I once heard that you shouldn’t read Dostoyevsky before the age of 30 — I figured that was just some gatekeeping BS pseudo-intellectuals told the young and curious minded to keep from seeing the real humanity in the work.

That whole ‘don’t read it before 30' kinda stuck with me, though — always in the back of my mind. I don’t know why, just one of those random little things that ‘sticks’.

Until one day I was reading a book on acting, I think it was ‘an actor prepares’ and in there, it said, ‘because one won’t have the perspective on envy and jealousy to truly grasp it’… i’m paraphrasing of course, but it all of a sudden made sense.

You don’t read Dostoyevsky before the age of 30 because you simply haven’t Lived enough life. You haven’t been stabbed in the back enough, and you haven’t witnessed the true depravity of mankind.

One aspect of Life is that those who have often gatekeep from those who have-not. It’s been that way for millennia.

In, say, 1950, if you had a question that needed answering, and you asked someone, you had to trust that they were giving you sound answers. Or information that could absolutely, without a doubt, help you accomplish whatever you wanted to accomplish.

But what if they lied to you?

What if the person you had trusted willingly gave you bad advice?

You see, one thing Web2, provided was a trustless scenario when I would aska question. This is why I love the internet more than anything. Because the person I’m reading an article from doesn’t know me and thus cannot, by any stretch of the imagination harbor any type of ill-will, envy, or jealousy towards me. They’re simply providing content to help because the incentive structure of web2 was such that if they, as Zig Ziglar would say, “help enough people get what they want and you’ll get what you want”.

All those Youtube videos I watched taught me how to fix my cars, install windows in my house, fix my computer… literally anything and everything.

And the beauty in that is that I didn’t have to trust them! I didn’t have to have faith in the creator — i had to have faith in the incentive structure which serves as the driving force behind the why.

The creator would not be able to build a reliable community on Youtube unless they offered sound advice. Simple as that. If they constantly gave out bad advice/how-to’s, the community would eventually get wise and stop watching them.

So, in essence, the incentives behind web2 helped remove personal bs from the gathering of information.

Whereas, say, in 1950, you had to completely trust the mechanic, the teacher, your neighbor… because how else could you get the advice/guidance on what you needed?

Removing any personal bs like envy and jealousy from personal relationships is a massive bonus. Egotistical nonsense like that has held back the human race from achieving greatness for so long.

Web3 is completely trustless… you don’t have to trust anybody except the code. The protocol layer takes care of it.

Trust1.0 — Trust what your neighbor, brother, ‘friend’, other human has told you to be the truth

Trust2.0 — Trust in the incentive structure of the economy to provide you with the truth

**Trust3.0 **— The truth is the only way. Trust in the underlying Protocol. The Protocol CAN’T LIE!