{"id":22885,"date":"2022-05-26T22:50:07","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T22:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=22885"},"modified":"2022-05-26T23:26:42","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T23:26:42","slug":"tortoise-media-making-sense-of-web3-with-luke-gbedemah-with-stephen-diehl-geoffrey-huntley-and-david-gerard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2022\/05\/26\/tortoise-media-making-sense-of-web3-with-luke-gbedemah-with-stephen-diehl-geoffrey-huntley-and-david-gerard\/","title":{"rendered":"Tortoise Media: Making sense of Web3 with Luke Gbedemah \u2014 with Stephen Diehl, Geoffrey Huntley and David Gerard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I did a panel last night, with Stephen Diehl and Geoffrey Huntley, for Tortoise Media: what on earth is &#8220;Web3&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>The levels are all over the place, so get ready to adjust the volume on the fly. But our content was excellent, and it&#8217;s worth the effort. It runs a bit over an hour. [<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qMbxLhmKNI0\"><em>YouTube<\/em><\/a>]<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"735\" height=\"414\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qMbxLhmKNI0?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-GB&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll just add here my rant at the media from the end, which I think came out quite well:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We&#8217;ve got a room full of people in there who are interested because they hear about this so much but they don&#8217;t really understand how it works.<\/p>\n<p>The very quick way is: all the complicated stuff that you don&#8217;t quite understand, that&#8217;s all chaff thrown up to try to get you to buy into nonsense. The idea that somehow money is different now, it&#8217;s a whole new paradigm, we can all get rich, everything will be magic, and it&#8217;ll be brilliant. There are problems in the world, we&#8217;ll supply some magic!<\/p>\n<p>So the first point: is magic doesn&#8217;t happen. Two and two makes four, it doesn&#8217;t make five, six, ten or a million. It makes four. If it sounds too good to be true, it&#8217;s too good to be true. If you&#8217;ve got someone promising to double your money, they want to pick your pocket. You&#8217;ve got someone offering 20% interest rates, they want to pick your pocket. If someone&#8217;s promising a fabulous new future and all you have to do is give them your money, maybe you should look into it a bit more closely, or just think, no, I can do without that, and get on with my life.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to fix your personal circumstances &#8230; crypto, you can totally get rich in crypto, right? You can also get rich betting on horses. It&#8217;s not investment on the individual level, it&#8217;s a gamble. If you think you want to become a crypto trader, you&#8217;re diving into a shark pool built by the sharks to feed the sharks. So trade carefully.<\/p>\n<p>Magic doesn&#8217;t happen, and you need to watch out because this space is full of predators who want your money. None of this has changed in centuries. I often say the best book about Bitcoin is <i>Extraordinary Popular Delusions<\/i> by Charles Mackay, and that was written in 1841, about the South Sea bubble which Stephen mentioned, about the tulip bubble in Holland, John Law&#8217;s scheme in Missouri [<i>I meant Mississippi<\/i>], all of these asset bubbles and irrational exuberance.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s because some people really, really feel desperate and they don&#8217;t understand stuff. They think maybe this is a way out. But whenever you hear people saying &#8220;new paradigm, money is different now,&#8221; they want to pick your pocket. You can go a long way just on common sense that <em>magic doesn&#8217;t happen<\/em>, and if it looks magical, magic doesn&#8217;t happen. That&#8217;s basically the short answer.<\/p>\n<p>And we need to be concerned, because these people are scammers! They&#8217;re out there skinning mums and dads and grannies and young people who are desperate! They&#8217;re desperate, and these people are preying on them! And that is reprehensible, and we have to stand up and say that, y&#8217;know.<\/p>\n<p>That is what the media needs to do, and what it doesn&#8217;t do. Like, the shine came off the crypto bubble just recently, you&#8217;ve got all these papers running features, &#8220;um, crypto: maybe it&#8217;s not so good after all&#8221; \u2014 these are the same papers who were running articles a month ago saying how great it was and you should totally get in. You know, where were you a month ago, guys? They have really lost sight of the public interest here. The public interest is making sure the public isn&#8217;t scammed by predators. That&#8217;s the short answer to what media should do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the Project Gutenberg download page for <em>Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds<\/em> by Charles Mackay. You should read it, you&#8217;ll enjoy it. [<a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/24518\/24518-h\/24518-h.htm\"><em>Project Gutenberg<\/em><\/a>]<\/p>\n<br><br><div align=\"center\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\"><img src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/become_a_patron_button.svg\" alt=\"Become a Patron!\" title=\"Become a Patron!\" width=217 height=51><\/a><br><p style=\"align:center;\" class=\"patreon-badge\"><i>Your subscriptions keep this site going. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\">Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The levels are all over the place, so get ready to adjust the volume on the fly. But our content was excellent, and it&#8217;s worth the effort. It runs a bit over an hour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2979,2980,1510,1907,2978,2602],"class_list":["post-22885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-geoffrey-huntley","tag-luke-gbedemah","tag-podcast","tag-stephen-diehl","tag-tortoise-media","tag-web3"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/diehl-tortoisemedia.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22885"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22897,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22885\/revisions\/22897"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}