in finance (specifically the money and interbank markets), your explanations of the monetary and financial aspects of crypto were on point and above what I'm used to hearing from most finance youtubers. I don't know what your background is, but I can tell you did your homework.

Holy crap! So much information in one video, this is incredible 💜

There's not a lot of content on the web about crypto that stay relevant for more than a month, let alone a year. I thought I knew a fair bit on the subject but I clearly didn't research quite enough. In particular, the history bits in that video are highly relevant and blew my mind. The production is amazing too. I especially love how the background musics always match and support the current tone. Amazing work.

The thing about "play to earn" games is you can't actually play to earn. If you play the game to have fun, you'll be losing money. The only way to actually earn anything is to do tedious grinding and all sorts of actual work. They are miserable experiences most gamers hate.

Witnessing the downfall of humanity is interesting to say the least. Really depressing video, looking forward to the next one!!!

"I'm going to have to Margot Robbie it" I haven't laughed this hard at a joke in ages.

This is funny, engaging, and also incredibly informative. You’re clearly smart as hell!

I miss web1. The good old days of fighting with my parents when they were trying to phone their parents because I just wanted to look at random shit online

I worked in a cryptocurrency firm for a few months. Despite the fact that it paid well, and I basically got to be by myself most of the time (I did 12-hour shifts on Sundays, because I was desperate for income at the time) - I hated it. It always felt off. If was as if I was doing something wrong... i knew that the coins had no value. The hype was so strong... until the crash, and things got desperate. When the company lost money, I was stoked! I got fired, eventually, because someone used an old lady to con $30k out of the company, via a fraudulent transaction. And I was (i guess) partially responsible for that, because I didn't really question the fact that an old lady was buying crypto - despite the fact that I was the second person in line to sort the transaction, and why should I have to question that? Why shouldn't an old lady buy crypto? There's no doubt that the company probably made a lot of money from the 6 months I was there - potentially, hundreds of thousands in profits, if not more - and it makes my blood boil. So many average users lost money, either because they bought at the peak, or because the company I worked with wouldn't buy back the crypto that they sold. Oh yeah - what was worse, is that they wouldn't accept coin sales until prices went back up. Class act, for sure. Oh - but do you think that the company kept their gains in crypto? Or did they pull them into USD? What's your guess? Of course they converted those gains to fiat, because they're hypocrites. They'd brag about the bag they were spending. It was disgusting. Watching this video has reminded me that the whole situation is stupid. So little of what was discussed and promised by all these shillcoins actually ended up being delivered. I ended up investing in traditional stocks, and have never looked back. And because of this, hey, it stays at a similar value, which is awesome. I have money, if I needed. Buying an NFT is counter to common sense, when it comes to investments. It relies on people being interested in it. It has no other value, is destroying our global climate, and it is predominantly and indirectly marketed by con artists and scams. It's a ruse, and it can die in a fire.

i never seen this channel u are FIRE!

This is my first video of yours! Incredible. I can’t wait to watch more.

This video had the one thing Dan Olson's was sorely missing: someone explaining economics in a bathtub.

"renting NFTs", "playing a cute fun game to earn a living", "crypto queen" Boy, the zoomer economy is fucking wild.

Just noticed the classical take on age of consent "mental maturity is enough" on the thumbnail. I always found it hilarious, as most of the people aren't really mentally mature all the way until their mid thirties. From that angle I support it wholeheartedly, a shitton of financially unstable families and people's depression coming from being neglected as a child would just evaporate

The funniest thing is the rich always say, dont tread on me, but once they "move out" and return they wonder why their fancy BMWs suspension cracked on that pothole thats there, or why that airport is only accepting comercial flights or charge a lot to use the apron and such

I am quite happy that you have mentioned and went into detail about the Axie phenomenon in my home country. At first, I thought it was just a side hustle where people who have extra cash to burn invest on it and hoped for the best but when it became sort of an "alternative" to having an actual job or a more respectable business. That's when I started to see the red flags. And for the Philippines, having most of its population living in the poverty line but somehow has access to the Internet due to the abundance of dirt cheap Internet cafes. Those said people are the victim on this phenomenon if anything. Sure, there are success stories but Axie all boils down to luck. Only the Rich can rise to the top or at least have a stable income out of it. Whilst the less fortunate just gambles on it. So no, it is not an "alternative" for having a job or a small time business.

I love the contrast between crypto critics making these extremely well thought-out, densely packed, thoroughly researched videos that put the crypto phenomenon into the appropriate historical context, expose the major players behind the scenes, and talk about the many, many predatory tactics involved in hyping up crypto and NFTs, while crypto shills have ... tits, technobabble and memes. Amazing.

the sponsor being a hair loss company is... it is just poetry

Just a few days short of 2 years later, web3 hasnt really gotten any better ... now we've got FTX as a prime example

I never knew I needed a mix of musical performances, comedy and crypto hate all together in one package in my life until now

Luckily, here in the Philippines. There is a lawyer that also is a content creator combats Axie Infinity and NFT Games. And the NFT games hype here is now dying and people are now aware that NFT games are scams.

"thats me, Christopher, a crypto degen with a crush for crypto kitties" is a line that makes me want to keep him 50m away from any school or park

Impressive production!

I always said. "telling stupid people to do their own research is the smartest form of terrorism."

I'm hoping we've already seen the peak of Web 3.0 and everyone will come to realize what a speculative scam it is. Congrats to those that got in early and aren't stuck holding the bag.

Thank you for the gold, kind standard