A simple overview of current technical trends in web3.<p>1. Identity<p>Wallets are required to interact with chain. This means every user has one which is great because you can use wallets to sign message and authenticate people.<p>People's transaction history are public so you can fetch that and do authenticate on a micro level. Say, you want to authenticate people who have a particular nft or spent money somewhere specific.<p>2. Tokenomics<p>Encourage contribution and investing by providing financial motivation in the form of tokens through technical means.<p>Take example of torrent protocol. A big problem with torrent is there are not enough seeders because there is no incentive to seed which means many useful torrents go down.<p>3. Public ledger<p>This one doesn't need much explanation. Use cases like DNS or voting fits the area where every record needs to be publicly available and verified.<p>4. Financial & payments<p>Prediction markets, Programmable finance, cross bridges, AMMs, lending, yield farming, etc. Some are cool, some are almost scam but there are some novel ideas tested in practice here. AMMs are one successful example.<p>5. Collectibles and scarcity<p>This one is controversial. If you know the traditional gacha and pay to play industry is huge, then you understand the applications where trading and uniqueness is built in. The items can be made unique and be used outside the game which increases their value.
A lot of web3 people don't seem to be open to much criticism of the space. As a whole this has kind of soured me towards anyone involved.<p>The (shameless plug) /r/Web3skepticism subreddit[0] is an open place for critical web3 thought. Feel free to drop by and say hi.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Skepticism/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Skepticism/</a>
> Concretely, our approach starts with collecting and steel-manning the key claims made for web3 through conscious, critical and open dialog with a diverse set of experts.<p>This is something that is desperately needed. More often than not I try to assess bold claims like "Blockchains will solve X". I try to follow the thought process of these claims and arrive at the solution: "Blockchains will most likely NOT solve X". The first comment to that is usually: "It was never supposed to solve X it is rather about Y which is loosely related to X".<p>There is no way to have a proper debate if one side if flip flopping about claims.
Many people have alaready made sense of web3. The problem with web3? People involved in the space don't care. They are either gullible or know exactly what they are doing (scamming and claiming something that has nothing to do blockchains).<p>One of the earliest articles that already made sense is 5 years old this year:<p>- <i>Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain</i>, <a href="https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...</a><p>- And the follow up, <i>Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future</i>, <a href="https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...</a><p>We've yet to see a single "making sense" cryptobro engage with any of the points in the article. I'm not even talking about the more recent ones like Moxie Marlinspike's <i>My first impressions of web3</i>, <a href="https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html" rel="nofollow">https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html</a>, or Molly White's collection of posts on blockchains and web3, <a href="https://blog.mollywhite.net/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mollywhite.net/</a><p>There are more, of course. But they are all dismissed by crypto people because they don't care as long as crypto is useful for getting rich quick schemes. It's not here to save the world, or help the disadvantaged, or whatever other bullshit they sling your way.
The conflicts are mostly coming from a few loud-mouthed individuals who feel the need to add their worthless opinions to everything (as is typical with most 'thought-leaders' and 'bloggers.')<p>Protip: if you work in tech it doesn't mean you automatically know shit about [p2p networking, decentralized incentive structures, consensus algorithms, decentralized property registers, smart contracts, economics, cryptography, economic-security, 'dapps' / web3, valid use-cases thereof, and so on]<p>Worse still: if you are only an 'expert' in one of the topics above it also doesn't mean you understand the totality of how it fits in to 'Defi' / 'ledger tech startups.' But I guess it's fun pretending to be an expert by only pointing only the historical bad things and posting retarded strawmans about dapps. Go ahead, with no understanding at all: you too can be a 'blockchain expert.'
Hi, I'm one of the folks behind this project and happy to answer any questions.<p>If you want to know more about motivation and approach there is quite a bit of detail on <a href="https://web3.lifeitself.us/about" rel="nofollow">https://web3.lifeitself.us/about</a>