Web2 vs. Web3, Alex Stamos vs. Chris Dixon
“In web2, you are just borrowing things — until the actual owners change their mind.”
In web3, you own something until a 17 year-old in St. Petersburg borrows your 32 byte private key (shorter than this tweet) for 100ms and steals your entire life savings with no recourse.
🧵 Thread by Alex Stamos: https://nitter.net/alexstamos/status/1470583102699307008
I have personal opinions regarding this exchange (and about the topic being debated)
(particularly that there is no single monolithic web2, nor is there a monolithic web3),
...but I'm going to keep them to myself for now. Let it marinate for a bit first.
Stamos thread copy-pasted below:
December 14:
cdixon:
“In web2, you are just borrowing things — until the actual owners change their mind.”alexstamos:
In web3, you own something until a 17 year-old in St. Petersburg borrows your 32 byte private key (shorter than this tweet) for 100ms and steals your entire life savings with no recourse.I’m writing something longer on this but the continued willful ignorance of the entire sordid history of software and information security by the otherwise smart people funding web3 is both infuriating and creates a great market opportunity for those with appropriate paranoia.
“A thousand years of common law underlying dispute resolution is just silly overheard that we can replace with our belief in the ability to write code that behaves perfectly predictably in the presence of an adversary” is the principle behind much of web3 and so so stupid.
I’m not sure the web3 kids or the VCs throwing money into the crypto dog fighting pits understand how abnormal this kind of story was for… most of human history. We don’t actually live in Ocean’s 11: the ability to easily steal $100M+ is totally new! [theblockcrypto.com/post/127270/...]
I’ve done defense and IR for a couple of decades, and it was hard enough dealing with attackers making state salaries or getting away with $500k wire transfers. The TAM for offensive skills has grown 1000x thanks to cryptocurrencies and we won’t understand the impact for years.
I shouldn’t be complaining; the market for infosec expertise will explode as legal recourses fade away and hundreds of millions of people are exposed to the prodsec risks large orgs used to handle for them. Just not sure being the old hacker in a cyberpunk novel is worth it.
The best long play is probably crypto forensics companies and Moscow Maserati dealerships.
Today, Dec. 15 (Dixon blocks Stamos):
alexstamos:
It’s unfortunate that one cannot just click block on the risk one is accruing on behalf of LPs and normal users.
Stamos thread was in reply to Chris Dixon tweet: https://nitter.net/cdixon/status/1470374120055615488
Original context, NY Times article \u0026 tweet:
Thea-Mai Baumann's Instagram handle was (at)metaverse. “You are now a millionaire,” one person messaged her when Facebook announced it was changing its name. \"Fb isn’t gonna buy it, they’re gonna take it,” said another.
And that's exactly what happened. http://nyti.ms/31UVs7U
📑 Her Instagram handle was 'Metaverse'. Last month it vanished. - NY Times - http://nyti.ms/31UVs7U
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#fz_links #fz_currentEvents / #metaverse #web3 #NFT #blockchain #DecentralisedFinance #cryptocurrency