Even Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

gamedeveloper.com:

Here's a head-scratcher for you: what happens when a science fiction author who co-founded a web3 metaverse company built on the blockchain doesn't buy into cryptocurrency anymore?

That was the question on our minds at science fiction author Neal Stephenson took the stage at DICE 2023. Ostensibly his talk was meant to be a musing on the metaverse, but in a quirky twist, he instead spent most of the time talking about... Jack and the Beanstalk.

What was the point of Stephenson's dive into an old folktale? It's a story that centers a transaction for "worthless" currency (the magic beans), and per Stephenson's reading, a decent comparison point for analyzing why anyone would want to invest in cryptocurrency for buying and selling in-game items.

This was a notable speech for the founder of a web3 metaverse company to give. It might not only signal what kind of metaverse product his studio Lamina1 might create, but also how the millions of dollars of venture capital invested in similar businesses may pivot in the crypto winter.

Stephenson's call to the audience was this: when building in-game economies for virtual worlds, devs can't lose sight of the intrinsic value of items—what gives them their worth beyond just artificial scarcity. Here's a quick rundown of his thought process.

In Stephenson's analogy, the magic beans Jack sells the cow for (when he'd been sent to get...uh, FIAT currency) are a good stand-in for cryptocurrency. They're supposed to be able to do all these wonderful things, but in the end they only lead Jack to a violent world of wealth, power, and eventually doom and downfall.

But Stephenson seemed less interested in the magic beans themselves and more about what Jack used to procure them: the cow. In