web3
Making sense of web3 & crypto. Introduction to key concepts and ideas. Rigorous, constructive analysis of key claims pro and con. A look at the deeper hopes and aspirations.
https://github.com/life-itself/web3
Last synced: 10 days ago
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Critique
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Central Bank Digital Currencies
- Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation - provides a high level overview of the current state of central bank and private sector currencies in the US, and identifies risks and challenges with the implementation of a central bank digital currency. From the paper summary: "The paper summarizes the current state of the domestic payments system and discusses the different types of digital payment methods and assets that have emerged in recent years, including stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies. It concludes by examining the potential benefits and risks of a CBDC, and identifies specific policy considerations."
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Crypto and energy consumption
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DAOs
- Is The DAO going to be DOA? - 2016-05-16 - by Dan Larimer (founder of BitShares and much else). Larimer sets out most of the basic critiques of DAOs as governance innovation extremely well:
- DAOs and the nature of human collaboration - 2021-08-12 by Marin Petrov. A critique of DAOs and technosolutionism.
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Economists
- Cryptocurrency and Fiat Money - 2017-12-23
- Economics Nobel prize winner, Richard Thaler: “The market that looks most like a bubble to me is Bitcoin and its brethren” - 2018-01-22
- 'Only good for drug dealers': More Nobel prize winners snub bitcoin - 2018-04-27
- Nobel Prize Winning Economist Abhijit Banerjee: Is Blockchain the Key to Financial Inclusion? - 2020-01-20
- Cryptocurrencies, Debt, and the Economy: Steve Keen interviewed by Layne Hartsell - 2021-02-17
- Prannoy Roy's Townhall With Amartya Sen On Economy, Farm Laws: Full Transcript - 2021-03-06
- Famed economist Jeffrey Sachs rails against Bitcoin: Highly polluting and ‘almost like counterfeiting’ - 2021-03-16
- Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin - 2021-05-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What is money, really? And why Bitcoin is not the answer (even if blockchain is brilliant & potentially helpful in democratising money) - 2021-08-02
- The Bitcoin Fountainhead - 2021-10-05
- Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism - 2022-01-26
- The Crypto Crash Strengthens the Case for Crypto - 2022-01-27
- Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing - 2020-08-21 - "Blockchain technology is going to change everything: the shipping industry, the financial system, government … in fact, what won’t it change? But enthusiasm for it mainly stems from a lack of knowledge and understanding. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem."
- Vice: ‘Crypto Ruined My Life’: The Mental Health Crisis Hitting Bitcoin Investors - 2022-02-16 - The stress and anxiety that goes with funneling your life savings into a volatile market is no joke.
- Ed Zitron: Solutions That Create Problems - 2022-02-22 - [The thing about Web3 is that it is uniquely useless. I have actively searched for an explanation as to why it's the future, what products it would allow us to build, what sort of *good* it would provide, and I cannot even at my most optimistic find a real use case](https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1495891031979704321)
- The Old Allure of New Money - 2018-05-21
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- Ed Zitron: Solutions That Create Problems - 2022-02-22 - [The thing about Web3 is that it is uniquely useless. I have actively searched for an explanation as to why it's the future, what products it would allow us to build, what sort of *good* it would provide, and I cannot even at my most optimistic find a real use case](https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1495891031979704321)
- The Old Allure of New Money - 2018-05-21
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- The Old Allure of New Money - 2018-05-21
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- The Bitcoin Fountainhead - 2021-10-05
- Nobel Prize Economist Joseph Stiglitz Calls Regulators to Ban Cryptocurrencies - 2021-10-28
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- Cryptocurrencies, Debt, and the Economy: Steve Keen interviewed by Layne Hartsell - 2021-02-17
- Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin - 2021-05-20
- What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- Nobel Prize Economist Joseph Stiglitz Calls Regulators to Ban Cryptocurrencies - 2021-10-28
- The Crypto Crash Strengthens the Case for Crypto - 2022-01-27
- Vice: ‘Crypto Ruined My Life’: The Mental Health Crisis Hitting Bitcoin Investors - 2022-02-16 - The stress and anxiety that goes with funneling your life savings into a volatile market is no joke.
- Ed Zitron: Solutions That Create Problems - 2022-02-22 - [The thing about Web3 is that it is uniquely useless. I have actively searched for an explanation as to why it's the future, what products it would allow us to build, what sort of *good* it would provide, and I cannot even at my most optimistic find a real use case](https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1495891031979704321)
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Former bitcoin enthusiasts turned skeptics
- Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. - 12-03-2021
- I wish I never bought bitcoin. - 01-06-2020
- Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. - 12-03-2021
- I wish I never bought bitcoin. - 01-06-2020
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General
- The problem with NFTs - 2022-01-21 - by Dan Olson (Documentary) 📺 [👉 Highly recommended 👈]
- Three things Web3 should fix in 2022 - 28 Jan 2022
- Today on Sick Sad World: How The Cryptobros Have Fallen - 2022-01-04 by Jamie Zawinski (legendary coder, co-founder of Mozilla etc.)
- Web3 First Impressions - 2022-01-07 Moxie Marlinspike, co-founder of Signal etc.
- Bitcoin, Currencies, and Fragility by Nassim Taleb - 27 Jun 2021 - highly critical paper by author Black Swan etc.
- The European Money and Finance Forum - The encrypted threat: Bitcoin’s social cost and regulatory responses - Jan 2022. A comprehensive study by SUERF - The European Money and Finance Forum that details the net negative effects of bitcoin to society.
- The Third Web - 2021-12-17 - long critical essay including detailed history by [Tante](https://twitter.com/tante)
- Tante's Web3/NFT FAQ
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Revolution Now! With Peter Joseph | Bitcoin and Financialization - May 21, 2021
- The Web3 Fraud - 2021-12-16 by Nicholas Weaver on usenix.com
- Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are
- It's not still the early days
- Abuse and harassment on the blockchain
- Anonymous cryptocurrency wallets are not so simple
- Cryptocurrency off-ramps, and the pressure towards centralization
- Cryptocurrency’s Robinhood effect
- Abuse on the blockchain – Guest lecture at Stanford University
- Against Web3 and Faux-Decentralization - 2021-10-19 by Soatok
- The technological case against Bitcoin and blockchain - 2022-03-05 by Luke Plant
- The Case Against Crypto - 2021-12-03 by Martin O'Leary
- The Case Against Bitcoin - 2021-05-14 by Michael W. Green. A portfolio manager discusses the case against bitcoin from a financial and geopolitical perspective.
- The Register: The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day - 2021-12-06
- Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies: Burn It With Fire - 2018-04-20 by Nicholas Weaver 📺 Nicholas Weaver is a staff researcher with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and lecturer in EECS, where he teaches machine structures and computer security. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley in 2003 and joined ICSI to study network security and measurement. "The entire cryptocurrency and blockchain ecology is rife with frauds, criminalities, and tulip-mania style hype and needs to be properly disposed of into the ashes of history. A “blockchain” is just a horribly inefficient append-only file which costs a literal fortune to secure without actually providing meaningful distributed trust, while cryptocurrencies are provably inferior than actual currencies for legal real world transactions. Beyond the sheer uselessness have emerged a whole host of bad ideas, ranging from the “put a bird^H^H^H^H blockchain on it” hype to unregistered (and mostly fraudulent) securities with “Initial Coin Offerings” to an invitation for massive theft in the form of “smart” contracts."
- Ross Anderson et al: Bitcoin Redux: crypto crime, and how to tackle it - content/uploads/sites/5/2018/05/WEIS_2018_paper_38.pdf))- 2018-06-01 - Anderson is a Professor of Security Engineering at the University Cambridge. Bitcoin Redux explains what’s going wrong in the world of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin exchanges are developing into a shadow banking system, which do not give their customers actual bitcoin but rather display a "balance" and allow them to transact with others. However if Alice sends Bob a bitcoin, and they’re both customers of the same exchange, it just adjusts their balances rather than doing anything on the blockchain. This is an e-money service, according to European law, but is the law enforced? Not where it matters. We’ve been looking at the details.
- Ross Anderson: Why Bitcoin is Not Cash - 2018-04-10 - 📺 walks through why bitcoin is not cash and the complex legal questions it would need to deal with if it wanted to be.
- Ross Anderson: Tracing Stolen Bitcoin - 2018-03-23 - 📺
- Simon Wardley: A Spoiler for the Future of Bitcoin - 2013-11-27 - "As you can guess, I'm not a fan of bitcoin. If left unchecked then I find it has the potential to undermine the importance of Government which is actually not good for competition and not good for the market. I hope none of the above happens and would rather see bitcoin disappear in a puff of history." (NB: he predicts massive appreciation in bitcoin and is concerned how it can undermine government and tax revenue.)
- Kai Stinchcombe: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain - 2017-12-23 - "Each purported use case — from payments to legal documents, from escrow to voting systems—amounts to a set of contortions to add a distributed, encrypted, anonymous ledger where none was needed. What if there isn’t actually any use for a distributed ledger at all? What if, ten years after it was invented, the reason nobody has adopted a distributed ledger at scale is because nobody wants it?"
- Kai Stinchcombe: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future - 2018-05-04 - "Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong direction."
- Cory Doctorow: When crypto-exchanges go broke, you'll lose it all - 2022-02-03. Why state backed money is a good thing (a feature not a bug).
- Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 - 2021-12-13
- "Get ready for the crash" - CBS Money Watch - 2022-02-09
- Crypto and NFTs are "Pretty Serious Speculative Bubble" - 2022-02-10
- David Rosenthal: Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies' Externalities? - 2022-02-09. Having built a decentralized consensus system using Proof-of-Work (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/945445.945451) the author has the technical knowledge to explain the design faults and limitations of permissionless blockchain systems, as well as highlighting the economic and environmental issues. Summary of critique:
- Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks - 2014-10-07. Network effects lead to centralization in p2p (e.g. Bitcoin) and no good way to mitigate this.
- Charlie Stross: Why I want Bitcoin to Die in Fire - 2013-12
- The Maltese Falcon - critique of bitcoin and financial properties of crypto assets from the CIO of JP Morgan bank. 2021-02-10
- Vivaldi CEO: Why Vivaldi will never create ThinkCoin - 2022-01-13 - Jon von Tetzchner: “if you look beyond the hype, you’ll find nothing more than a pyramid scheme posing as currency.”
- Centralizing Control: Why Bitcoin is Dangerous - 2022-04-02 - Sal Bayat: “Democratic governance is fundamentally incompatible with existing cryptocurrency systems as they can only represent the interests of those in control of the system.”
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Revolution Now! With Peter Joseph | Bitcoin and Financialization - May 21, 2021
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- Web3 takes trust, too - 2022-01-10 by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com
- The Case Against Crypto - December 31, 2021
- On Unintentional Scams - July 23, 2021
- How to Destroy Bitcoin - July 13, 2021
- The Political Case for a Blanket Cryptocurrency Ban - March 30, 2021
- Gamestop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage - February 3, 2021
- The Register: The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day - 2021-12-06
- Blockchainism - December 11, 2021
- Web3 is Bullshit - December 4, 2021
- The Internet's Casino Boats - December 1, 2021
- The Token Disconnect - November 27, 2021
- The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger - November 24, 2021
- Ice-Nine for Markets - November 23, 2021
- The Tinkerbell Griftopia - November 19, 2021
- Decentralized Woo Hoo - November 16, 2021
- The Intellectual Incoherence of Cryptoassets - November 7, 2021
- The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency - July 7, 2021
- The Oncoming Ransomware Storm - May 11, 2021
- Et tu, Signal? - April 7, 2021
- Bitcoin: The Postmodern Ponzi - February 27, 2021
- The Crypto Chernobyl - February 10, 2021
- Revolution Now! With Peter Joseph | Bitcoin and Financialization - May 21, 2021
- The Case Against Bitcoin - 2021-05-14 by Michael W. Green. A portfolio manager discusses the case against bitcoin from a financial and geopolitical perspective.
- The Register: The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day - 2021-12-06
- "Get ready for the crash" - CBS Money Watch - 2022-02-09
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Humour
- Crypto Curious - South Park on NFTs - 2021-12-21
- N-FT: Non-Functioning Tower - NFT satire - 2022-03-07
- “a normal person explains cryptocurrency” - 2021-12-22
- “my crypto friend calls me every day and this is what he sound like” - 2021-02-22
- The Billion-Dollar Bitcoin Scam - Ordinary Things - 2020-05-31 - “What is Bitcoin? Is Bitcoin a scam? And how did Bitcoin become what it is today? Who was the Dread Pirate Roberts and what happened to the Silk Road?”
- Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - 2018-03-12
- Don’t Understand Bitcoin? This Man Will Mumble An Explanation At You - 2015-07-7
- If Cryptocurrency was Honest
- If NFTs were Honest
- Brave New Web - ani utopian Web3 satire by Nikolay Vlasov - 2022-04-10
- N-FT: Non-Functioning Tower - NFT satire - 2022-03-07
- “a normal person explains cryptocurrency” - 2021-12-22
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NFTs
- OpenSea, Web3, and Aggregation Theory - 2022-01-05 - Ben Thompson of Stratechery
- Brian Eno on NFTs & Automaticism
- Detailed twitter thread by @NFTEthics alleging fraudulent or close to fraudulent behaviour by a major NTF influencer named BeanieMaxi - 2022-01-17 ([cached](./assets/Thread by @NFTethics re beaniemaxi.pdf))
- Jacobin: NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit - 2022-01-26
- Detailed twitter thread by @NFTEthics alleging fraudulent or close to fraudulent behaviour by a major NTF influencer named BeanieMaxi - 2022-01-17 ([cached](./assets/Thread by @NFTethics re beaniemaxi.pdf))
- Jacobin: NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit - 2022-01-26
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Ponzi aspect
- Financial Times: Why bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme - 2021-12-22. A Ponzi scheme is a zero-sum enterprise. But bitcoin is a negative-sum phenomenon that you can’t even pursue a claim against, argues Robert McCauley. [Original](https://ft.com/content/83a14261-598d-4601-87fc-5dde528b33d0)
- Seattle Times: Bitcoin is basically a Ponzi scheme - 2018-01-30
- Bitcoin is a Ponzi - 2020-12-13 by Prof Jorge Stolfi
- Financial Times: Albanian lessons for regulators nervously eyeing the crypto world - 2021-07-05 - Albania’s 1990s pyramid scheme debacle highlights risks of regulatory paralysis on the cryptocurrency explosion
- Jacobin: Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme - 2022-01-21
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Categories
Sub Categories
Tether, and other stablecoins
132
General
105
Economists
61
Humour
12
Fairer Economy
11
Ponzi aspect
8
Religious skeptical angles
7
NFTs
6
Crypto and energy consumption
5
Former bitcoin enthusiasts turned skeptics
4
Trading/Market Microstructure/Security Risks
4
Scams/frauds
3
Specific use cases
3
Bitcoin
3
Fat protocols
3
Fairer governance
3
DAOs
2
Twitter users
1
Central Bank Digital Currencies
1
Web3
1