I’m not sure if you’ve been around in this space long enough to have seen the Ethereum community back in 2015. What a different time that was. Back then, the prevailing narrative wasn’t getting rich on Ethereum. And it certainly wasn’t getting rich FROM Ethereum. (By “on Ethereum” I mean getting rich from developing dApps, tokens, services, software, etc. that run on the Ethereum network, and by “from Ethereum” I mean buying Ether to hold, and expecting its value to 100x)
The prevailing narrative used to be how we could use this breakthrough technology to help one another. (I know, today this sounds absurd!) People talked on forums about how we could take financial instruments that were restricted to only the rich and the powerful in western countries, and make them accessible to everyone, everywhere, (ideally anonymously), and for free (minus gas :p). Banking the unbanked.
Unlike farming, mining, or most other human endeavors, software development is an action that provides PERPETUAL yield after the action is completed. In this way, it (ironically enough) is more similar to creating art or composing music. Once the time and effort is done being spent on creating the work, it exists and requires relatively little effort to have it shared with others.
Corporations know this. Developers are hired to create a specific tool for humanity - a tool where after the initial upfront human labor cost is spent to bring it into existence, it costs nearly nothing to give to the world. Yet we end up in the SAAS world of subscriptions, where corporations are profiting on the software long after they’ve already laid off their R&D team.
But this pisses off some talented people who have this cyberpunk flame in them, the same sorts of people who were the prominent voices in Ethereum back in 2015. With a passion to create and a desire to make the world a better place, they had a response. Software created simply out of the love of making, shared with the world for free. I am of course, talking about open-source.
Back then, it seemed like were all on the same page about how the middle-men and corporations were stealing value from society. Just like how the subscription models of SAAS software companies pocket the subscription fees from software that has already been written, traditional financial institutions are also leeches that pocket most of the interest paid from their debtors using their depositors’ money.
Visa and Mastercard pocket 2.35% of pretty much every transaction in the world. Your bank profits the difference between their loan interest and what they pay you for your savings. Your stock broker takes a fraction of your transactions, and so does your financial advisor and your real estate agent.
Ethereum was supposed to enable the “open-source” equivalent of financial tooling. Not just open-source where the code is freely available, but open-source where the service itself is freely available. Where 100% of the interest earned from the depositors’ money goes to the depositor. But where did the promised vision of these public goods go?
Sure, the code behind our dApps today are open-source. But that doesn’t make them public goods. We still take from the users of our dApps just like the middlemen in our traditional systems today, and charge them to fund the burning of our shitcoin, the rewards to our governance token holders, the warchests of our DAO treasuries, etc.
Profit is tempting, but it didn’t stop the open-source developers in the face of corporations making some serious cash on subscription SAAS.
Where did our REAL cyberpunk web3 developers go?
If you’ve read this far, thanks! I really appreciate your time. If you really liked this piece, I’d really love to hear your thoughts. Send me something (@threemuskets) on Farcaster!
In my next post I’m going to explore a middle ground concept that pays developers for their time spent developing (we all need to feed our families somehow), but still rewards humanity with their tool in perpetuity. Limited Profit Public Goods.