Note: This is one of the highest-quality crypto conversations I've ever seen. The two participants are Chris Dixon, a partner at A16Z, and Fred Ehrsam, a co-founder of Coinbase and now partner at Paradigm. The discussion took place in late 2017, when Fred Ehrsam was still at Coinbase.
Four years later, looking back, the insights feel increasingly mind-blowing. Recently, I printed out this transcript for long-term study and have also recommended it to many traditional VC friends.
This conversation offers a foundational breakdown of blockchain tokens. From incentive mechanisms and developer communities to new protocols and governance models, from the pros and cons of centralization versus decentralization to the wild ICO market, these two experts share how they evaluate whether an ICO project is credible, how to quantify a token’s long-term value, and why this new technological wave must create a new layer of value.
The content comes from an April 2018 article by Orange Book (WeChat ID: chengpishu), translated by retric, authorized for publication by TechFlow.
TL; DR: (too long, didn’t read)
1. For the first time in history, we’ve embedded an economic system directly into the internet.
2. Similar to computing power and storage, “native resources” are better sold directly via token mechanisms.
3. We’ve already abandoned OpenSSL because it lacks a business model—it can’t be a sustainable business, no matter how important it is.
4. Bitcoin emerged during the 2008 financial crisis, but there was another, even bigger crisis happening at the same time—the “programmer crisis.”
5. Good incentive mechanisms can create massive “collective behaviors,” and tokens can build new networks at an exponential speed previously unimaginable.
6. Over the past 15 years, every company that truly scaled has been one that owned user data and network effects.
7. You can think of each token as its own new decentralized mini-bank or mini-government.
8. The volunteers and individual developers working nights and weekends have been the best prophets of the internet over the last 20 years.
9. In chaotic structures, people try more paths—some of which may lead to significant innovation.
10. All our knowledge and experience come from things that already exist and have been proven. But blockchain allows you to create something entirely new.
11. Of the world’s top 50 websites, 48 were built by companies founded after the internet existed.
12. The essence of software is translating human ideas into code that machines can understand and execute.
Ten years ago, someone published a nine-page whitepaper online. Ten years later, we have a $70 billion digital currency system with the world’s largest cluster of computers. Isn’t that exactly how innovation happens?
There is now a group of deeply dissatisfied programmers worldwide who want a new way to build things—and their aspirations have coincided perfectly with the emergence of blockchain.
Chris Dixon: Many readers of this article have probably heard of Bitcoin and Ethereum. My first question is: Why are tokens so important? Why is blockchain more than just a speculative frenzy, but actually meaningful for our world? Where does token value come from?
Fred Ehrsam: The most important reason, I believe, is—for the first time in history, we’ve embedded an economic system directly into the internet.
Chris Dixon: But haven’t we already had credit cards and Alipay on the internet? You can pay directly on Taobao to buy goods. What exactly do you mean by “embedding an economic system into the internet”?
Fred Ehrsam: Decentralized blockchains and tokens represent a more direct economic system. Yes, you can currently spend money online to buy goods or services, but payment capability hasn’t been written into the underlying protocol code of the internet. So you can’t directly pay at the protocol layer to purchase what you want.
Platforms like Taobao and Amazon build application-layer services atop the protocol layer, allowing purchases at the app level. But Ethereum and Filecoin work differently. Ethereum sells computational resources directly at the protocol layer, while Filecoin (IPFS) sells storage space directly. Beyond compute and storage, many other native resources can be sold directly via token mechanisms at the base layer. I believe such resources will perform better on decentralized platforms than centralized ones.
Chris Dixon: I tend to view blockchain and tokens more from a developer’s perspective. Historically, we’ve had two development models. One is building底层 protocols through non-profit, community-driven efforts. That was our initial approach—early internet protocols like HTTP, TCP/IP, HTML, SMTP were designed openly by governments and universities. And initially, this worked very well.
But if you look at the next 20 years, something seems off. Take OpenSSL—for example. OpenSSL secures web browsing for billions globally, encrypting sensitive data like passwords to prevent theft. Yet it once suffered a critical bug because only a small group of volunteer, part-time developers maintained it. Protocols lack commercial value—OpenSSL has been abandoned because it has no business model. It can't become a real business. So few people actually commit to it, no matter how crucial it is.
The second model is corporate: giants like Facebook dominate advertising, Amazon dominates e-commerce. These companies grow extremely fast, generate massive revenue and profits, which fuel further growth. As a result, all the smartest people, top engineers, capital, productivity, and attention get sucked into these highly centralized systems. Meanwhile, individual developers and small startups find their survival space gradually squeezed out by these centralized platforms—they suffer constant “suppression” and “chasing down.”
Either your app gets banned outright—a common occurrence on WeChat, Twitter, or Facebook—or, if you’re lucky enough not to be banned, you still have to pay a 30% toll to these platforms (like Apple’s App Store).
So today, there's a large group of deeply frustrated programmers seeking a new way to build. And this sentiment aligns perfectly with blockchain design, token incentives, and Bitcoin’s economic architecture.
Fred Ehrsam: If I were a founder, would I want to build my service or product on a centralized platform? Eventually, you realize that building on big centralized platforms means always having a glass ceiling above your head and a guillotine around your neck. But in decentralized systems, those problems don’t exist—no one can shut down your service or restrict your product’s growth.
Chris Dixon: Many say Bitcoin emerged during the 2008 financial crisis. But I believe there was another, even larger non-financial crisis at the time—the “programmer crisis.” In developer communities, there was real “cleansing” of developers. And I think the new generation of programmers—the younger tech talent—won’t let themselves get exploited twice. They won’t repeat the mistakes of previous generations, suffering again under the oppression of big tech platforms.
Fred Ehrsam: Right. A person doesn’t fall into the same pit twice.
Over the past 15 years, every company that truly scaled has been one that owned user data and network effects. Now, every token is a nascent bank or government.
Chris Dixon: Most platforms—I mean platforms as communities or networks that bring together developers and users, like Windows, iOS, iPhone, Android, Twitter, Facebook—all these platforms are themselves locked in battles with each other. Microsoft vs. Netscape, Apple announcing a list of killed competitors at every launch—there’s a long history here. But the blockchain movement establishes a new way to build networks where all participants receive fair rewards without needing to destroy each other.
Fred Ehrsam: Exactly. This is the core insight of the entire blockchain movement: incentives. Who do you incentivize within the network? How do you structure incentives to drive large groups toward beneficial behaviors that, in turn, strengthen the network?
Bitcoin is the classic example. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a nine-page whitepaper proposing a novel incentive mechanism. Ten years later, we have a $70 billion cryptocurrency system with a rich ecosystem of companies, investors, and users. This system runs on the world’s largest computer cluster, unmatched in computing power by any nation, institution, or organization.
Bitcoin demonstrates the immense power of effective incentive design. With strong engineering execution, such incentives can create massive “collective behaviors” that were previously unimaginable or impossible to initiate through traditional means.
Chris Dixon: Incentives here go beyond just rewarding developers, as in traditional startups via equity financing. Token incentives also reach roles like miners—service providers in the network. Incentives extend to developers, service providers, and end users. This token-based incentive mechanism can now bootstrap new networks at an exponential speed previously unimaginable. Ethereum is a prime example.
Fred Ehrsam: Yes. The reason I originally joined the blockchain space—and the most important reason—is that tokens allow you to incentivize all early adopters: potential users, service providers, even “protocols on top of protocols.”
If you look at the past 15 years, nearly every company that scaled massively has been one built on user data and network effects. “User data + network effects” creates monopolistic power and entrenched dominance. Today’s internet feels monolithic. Tokens promise something unprecedented: for the first time, you can overcome the “chicken-and-egg” problem when building network effects.
Chris Dixon: Expanding on “chicken-and-egg”—the upside is that once you achieve scale, you become extremely powerful. The downside? You’re only powerful once you’ve achieved scale.
A dating site with one user is likely the worst website in the world. But with a million users, it becomes valuable. So how do you go from one user to a million?
From my experience investing and founding startups, 99% of networks die before reaching a million users. Companies like eBay somehow find strange ways to grow and survive, eventually becoming giants. There are about 50 such massive network platforms that succeeded and grew into towering trees—but thousands of other potentially useful networks died early due to lack of users.
The biggest challenge is scaling. Tokens offer a general solution to this problem. When a new network lacks sufficient network value, you use financial incentives to attract early seed users. Later, as network value grows, financial incentives naturally diminish.
Fred Ehrsam: It’s like joining a startup like Tencent very early—you take on higher risk but gain higher potential returns. The key difference is that participation isn’t limited to employees; users, service providers, and app developers can all join.
Imagine a graph: x-axis is number of users, y-axis is network value. As the first user, network value is zero. But as more people join, value shoots up exponentially. The network might still fail, but if it succeeds, the payoff is enormous—and later entrants are more willing to join, accelerating growth.
Chris Dixon: Even more interestingly, early developers and users don’t just benefit from the network’s success—they also act as early regulators and stewards. I sometimes feel frustrated reading articles. People complain that Facebook manipulating elections is terrible, yet simultaneously claim blockchain is the worst thing to happen in Silicon Valley. They fail to realize that the entire point of the decentralization and crypto movement is to correct imbalances like those created by Facebook. This is the absolute core of the blockchain wave.
Fred Ehrsam: This applies across economics, politics, and many other areas. An interesting way to view blockchain: in the real world, we rarely get chances to experiment with different organizational models to find better outcomes. New governments or banks rarely emerge—that’s low probability. But you can view each token as its own new decentralized mini-bank or mini-government. With thousands or tens of thousands of tokens globally, we’ve essentially created a new platform for experimenting with diverse commercial management and economic systems. This is a new path for innovation.
Chris Dixon: Is Tezos an example of this?
Fred Ehrsam: Yes. Many may not know Tezos well. It’s a new blockchain platform similar to Ethereum, supporting smart contracts. The key difference: Tezos maintains a self-correcting ledger. Its future direction—how the protocol evolves—is decided by community consensus. The shape of Tezos is collectively determined by all members. Users and token holders vote on protocol changes, enabling a mechanism for self-evolution over time. Developers contributing to Tezos’ protocol will earn clear rewards.
Chris Dixon: On that note, Ethereum is somewhat unfortunate. It still faces unresolved issues like scalability, yet many core developers hold ETH while working on other projects.
Fred Ehrsam: Ethereum’s current token market cap is $25 billion. Solving scalability—say, via sharding—could easily increase the network’s value by 10–20%, adding roughly $2.5 billion. That’s a significant improvement.
But how do you convert that added value into actual incentives for core developers to implement the fix?
If you could allocate half of that future gain—$1.25 billion—as incentives for developers to implement sharding, everyone benefits.
Tezos’ innovation lies in using token inflation for such incentives. When you submit new code to Tezos’ repository, it includes a payment request. If the community accepts your code, proving your contribution was valuable, Tezos pays you in additional tokens. This newly inflated supply gains value because the network itself increases in value from the improvement.
It’s like a startup where a new hire receives equity from existing employees. The difference? After this redistribution, the overall pie grows—so everyone’s share increases in value. Everyone wins.
Volunteers and individual developers working nights and weekends have been the best prophets of the past 20 years. If I had to bet, I’d bet on them.
Chris Dixon: Let’s move on to proof-of-stake. Ethereum’s transition from PoW to PoS made people suddenly realize PoS enables new designs—for instance, punishing malicious behavior in the community, which wasn’t possible under PoW.
Fred Ehrsam: Exactly. It provides a general method to penalize actions harmful to the community—critical for healthy network development.
Chris Dixon: Email is a good example. It lacks such punishment mechanisms. Without penalties, spam costs enormous resources annually to combat. Otherwise, the cost shifts to user experience—like forcing CAPTCHAs on every email sent—leading to poor UX.
Fred Ehrsam: Right.
Chris Dixon: Beyond consensus mechanisms, another key aspect is centralization vs. decentralization.
Fred Ehrsam: Yes. Centralization gives you greater control, faster development, and generally better UX or performance efficiency. But the downside is you can only pursue one path.
For example, there’s only one Facebook, one dominant social database. As a company, Facebook can only move in one direction—using A/B testing to guide decisions—but you can’t simultaneously run five different versions of Facebook. Same in politics, like the formation of the U.S. government.
But trying many different experiments often leads to unforeseen, interesting results. You can’t do much more with Twitter’s API—it can ban you anytime—but everyone still uses the same SMTP protocol. When standards are shared, network effects become extremely powerful.
Chris Dixon: You mentioned centralization is more efficient than decentralization. I actually question that. Are decentralized systems really worse in usability, efficiency, or UX? You need to view this dynamically—over 10 or 20 years. Will the gap remain?
Think of two startups: one launches a terrible product—low efficiency, poor UX. But it harnesses developer power. If developers continuously improve it over time, it may eventually surpass the competition.
SMTP’s advantage is that you can build any business model on top of it. You can build a business on email. Thousands of startups offer new email-based services—inboxes, spam filters, Microsoft’s Outlook, Google’s Gmail, etc. Though Gmail is now so dominant it may have partially centralized the SMTP protocol—another topic altogether.
But SMTP’s key difference is equal access. Developers and users can freely and equally use the standard, keeping the platform vibrant. Unlike Facebook, you don’t need all your friends on it—otherwise, SMTP would’ve died long ago due to network effects.
Fred Ehrsam: Let me ask you: if you had to bet between a centralized company building a social product (like Facebook) versus a decentralized organization building an open protocol for a social product—which would ultimately grow larger?
Chris Dixon: Are both starting from zero? Because Facebook is already so large, making the competition unfair. Facebook has vast funding, elite engineers, top talent.
Fred Ehrsam: Let’s assume this contest takes place right when Web 2.0 emerges.
Chris Dixon: That’s an interesting question—and risky.
On one side, you have a team in the same office, with funding, focused on one goal, KPIs, clear metrics, better hardware, servers, facilities. On the other, you have volunteers contributing after work and on weekends.
It’s essentially hobbyist volunteers versus full-time office workers.
Volunteers vastly outnumber employees of any single company. Open-source projects like Linux or Wikipedia may have 10 million volunteer contributors—and they’re often highly intelligent.
Those working nights and weekends have been the best prophets of the past 20 years. If I had to bet, I’d bet on them. That’s my choice, my investment strategy. I once wrote a blog post: “What smart people tinker with at night and on weekends will become what ordinary workers accomplish in ten years.” I think this is the greatest lesson the internet has taught us over the past two decades.
Fred Ehrsam: You can see the difference in motivation between these two types of workers.
Chris Dixon: It’s motivation, but also… how to put it—time is the ultimate judge. No matter how ambitious or visionary a company leader is, they’re inherently “short-sighted.” Zuckerberg, Larry Page—they’re great founders with long-term vision, but even they can only plan 2–5 years ahead. Those working nights or weekends in labs usually think on 10+ year timescales.
Fred Ehrsam: Exactly. Innovation often involves branding or short-term cash flow questions—big companies struggle to bypass these, so they often choose not to innovate.
In this paradigm shift toward decentralization, the exciting part is that instead of being limited to one path like traditional companies, you can try many things simultaneously. It’s like copying Facebook’s source code and all user databases, then running five different versions in parallel. Some may fail, others may thrive. You pick the best-performing version, then split it into five new variants. It’s like natural evolution.
Decentralized token systems appear messy—just as free markets are messier than planned economies. But the key insight is that in such chaotic structures, people explore more paths, some of which may yield major innovations. You also learn faster because feedback loops are short and direct. You quickly see which paths are worth pursuing.
Chris Dixon: That’s why I felt optimistic about the industry last year compared to the寒冬of 2013–2014. Many attribute it to rising Bitcoin prices, but it has nothing to do with price. The real reason is what you described—the increasing proportion of experimentation.
Fred Ehrsam: I think our development capabilities will keep improving—whether in centralized corporations or decentralized, looser organizations. Your point focuses on what matters most: developer activity—what they’re doing, what they’re trying.
Back in 2014, inside Coinbase, we tracked how many people followed Bitcoin’s GitHub repository, how many referenced its code, then used that to identify promising founders. Now, we track Ethereum’s GitHub followers and code references. New things are emerging. Suddenly, the whole industry has come alive.
Chris Dixon: Ethereum offered several key insights: First, you can rapidly assemble a large network even amid existing super-apps and super-networks. Second, Ethereum is Turing-complete, with Solidity (like JavaScript) built in, enabling diverse applications—realizing Bitcoin’s unrealized potential. Third, you can not only build apps but also create new token networks and protocol layers. So three kinds of innovation may be happening simultaneously on Ethereum.
Fred Ehrsam: Yes. That’s why I believe blockchain is a uniquely special industry. It’s close to finance, yet far more than just finance. If you come from Wall Street, understanding blockchain’s financial and economic aspects gradually deepens your grasp of its applications, innovation, and systems. In other words, you must first understand its monetary role—but that’s just one facet. Viewing blockchain solely through that lens reduces it to mere “money,” blinding you to its intrinsic value and potential as a global innovation battleground.
Chris Dixon: I think they overlook that this is a complete architectural redesign of the internet—one that gives everyone participating a chance to own a piece of the network. Eventually, the network gains value, which translates into tangible benefits. But to reap those benefits, you must first understand what we’re creating. And that requires understanding how the internet works from both technical and cultural perspectives.
All our knowledge and experience come from things that already exist and have been proven. But blockchain allows you to create something entirely new.
Chris Dixon: You build a network and use its token to participate in its growth. This leads to another concept: ICOs. I don’t particularly like the term ICO, but since everyone uses it, let’s discuss what ICOs really are.
Fred Ehrsam: It felt like overnight, everyone rushed to launch tokens, thinking free money was falling from the sky. Just issuing a token could make you rich. It’s similar to startups—only a tiny fraction raise funds and build great products, while most are junk and never secure funding.
Chris Dixon: Scammers moved in.
Fred Ehrsam: Right. Most ICOs today are bad, but a small number look promising. It boils down to judging whether a token project is credible. Red flags include rent-seeking token models; tokens eliminating middlemen where unnecessary; or tokens fundraising for centralized systems—none requiring tokens.
Chris Dixon: If a token is derived from corporate profit-sharing, backed by high trust and security, you don’t need a token—you can solve it traditionally.
Fred Ehrsam: Other red flags: a whitepaper that’s just a marketing brochure, lacking technical specs or protocol-level details.
Chris Dixon: Conversely, a credible project needs at minimum a technically detailed whitepaper, live code, a team capable of writing high-quality code, and strong software engineering backgrounds.
Fred Ehrsam: Exactly.
Chris Dixon: I must emphasize: we aren’t recommending anyone invest in the tokens discussed here. Risks are extremely high. If you do invest, you must deeply research the project, conduct thorough due diligence, or mentally prepare to lose all your money. This is venture capital-level risk.
Fred Ehrsam: Yes. The industry is still very early—we’re laying foundations, not building houses yet. Look at Ethereum’s current capacity: it handles fewer than 20–50 transactions per second. Building a true Facebook on-chain is still ~2000x away. So infrastructure services are more valuable now than building apps directly. I believe infrastructure and system-layer projects have a much higher success rate than application-layer ones.
Chris Dixon: By analogy to the internet, we’re still building servers and protocol-layer infrastructure. This phase is unavoidable. It took 20 years of internet development to produce Facebook—requiring AWS and other middleware before super-apps could emerge.
Fred Ehrsam: In technology transitions, we often mistakenly try to transplant existing solutions directly onto new platforms. All our knowledge comes from proven, existing things. But the real excitement of new technological waves is enabling entirely new creations—not rehashing the old. So the most important thing, I believe, is judging whether a project is uniquely native to blockchain—something strange, different, genuinely novel.
Chris Dixon: Whether something is natively blockchain-born or merely transplanted.
Fred Ehrsam: Exactly. Like cars pulled by horses...
Chris Dixon: Or rather, is it barnesandnoble.com or Amazon? That’s an example I often use.
Ultimately, it’s always the all-in, truly new entrants that succeed—not legacy players transitioning slowly. Hybrid or transplanted ideas attract more effort because they’re familiar—humans are creatures of habit. But only radically new, all-in designs ultimately win.
Take Stripe—they asked, “What if we designed the best online payment system for developers from scratch?” Not, “Let’s take existing banking assets, hire a few coders, and build an internet+banking product.”
Fred Ehrsam: Yes. Here’s a fascinating stat: of today’s 50 largest websites, how many were built by companies that existed before the internet?
Chris Dixon: I don’t know this number. How many?
Fred Ehrsam: Two. Out of 50, only two were built by pre-internet companies: msn.com and microsoft.com—both from Microsoft. The other 48 were all built by internet-native companies.
A common flawed mindset: “PayPal is worth X today, so a blockchain PayPal should be worth X.” Or, “Uber is worth Y, so a decentralized Uber should be worth Y.”
It’s hard to quantify software value using traditional economic models because software’s essence is translating human ideas into machine-executable code. Can token long-term value be quantified?
Fred Ehrsam: Many treat tokens like stocks. Talk to them about tokens, and they’ll say, “Yes, it’s just like stock.” But that’s because stocks are the most familiar financial instrument—we default to comparing tokens to stocks, lacking better frameworks. But fundamentally, tokens don’t operate like stocks.
The core difference: stocks represent future claims on a company’s cash flow and profits—selling products above cost, sharing profits with shareholders.
Chris Dixon: Lately, I’ve been pondering token long-term value—how to measure it. Markets may be irrational—let’s call it that—meaning prices are currently too high. There’s a bubble. What’s your view on token long-term value?
Fred Ehrsam: My thinking on token value is heavily influenced by Chris Burniske, who worked at a Wall Street investment firm studying general financial models and adapting them to quantify crypto and token value.
Chris Dixon: For example, if IPFS expands, people trade using Filecoin, the market grows, Filecoin’s price rises, more people want to hold Filecoin, more pay tokens to store files—can we model or predict token value using such dynamics?
Fred Ehrsam: That highlights a fundamental difference. In my view, the best tokens are non-rent-seeking. For instance, they charge fees on every transaction processed. Simply holding tokens doesn’t grant transaction-processing rights—you must contribute to earn tokens.
More specifically, in certain economic theories, tokens resemble money. A common model is MV = PQ, also known as the Fisher Equation. The key isn’t future cash flows, but the other four variables:
M = Money Supply—the average amount of money in circulation over a period;
V = Velocity of Money—the average number of times a unit of currency circulates per period;
P = Price—the weighted average price of goods and services;
Q = Economic Quantity—the total volume of goods and services transacted.
In blockchain terms:
M could be the amount of unpaid Filecoin outstanding;
V could be the annual turnover frequency of Filecoin supply;
P could represent the cost to store one GB of data;
Q could be the total GBs of storage purchased.
Chris Dixon: Yes, you can abstract this into a model. I’ve seen many such quantitative attempts—they yield interesting hypotheses, given much of this is speculation-driven.
But I think we’re discussing two broad categories—at least two. One is Bitcoin-like: creating systems for storing and transferring value—digital cash with properties like peer-to-peer transfer, censorship resistance, etc. I think this first type can be modeled using commodity economics, like the MV=PQ formula. Bitcoin, Zcash, Monero, Dash fit here.
The second type—call it fat protocols or tokens—creates systems with their own network resources. For this type, I believe you need a completely different valuation model.
Fred Ehrsam: Right. In the model represented by that equation, both types converge. Viewing tokens through a commodity lens is a basic starting point. Ethereum literally has a “gas” concept—you consume gas to run programs, paying tokens to schedule computing resources, like fueling a car. Using a commodity model makes sense here. But one inconsistency: commodities are typically consumed and vanish upon use. Some tokens are designed this way—via “burning” mechanisms, unlike PoS or PoW. But the more common model is: used tokens flow to other users—like RMB—not disappearing into thin air.
Chris Dixon: Here’s how I think about it. Software’s greatest strength is translating any human idea into machine-executable code. Equity, commodities, money—no concept is immune to being coded. The only limit is imagination. That’s why traditional models—like Carlota Perez’s in *Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages*—fail to predict software innovation. In software, the only constraint is whether people can conceive new ideas. Satoshi changed the world with a whitepaper.
Fred Ehrsam: From a developer’s view, yes. But Carlota Perez might counter that she’s really analyzing the barriers and time required for an idea to gain global adoption and acceptance.
An interesting point you raised: many current blockchain designs and token incentives may eventually become the everyday service frameworks people rely on, like internet protocols. From a funding perspective, we’ll evolve from today’s scam-filled ICO frenzy toward rewarding genuine contributors. Or, as we discussed earlier, using inflation/deflation to incentivize network innovation.
We’ve spent decades refining centralized corporate structures. We haven’t yet deeply considered how to work within decentralized internet architectures—nor spent years reflecting on it.
We still have a long way to go. The biggest challenge: whether centralized banks or Silicon Valley giants can adapt their existing businesses to this new technological wave.
While revenues and profits play vital roles under old rules—and hinder new experiments—the worst assumption is treating this tech shift as zero-sum. It’s not.
In past tech waves, old systems kept running while new systems created new value. We must create new value on a new layer—not fight existing systems for existing value.
In short, you just have to have an open mind.
