Comment by frollogaston

Moxie doesn't trash NFTs or Web3 in that article. He just points out some limitations of the ecosystem.

Also, ipfs directly fixes one of the bigger issues:

> Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data.

If it's ipfs, it points to the content. If it's ipns, it points to a changeable link to the content, but one that is made consistent through the network, preventing the trick of making it differ based on the referrer.

His statement at the end was pretty interesting:

"If we do want to change our relationship to technology, I think we’d have to do it intentionally. My basic thoughts are roughly:

    We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust. One of the surprising things to me about web3, despite being built on “crypto,” is how little cryptography seems to be involved!
    We should try to reduce the burden of building software. At this point, software projects require an enormous amount of human effort. Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever. This wasn’t always the case, and there was a time when 50 people working on a software project wasn’t considered a “small team.” As long as software requires such concerted energy and so much highly specialized human focus, I think it will have the tendency to serve the interests of the people sitting in that room every day rather than what we may consider our broader goals. I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass. Unfortunately, I think distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult, not less complicated and less difficult."

Funnily enough, later that year ChatGPT came out and blew away the excitement around cryptocurrencies by making software easier to manufacture to some degree. Though even with the latest LLM tools, I don't think this has changed at all so far: "Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever." Maybe those people can program by texting from the coffee machine, but they're still working.