On December 31, 2019, there was a war of words about Web3 (the third generation of the Internet) on Twitter. Among the contestants are Tesla founder Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, who has just stepped down as CEO of Twitter, and the founder and partner of top venture capital A16Z.
In the eyes of proponents, Web3 is the form of the next generation of the Internet, and in the mouths of opponents, Web3 is just another concept that has been hyped by capital.
At 11:00 a.m. Beijing time on December 21, Jack Dorsey took the lead: "You don't own 'web3', venture capital firms and their limited partners are the owners, it will never escape the incentive mechanism, and eventually, Web3 will become a centralized institution with different labels, you have to know what you are doing." ”
Shortly after Jack posted, Chris Dixon, a partner at A16Z, who had been promoting Web3 on Twitter, couldn't sit still and took the lead in fighting back: "In Web3, all code, data, and ownership is open source." You read and then decide what you want. VCs (including A16z) have very little. ”
Chris Dixon then famously said, "At first, they ignored you, then they laughed at you, then they hit you (we were at this stage), and in the end you won." (This passage was forwarded by Trump when he was signed by Mahatma Gandhi.)
Jack choked below: "Your fund wants to be a media empire that cannot be ignored, not to become Gandhi." ”
Chris Dixon responded that "well said, by the way, this sentence is not from Gandhi" and casually threw out a link to debunk the rumor.
The game went into half-time and the balance of victory seemed to lean in favor of the A16Z. Next, Chris Dixon took the initiative to ask Jack for peace, to the effect that "I have always been a big fan of you, for the sake of all of us bitcoin supporters, truce."
But Jack was soft and hard, commenting that "focusing on the really secure and developmental technology owned by the masses rather than individuals or institutions", while forwarding a cartoon satirizing Silicon Valley VCs using the Web3 circle of money, accompanied by a "100 points" emoji.
Immediately after, the battle line expanded, and the cosmic internet celebrity Musk took the initiative to join the battle, tweeting and asking: "Have you seen web3?" How I didn't find it. ”
Jack Dorsey replied, "Maybe somewhere between A and Z." "Dark poke A16Z." Musk then replied: Great.
One day, the next morning, Jack Dorsey found himself blocked by A16Z founder Marc Andreessen, once again offering up his taunt skills: "This time I was officially banned by Web3." ”
Jack began to fire furiously, bluntly saying "the software we invested in has eaten all over the world" to the A16Z official Twitter profile, and then forwarding the tweet that others were blocked by Marc Andreessen, bluntly saying that the A16Z pattern was too small.
Subsequently, Jack has successively closed Web3 fans, including Marc Andreessen, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss and others.
Pull black, take off, yin and yang weirdness without a word... The war of words between Silicon Valley bigwigs looks no different from that of Weibo netizens.
As of now, the war of words on Twitter has come to an end. But it's conceivable that the next debate about Web3, both in Silicon Valley and globally, will continue for some time.
Web 3, also known as Web 3.0, was created in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood and in the second half of 2021, it was chased by tech companies and venture capital firms. In a report released by A16Z, Web3 was defined as "a set of technologies that encompass blockchain, crypto protocols, digital assets, decentralized finance and social platforms."
Since the beginning of this year, capital giants including Sequoia Capital, A16Z, And Coinbase have entered Web3. In June, A16Z announced that it had raised $2.2 billion in funds, plus the first two early-stage crypto funds totaling $825 million, with a crypto asset management size of more than $3 billion. On November 15, Paradigm announced that it will set up a $2.5 billion crypto investment fund to bet on the next generation of leading crypto projects.
In October, A12Z executives traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the regulation of Web3. A12Z as a policymaker has been trying to come up with a potential solution for Web3 web regulation.
In this Web3 war of words, Musk posted: "I'm not saying web3 is real — it seems more of a marketing buzzword than a reality now — just wondering what the future will look like in 10, 20 or 30 years." 2051 sounds like crazy futurism!"
In an interview this year, Elon Musk cast doubt on Web3: "It now looks more like a marketing buzzword than a reality." ”