This is why, paradoxically, I’m almost sympathetic to people who cannot wrap their minds around the “revenue meta.” Not because these people are correct that it’s just a “meta”, they are very wrong and always have been, but because the first 10 years of crypto managed to completely nerdsnipe and indoctrinate so many in this industry into just writing open source code and assuming you’d capture value for ~reasons~ and the worst part was that it was *mainly true* for those 10 years, in other words, there was a positive feedback loop where these tokens *did* go up in value so people assumed they were on the right track, surely something wouldn’t go up in value if it was valueless. This was the wrong take away and now we reckon with the ramifications of this The fat protocol thesis brainfucked so many people into building infrastructure with no real path to a defensible moat or monetization and we are having to undo this insidious plague in real time. The whole “public goods” funding worked in the literal sense that it provided a lot of infra (even tho most of that infra is actually being siloed/ customized at this point), that part is probably true, but public goods *definitionally* do not make money, they are projects that would not be funded because because there is no financial incentive to do so. And a lot of god forsaken analogies were drawn to early OSS investment outside of crypto like red hat, mongodb, gitlab etc, but the strategy there to be very clear, was to write OSS and *then* sell it as SaaS like custom Linux or GitHub or database solutions / integrations / whatever. It wasn’t just hacking on a token and calling it a day which is what we did in crypto. And sure “building the infra first and then monetizing with the apps atop it later” is a reasonable strategy and has precedent in trad tech where acquiring users / building network effects before focusing on revenue later has worked well but this isn’t the same. Everyone was forced to hawk tokens that have a dubious value prop and people are realizing this now. The point though is we should be kind to, or at least understand, people who were deep in the sauce between 2016 to ~2023 who bought into this drivel, it was powerful and convincing to many and it made people feel like they were doing something different to make the world a better place and I at least understand why the idea of a project *actually* needing to make money is sort of jarring if you were brought up in this church