The ‘Hollow Abstraction’ of Web3 ⇥ newsletters.theatlantic.com

Charlie Warzel, in his fantastic Galaxy Brain newsletter:

When I read McCormick’s posts or many of the other pieces evangelizing for crypto-related projects, I tend to come away feeling kind of stupid — just as I did reading the Braintrust whitepaper. Now maybe I’m telling on myself here. Perhaps my small brain stopped accepting new ideas after the 10th version of the iPhone, and now I’m doomed to look foolish (I’ve written at length about this fear). But I also know I’m not at all alone when it comes to reading whitepapers and crypto Substacks and feeling like the breathless urgency or complexity doesn’t match with what’s really being described.

I am keeping an open mind, but this has also been my experience. I find myself stumbling across these projects and asking myself what lies beneath the layers of jargon and marketing speak, and then how that differs from existing products and services. So far, I have been unsatisfied.