1. Censorship

   [Arbitrary, Common speech to a private corporation, Banning, Shadow-banning, Voices, Against the grain, Increasing consequences, Inherent costs, Power to shut down any account at will, One action, Banned for life, Cannot truly live inside a controlled virtual world]

2. Undue Rent Extraction

   [Privacy cost, Manipulation of our sense and nerves]

3. Privacy Issues

   [Expose private data, Inherent privacy costs, Leasing our eyes and nerves]

4. Misaligned Incentives

   [Harmful for society, Internet’s original sin]

5. Anti-competitive Behaviours

   [Dominant players, Monopolistic behaviour, Centralized control, State aggregators, Network effects limiting competition, Social networking, Power of networks, Network becomes global over time, Bunch of close systems interaction with each other, Original open protocols have been replaced, Oxygen to a monopoly]

6. Monopolizing the Value Shifting Online

   [Value Transfer protocol, Architected to capture value, Take more than they give, Take rates are a Form of Taxation without representation, Traditional client-server architecture model, Servers are closed systems, Owned by a company, VC Money Going to Google and Facebook]

7. Ad-driven Business Models

   [Adversarial Business model to consumers]

8. Subject to Politics

   [Political abuse, Directly influencing democracy itself, Removing content that might aggravate parties, Refusal to remove posts, Impossible to immunize with centralized chokepoints, Weaponized by states, Fighting political adversaries, Regularly succumbing to pressure, Increasingly Dubious and opaque platforms, Universal Erosion of Trust in Institutions]

9. Mediation by Third Parties

   [Inherent transaction costs, Using power to become new intermediaries, Price and cut of revenue determined by a sea of middlemen]

10. Mandatory Permission from a 3rd Party to Integrate

    [Going through the onboarding process to have the items be tradable, SaaS]

11. No Ownership Prospects for Users

    [Unsound digital goods, Merely licensed from the issuing company, Cannot be held, authenticated, and sold, In-game purchases not considered a form of investment, Broke synergy between ownership and commerce, Owners are renters, Record of your rights to each kind of content is stored on a small number of computers, Ownership proofs handled by a small handful of for-profit institutions, Serfdom, not ownership, Can seize the digital property you worked for at will, Uploading a file on a platform transfers ownership, File is copied to the platform’s backend, Ownership of the file is transferred to that company]

12. Siloed Databases and Walled Gardens

    [Most codes are private, Data is secured, Digital capture and storage]

13. You Cannot Take Any Followers Elsewhere

    [Content and social graphs are rarely portable across platforms, Users cannot take something they paid and own to the next platform without permission of the rulers]

14. Building Audiences on a Misleading Free Platform

    [Forcing brands and publishers to pay to reach their audiences, Switching from attracting to extract, Charging to reach customers]

15. A Dominant Way for Creators and Fans to Connect

    [Algorithmic recommendations between creators and users, Audience has to go along, AI / ML]

16. Required Degree of Obnoxious Spam to be Noticed

    [Forced to constantly broadcast to everybody to be cool]

17. No Investment from a Poster

    [Cannot signal your early commitments to cool things, Contributions are anonymous and not time-stamped, Cannot establish when you took the risk]

18. Creator Payouts are Determined by Opaque Processes

    [Creator Grant Program Trap, Clever way to acquire top creators by getting their audience to join a platform and retain them over time, Programs are opaque and cash-based with little to no equity, Cash-based, No equity, Keeping revenue for themselves, Terms of service monetizing as they see fit, Misaligned monetization models, Not aligned with the best interest of creators, Reaping the bulk of the value from owning creator content, Monetizing your content, Keeping most of the content value, Opaque capital flows, Capturing a disproportionate share of the profits]

19. Hard to Make a Sustainable Living

    [Gig economy marketplaces, Unless you are a top creator, Small part of the population is included, Treating creators as commoditized supply, Users are the engine for growth]

20. Designed to Incentivize Free Labor

    [Failure to recognize man-hours, Gamification, Likes, follows, friends, badges, Incentivizing contribution, Tapping intrinsic incentives, Moderators keeping positive discourse on platform, thus growing platform, Enabling users to ‘earn’ within a status economy existing only inside the platform, Rewarding participation and coordination]

21. All-or-nothing Propositions

    [Unless crowdfunding campaign hits its fundraising target, the project doesn’t happen, Limited ways to fundraise projects]

22. Owned and Governed by Shareholders

    [Skews towards finance firms, executives, board directors, and early employees, Controlled by the board, CEO, and activist investors, Fees are captured exclusively by the core team, Community is forgotten, Members only paid in badges, not in money, More stuff to sell through the same traditional system channels, Limited access to the upside for employees and customers, Investors get rich, The community gets nothing, Fractured systems and incentive mechanisms]

23. The Raw Power

    [Individuals having a minimum influence over society]

24. Sudden Cessation

Sources

The Intelligent Crypto Investor is the result of an analysis on the a16z NFT canon, and long-form podcasts from crypto-related guests of the Lex Fridman Podcast.

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