Comment by voidmain

The new hot take (I heard it from Matt Levine, I think, but I doubt it's original to him) is that pyramid schemes solve the adoption problem for technologies with network effects.

Everyone would be better off with better identity management, but it's not worth anyone's time to be one of the first users of a system with no sites supporting it or one of the first site supporting a system with no users. The web3 version of this will be something where if it takes off the first adopters get super rich at the expense of late adopters, and that makes it take off.

Similarly, conventional profit models incentivize the creators of a technology to make it as centralized and locked in as possible, so that they can profit off it over time. The pyramid scheme business model incentivizes the creators to make a decentralized and open system, so that they don't have to do any work over time once it takes off.

Is this the special kind of stupidity that only really smart people can aspire to, or the special kind of genius that only really stupid people can? Time will tell, I guess.