Comment by @zkjew • Hey
I completely agree with these points, and I think with some more clarification on how something like this would work we could come to a consensus on how th
Comments
- I think we should examine where the value in a protocol comes from:
It’s not scarcity, it’s liquidity.
More users = More value.
Email (specifically SMTP/POP/IMAP) is a winning protocol because it’s open to all and has attracted “critical mass” adoption. There are indeed costs, and those costs are handled by various participants along the stack. Google pays to cover the costs of email because they’ve figured out how to make money on top of it. Some Email providers charge a monthly fee direct to consumer. But (crucially) anyone can run their own email server and pay for the costs themselves. Similarly, anyone can build an app which uses Uniswap and pays for the customer’s fees by building a business on top of it. Fidelity or JP Morgan or any institution can use it, pay the Uniswap fee for the user, and then make the money back in all kinds of other fees from the business. Or users can go directly to Uniswap and pay the costs themselves.
Lens can let anyone in the stack pay for gas. An open source Lens app could allow users to pay gas directly while Orb could insert ads and cover the gas fees with ad revenue.
The value comes from successful adoption/network effects/liquidity. Ebay, after all these years, is still a winning marketplace because it has the most liquidity. So is OpenSea, even though there are many competing marketplaces. An example/warning I give all the time is regarding Instagram entering web3: Meta has stated that their goal is to switch from an ad-based business model to a marketplace model. They may be slow by our standards in this transition, but it’s coming. If Instagram turned into a marketplace today, Jan 9, they would have the most liquidity in the world. They would obsolete OpenSea.
Now take that one step further: If Meta released a free and open social networking protocol, like Lens, and allowed every app (even Twitter/YouTube/Pinterest/etc) to adopt it in the same manner as Email it would become the most widely-used format for social media posts, which would of course benefit the world’s largest social media marketplace. Lens would become irrelevant or become an additive protocol rather than a base layer, unless Lens reaches “critical mass” adoption first.
For what it’s worth, I’m not saying a closed system can’t or shouldn’t work, just that their value comes from other sources (like scarcity). We have these web3 examples already: Bored Apes, Punks, CloneX, etc. Those are closed platforms you must pay to use. If Lens wanted to become a private platform then “pay to mint” is the way to go. If Lens aims to become the most widely used social protocol it needs to enable the most amount of people to use it. Those are two completely different incentive structures and sources of value.
The “oppressed” Chinese citizen in our example, by the way, already has access to immutable data at the base layer of Ethereum. From there they can choose how to format their data, if at all. One of the ways to entice this person to format their data for Lens would be to make it the most widely-adopted format.