I am admittedly extremely biased against cryptocurrencies (stop reading unless you're ready for this re-hashed rant), but I don't see how users (read: people with real money) care about any of this stuff.<p>On-chain games? I don't want to feel like I'm in a laggy casino, I just want to blast zombies with a rocket launcher and I can already do that perfectly fine.<p>Uncensorable Github? Yeah, it's called "git".<p>Decentralized DNS and Postgres? Yeah, it's called "DNS" and "Postgres" respectively.<p>Web3 twitter?<p>> The winning Web3 Twitter will ultimately offer the features we have been eager to see: data truly owned by users themselves, uncontrolled by one entity or even one man, multiple clients permissionlessly built, multiple options of curation algorithms that users can choose from.<p>Congratulations you just described Mastodon and ActivityPub. No blockchain required (though it does depend on those boring web2 technologies like HTTPS and DNS).
Here’s what I’ve observed recently in this space.<p>- What really astonishes me, is that for each and every one of these ideas there is probably a VC funded company or group of individuals working to build the thing.<p>- anyone in web3 is working for hype and for funding. Bunch of clout chasers. If you can make the thing sound good, you win. Your shitty GitHub repo is mostly ignored; as is your ability to integrate with the real world.<p>- No one is working for actual market share of anything meaningful because there is no real market for any of this crap.caveat-<p>- The only actual market that exists is a self-feeding one, so you have startups building dev tools or doing things like recreating web2 data systems on web3 in horrid/obscure ways.<p>Overall it seems like a big fun money scheme. A few privileged and/or greedy individuals chase some hackers pipe-dream, convince a bunch of young fools to join & build for them, and then a bunch of idiots to fund them/pump their token.<p>EDIT: while I’m knocking current state, I believe in a lot of the ideals of decentralization and expanded uses of cryptography. I’m investing a lot of time & effort in understanding what could possibly be meaningful. I really, really struggle with the noise in current state.
- Distributed corporate liquidators (reacquire assets from remote former employees when your web3 startup runs out of funding/gullible folk)<p>- NFTs commemorating the “decentralized” companies that used to host NFTs that disappeared along with said companies<p>- Black market for about a year before everyone goes to prison<p>After writing that, it sounds ridiculous to say this, but: I actually would be pleased if something useful and good for the world came out of this whole mess. There’s been so much youthful energy and excitement put into the cryptocurrency space, and if it turns out that the kids are right and I’m just being a curmudgeon, great! Good for all of you!<p>It’s been over a decade, though, and the least harmful piece of crypto I’ve seen is Helium, which is probably about to get steamrolled by 5G.
MLM scheme aimed at the recently retired that encourages them to sign up to an incremental equity release and to invest the funds in a "care coin" that "guarantees" a place in a luxury care home should they need it. The incremental nature of the equity release means the coin gets a slow pump guaranteed over several years raising it's value as an instrument for speculation. Constant need to pay for places in care homes (at a low rate because young pensioners) means regular sales of care coin can be easily justified. Rug pull after 5 to 10 years depending on demographics.
What you expected a none evil one???
Aren't these just all ideas about how to get VC funding, or ideas about how to get crowdsource funding?<p>Whether it's about extracting money from few rich people (VC) or many not-as-rich (or even poor people), this just seems like a document full of "The AirBNB of blockchain. The Uber of blockchain. The Google of blockchain. The government of blockchain. The Vattenfall of blockchain". It doesn't actually mean anything. It's a parody of a parody. (the parody being "We're the AirBnb of Uber. The Microsoft of Amazon. The Uber of AirBnb")<p>None of these startup ideas even show that they know enough about their space to even know what the problem is.<p>They're the "not even wrong" of startup ideas. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong</a>)
I kind of can’t tell if this is a spoof? The first point is literally “decentralise ALL the things!”. Ok great.<p>Next… decentralised Postgres, what does that even mean? Like if we have a decentralised system that is a database, where do I write data? How do I know where to read data? Do you have redundancy? If so what’s the cost? Are you literally just hosting multiple Postgres’s with duplicate data behind some load balancer? Do you need multiple load balancers? What’s your consistency model?<p>It’s just very unclear to me what this person is asking for?<p>Just stick with mongodb, it’s webscale…
circa eight years ago I read I book that was basically a compilation of how to "blockchain everything". nothing much of that long list came to pass (overt or covert money printing schemes don't count) and it isn't because there wasn't enough brain power, time, political influence and money invested. its not that concept failed because execution wasn't perfect and people had high expectations. in fact every trick on the book was used. to no avail. there is little to showcase or at least iterate on.<p>there really should be a deep study to understand what has (not) happened and why. I believe one conclusion of such a study might be that the tech sector in its current incarnation is too detached from the core of society. unregulated, unchallenged, arcane and self-absorbed, essentially untethered, yet at the same time endowed with enormous resources on the premise that it is a golden goose (the very naming web3 alludes to this projection). in essence it operates in a different universe (so metaverse may not be too wide off the mark)<p>whatever the next tech era will look like it will bear the scars of this recent past
How about just take the blockchain which is honestly cool on it’s own (distributed ledger) and use it for REAL WORLD applications like protocols for various types of work that can be easily audited and provide the best quality service.<p>Supply chain visibility, transportation and logistics, reviews, bidding, work history (commercial activity), etc.<p>I have some supply chain optimization experience and if I had the resources and connections I’d love to build out a blockchain based scheduling and fulfillment protocol.<p>Enough with the gorilla png and rug pulls.
as someone steeped in web3 space, what web3 needs is some basic product design knowledge. Atrocious how so many multimillion dollar market cap projects have no concept of UI/UX, no concern about site speed (12mb-uncompressed-image-home-page bad), and frankly, no concern with anything remotely related to utility.
Very interesting list to build a discussion.<p>As a Web3 incumbent (more than 200 research, development, and security auditing projects done since 2014 in several blockchains and layers) I would start adding the following:<p>- Provide one or more robust multi-party computation (MPC) libraries. Awesome-MPC [1] provides a big list but most are not maintained or security audited, were acquired and closed by companies (cough, cough Coinbase [2]). There are existing projects such as <a href="https://web3auth.io/" rel="nofollow">https://web3auth.io/</a> but the core elements are not open source. Shameless plug: we have created an MPC wallet that is accessed through <a href="https://walletconnect.com/" rel="nofollow">https://walletconnect.com/</a> the interesting point about MPCs goes beyond Web3 and involves data custody in general.<p>- Encourage coopetition using data privacy offerings for computing over encrypted data. Companies such as [3] provides technologies around this using different strategies such as homomorphic encryption or security enclaves. For example we are working with pharmaceutical companies to share stats without revealing their private information. This could also be appled to a lot of industried. Idea: share Google Analytics / AdWords data for improving markets? The problem is politics, not technology, the technology already exists.<p>- Full backed stable coins to provide more liquidity to the ecosystem. It is a nice business: you create a stable coin backed by real money, the real money gains interest (efective FED rate at 4.25% - 4.50% [4]) while the stable coins are the same.<p>- Declarative programming languages for smart contracts. Since smart contract use cases could be reduced to a few use cases (beyond outliers) it could be useful to just declare and compose their features. Some blockchains such as Algorand have been playing around this but a lot of work needs to be done.<p>- Automated and assisted tools for security code reviews (static, dynamic). More stuff like [5]<p>- Descentralized stable coins: there are less popular ones that worked better than the top one (DAI). This means they resisted the fluctuations while DAI failed. For example <a href="https://moneyonchain.com/" rel="nofollow">https://moneyonchain.com/</a><p>- Better testing and sandbox infraestructure. For example, if you want to play with Uniswap protocol in the testnet the coin pairs don't have the real price and/or fake liquidity to play with. They could even put mocks to play with.<p>- Adversarial analysis of popular blockchain models. Bitcoin is most studied one but we have a blind spot on others.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc">https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-to-acquire-leading-cryptographic-security-company-unbound-security" rel="nofollow">https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-to-acquire-leading-cr...</a><p>[3] Examples: <a href="https://dualitytech.com/" rel="nofollow">https://dualitytech.com/</a> <a href="https://secretarium.com/" rel="nofollow">https://secretarium.com/</a> <a href="https://www.dpella.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dpella.io/</a> <a href="https://inpher.io/" rel="nofollow">https://inpher.io/</a>
<a href="https://www.stealthsoftwareinc.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stealthsoftwareinc.com/</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr</a><p>[5] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmle" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmle</a> and <a href="https://semgrep.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://semgrep.dev/</a>