a16z Future

You're taking a lot of flak here, but I think you're basically correct. (Even if cross-game NFTs never become a thing.)

The debate reminds me of when Napster looked, to many, like it would end the sales of pre-recorded music, since music can be copied identically for free. Obviously such predictions turned out to be wrong.

I think they would have turned out to be right if there was no such thing as copyright law. But there is. People were prosecuted, and over time the prosecutions made a difference. They helped it make sense to invest money in creating well-designed, easy-to-use streaming services. And in the end, for most people, it was more convenient and risk-free to get music from such services than to pirate it. It was worth the cost.

Over time, if people spend real money on NFTs, the legal system will evolve to better protect people's purchases. For now, if two people claim to be the creator of a given artwork which is the subject of an NFT, and create two NFTs, only one of them will have the actual copyright. That should provide a basis for legal action.

As I said, I'm not sure cross-game NFTs will ever get past the hype stage. But I have been to a museum where truly beautiful NFT art was on display. I haven't bought any art in many years but I can certainly imagine that my next art purchase could be that kind of NFT. By purchasing it, I am helping the creator in "1000 True Fans"[1] manner, and I am, in the creator's view, which is the only one with any legitimacy…

Why should I care if the teenage son of a wealthy banker in Switzerland wants to blow his Dad's money speculating on NFT's? How about the sons and daughter of wealthy Arabs in the oil countries? Surely it doesn't matter if I, as a member of the Silicon Valley elite, take them for a ride and teach them a valuable lesson while profiting handsomely?

Just remember, when you're playing with this kind of a crowd, this late in the game -- it's all about being the last person holding the bag.

Do you know that the phrase means? And do you want to be that person?

I've been pretty skeptical until I had a recent epiphany brought on by a16z's enthusiasm for the market.

Which is utterly and transparently deranged, BTW. Either that, or very cynically and skillfully devised to promote businesses with the specific intent of fleecing down brave, optimistic people very much like yourself.

I'm not exaggerating here; just look a the opening paragraph of one of their recent pronouncements on this subject:

https://future.a16z.com/the-future-of-work-daos-crypto-networks/

Headlines need statements. If you disagree, consider if I'd written: Headlines that assert a statement grab readers, you probably wouldn't care enough to still be reading.

Write the headline just as you think it with all its logic and reason, and then conjugate it into an assertion with a begged question.

Maybe they're going for a more quiet experience than clickbait, but since people read for sensation, and the more people that read something the more they will have in common, I'd say conjugate your headlines.

People Overlook Subtractive Changes.
https://future.a16z.com/the-untapped-potential-of-subtraction/

Low Switching Costs are Driving DeFi.
https://future.a16z.com/cryptos-fourth-wave-defi-poised-for-breakthrough/

Nobody Knows Where Their Stuff Is.
https://future.a16z.com/beyond-the-meme-ever-given-supply-chains-and-the-physical-world/

Bubbles Are Statistical Time Travel.
https://future.a16z.com/well-behaved-bubbles-history-innovation/

etc.

Lots of people asking about DAOs. So here are a couple of resources you can look up.

To look at a large list of different DAOs with info about what tech stack they run, how big the treasuries are, etc., look here: https://deepdao.io/#/deepdao/dashboard

Here is a good article written in layman's terms (it's CNBC after all) about the concept and current landscape of DAOs: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/what-are-daos-what-to-know-about-the-next-big-trend-in-crypto.html

If you want to get a peek into organizational minutiae that DAOs deal with the CabinDAO does a great of documenting it. For example: https://creators.mirror.xyz/Le68ptgaqsBh1g6w8UqqVL2kIrA_Lqn37bELMO-W_-0

And here is a mega-collection of resources on the ever-evolving landscape by a16z: https://future.a16z.com/dao-canon/

I am a happy member of two DAOs in case some people think it is a conflict of interest.

You may want to look at the guidance from a16z. https://future.a16z.com/emerging-architectures-modern-data-infrastructure/

They are basically recommending picking one of the big three: Snowflake, Bigquery, or Redshift. Using standard connectors. Once your data is in one of the big three, you can use any analysis tool.

I have been involved in this space for some time and am heavily involved with Salesforce. In my corner of the world, I still lean heavily on SQL Server and Cdata/Dbamp which allows me to replicate and write back to Salesforce via SQL batch jobs. Tableau Online has also been a game changer as it allows business folks to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Our BI team now consists of three senior tech folks and 12 business analysts.

As an example of diversity of approaches, look at the Fast Grants program:

https://future.a16z.com/what-we-learned-doing-fast-grants/

It was created in 2020 to give grants for COVID-related research. Its big selling point was that it would give out money fast: very little paperwork to fill out, and yes/no decisions made within 48 hours. They were surprised to discover that even researchers at top universities were having a hard time getting funding out of the usual institutions like the NIH, which were adapting very slowly to the pandemic. They seem to have done very well in speeding up research, at least with the amount of money they had, just by giving out the funding in a way that few-to-none of the existing institutions would.