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There's so much talk about web3 - it's a bit overwhelming - and almost feels a bit toxic by all the people shilling it without any actual proof (in the form of

There's so much talk about web3 - it's a bit overwhelming - and almost feels a bit toxic by all the people shilling it without any actual proof (in the form of new products or services). I have yet to see any product or service that actually leverages "web 3 technologies" - whatever that means to you - to create something that can't be done with web 2 or that is either marginally or substantially better. This doesn't mean they don't exist. Rather, I don't even conceptually understand what a service built on "web 3" technologies would accomplish that is distinct from what we have today with web 2 technology. Does anyone have examples beyond crypto currencies as an investment and NFTs - which is just digital art? Fundamentally, many of Web 2.0 is distributed, FB, AWS, Google and most tech companies all do massive amounts of working in creating distributed systems - distributed databases, distributed serverless infrastructure, CDNs etc. The "centralization" is that there are companies that operate these services. Is the goal of Web 3 to not have companies but have individuals' machines running these? I certainly don't want my personal computer, phone, Alexa etc running and supporting someone else's "decentralized application". What is the goal of web 3? I haven't seen any articulate answer that clarifies this question in any meaningful way. I'm hoping someone here can shed some light for me. ETA: The only interesting use case I can think of is to simplify transfer of ownership of digital assets - ebooks, video games etc. Maybe blockchain would be good at simplifying lending of these digital assets between friends, stores, etc without the need for DRM? I'd explicitly include TV, movies, and music but very few people purchase these 3 categories since streaming came along.

cblconfederate 5y ago
yeah despite whatever VC money they have the perception isn't good. Like, suppose i want to add Metamask login to a site. It's not easy, plus it forwards all requests to some server. I thought where we are going we don't need SPOF!!
KarlKemp 5y ago
The whole ecosystem is locked in this tiny box that is amendable to complete computation. It is impossible to connect that paradigm to the real world without, in some way, falling back to concepts they reject, like trusting someone’s testimony that a product was physically delivered. That’s why they copied the concept a second time with NFTs: it’s a bit awkward to just keep trading fictional currencies for other fictional currencies. Now, you can trade something real: fictional ownership of fictional “art”.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  My mindset is anyone who is a "maxi" is just an idealist. Most (all?) idealists end up being wrong; that includes 100% decentralized viewpoints and 100% centralized viewpoints. Anyone who thinks that bitcoin is going to be somehow the most efficient to buy a beer at the local bar is an idealist. Anybody who thinks that their nation's fiat currency is the only safe thing to store value in need only look at Turkey and Venezuela as counter points (or find a list of defunct currencies throughout history if you want to get more philosophical). If you want to make more nuanced arguments about making global investments go ahead; but bitcoin is attractive because the narrative is more simple. Does that guarantee Bitcoin is the answer, nope. NFT's aren't just digital art; digital art is just an easy implementation of NFT's. DAO's are a decentralized usecase. Centralized entities issuing NFT's redeemable for services at a future point in time is another category. For example, Nike issuing a NFT which can be redeemed for a limited edition shoe rather then selling the shoe online directly, having it be bought up by bots and resold on the 3rd party market. Nike gets a cut of the resale value every time the NFT is resold at minimal effort; they don't even have to build/host the marketplace. Consumers get a limited edition shoe shipped to them directly from the manufacturer with worry about middlemen or authenticity. To your point, people already trust Nike (and many other companies) to send them products. Do the decentralized "maxi's" like that nike example, probably not. But they don't really get a say whether it exists or not. Everyone is so quick to declare web3 100% dead or 100% going to take over the world. If this was pre social media, nobody would know about web3. The value would be orders of magnitude lower and you'd probably only find out about it once there were "useful products" or never at all if it's a complete failure. But that's not the world we live in anymore.
  - rileyphone 5y ago
    I think these are some good points. I’m a typical HN skeptic when it comes to crypto, but I think a lot of that comes with web3 being such an encompassing and thus refutable concept. I hope some parts of the tech that is being developed is ultimately helpful, but taking the humans out of the systems we rely on is just going to make them less adaptive and more fragile. Idealists don’t understand that our world is built on messy, imprecise systems and the strongest ones can change over time - defining them in immutable code is a mistake, though at least a noble one.
opportune 5y ago
If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero. It offers anonymized payments with low fees. Like Bitcoin but without the chain being visible to anybody. Unlike with regular payments, the transactions are anonymous, irreversible, and requires no KYC. Most crypto are not fully anonymous. Beware other privacy coins based on zksnarks since their creators are generally anti-anonymity (in the sense they don’t want their tokens to be used in illicit transactions and have pledged to make that harder - this defeats the entire purpose of a privacy coin, and any solution to this would reduce privacy). While monero is not fully anonymous under 100% of cases - it’s possible to do something to allow transactions to be linked back, such as using the same receiving and sending sub addresses multiple times for transactions - it’s pretty dang good. It’s pretty close to being digital cash. And the fees are pretty low (last I checked maybe $0.10?), which is more or less a permanent feature because it has dynamic block sizes. BTW, for any blockchain, it’s a good thing for ex fees to be non-zero. Otherwise there is no cost to “spamming” the blockchain which congests the network and increases the size of the chain (potentially making it harder to host). It is unfortunately based on POW, but on the bright side it uses an asic resistant CPU-based algorithm to prevent centralization.
- bern4444 5y ago
  > If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero. Genuine question, is crypto sometimes not counted as part of web3 by people in the space? I understand blockchain technology is distinct from crypto currency, but crypto always seems to be included as part of web3 no? I'll check it out. I know generally one focus of "web 3" is to simplify transactions especially by not having to integrate or work with credit card companies, local regulations etc especially in countries that don't have that infrastructure to as strong a degree. Certainly an admirable goal, and one I'd love to see - but I don't believe that a lot of these issues can't be solved better and faster with "web 2" technologies (minus the anonymous piece which is a fair and clear advantage).
  - opportune 5y ago
    I would include general crypto tokens in web3. Though monero is not exactly “WWW” which maybe some people think is what web3 is on? The only reason I mention monero is that it’s one of the only cryptos that is not vaporware (it isn’t hyped up based on some as-yet unimplemented capabilities) and has real world uses (digital cash. Battle tested, most popular token for tx on the dark web). You can also imagine that instead of being used on the dark web, it can be used to route around oppressive regimes or evade censorship. It’s permissionless and anonymous which is a unique combo for payment systems. It also has a decent online ecosystem for onboarding from fiat at localmonero.co
princekolt 5y ago
The reason you haven’t heard a coherent answer to what problems web3 is supposed to solve is because there aren’t any. It’s just a continuation of the past 5-10 years of cryptocurrency pump and dump schemes (which also include ICOs and NFTs). Just a bunch of hot air. As you correctly put it, it’s just a bunch of opportunists making money off of tech-gullible people.
- salawat 5y ago
  You forgot the more important part: What Web3 is pitched to be is completely antithetical to what most people want in the sense that by it's nature, Web3 basically makes AML and other financial controls pretty much impossible to reliably implement and enforce. You will not get trivial money transfer over the Internet without a gatekeeper. Not permanently anyway. As soon as the primitive for doing so comes into existence, it is guaranteed to be regulated on a when not if basis. Whether you try to exploit the short time before the law catches up to it says more about whether you're a gambler or not than anything else.
  - Sargos 5y ago
    Do you have any citations for your claim that most people want KYC? All the data I've seen indicates it's a government initiative and not debated or discussed with the general public. In fact the polls we do have show an overwhelming support for cash which is private and peer to peer.
    - salawat 5y ago
      it really doesn't matter whether the public hates KYC or not, because Law Enforcement will alwaya have the regulators ears, and eventually the KYC and AML can get pushed hard enough to increase traceability enough to start potentially prosecuting white collar crimes. And if you don't think there's a war on cash with the push for CBDC's you're high. Or have you not noticed the going on 2 year coin shortage entirely because someone just isn't interested in keeping up the coinage supply? Or how there are currency transaction reports to law enforcement on any sizable cash withdrawal, or how banks train employees to red flag any type of regular transacting just below the SAR monitoring point? It is too profitable and powerful a diplomatic tool to be a realistic outcome in my cynical view for government to do anything but double down on financial surveillance.
pessimizer 5y ago
> NFTs - which is just digital art? I don't think it's that: it's a key associated within a particular distributed database to a hash of some digital (or digitized) art, as far as I know.
- bern4444 5y ago
  Yes, I agree. It's slightly more indirect than digital art but the consequence is the same. It's equivalent to copyright. I own this thing. Here is the proof - the NFT. If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can license it from me. It's no different than a standard contract.
  - saberience 5y ago
    Except an NFT is basically just a link to some JSON which has a URL to an image. You could easily make another NFT yourself with a different link to the same image, whose NFT is the "real one"? How could you prove who made the original image and who sold it? NFTs don't any actual rights to the image and certainly don't stop people copying and using it. It's a load of crap basically.
    - grog454 5y ago
      I thought "the real" NFT is determined by what people decide "the real" one is. This is not actually a problem. NFTs are (or at least can be) a certificate of authenticity within a cryptographic framework. You can forge any physical certificate of authenticity with enough time and effort, but if you manage to forge a cryptographic one in our lifetime then congratulations! You just broke encryption. Tangentially related: It amazes me how poorly people seem to understand anything in this space but especially cryptocurrency. In maybe one out of hundred discussions on cryptocurrency do I see any mention of a ledger, which is the entire point. If you use Venmo or any similar cash exchange app then you automatically stand to benefit from the use of a cryptocurrency. Venmo is a ledger. The only reason you are able to send $1 a thousand times a day to your friend with no transaction fee is because you're not actually sending any money to anyone (as most people would understand it). You're changing values in Venmo's database which is an implementation of a digital ledger. Only when you "square up" with Venmo by transferring money out of Venmo into your own bank account does any money move anywhere (in a way that would cost Venmo a non negligible amount of money themselves). Cryptocurrencies are digital ledgers that, unlike Venmo, are decentralized and cryptographically backed. This means its physically impossible for Venmo (or anyone) to freeze or seize your assets, and impossible for your balances to be hacked or manipulated by a bad actor with too much authority (although your private keys can certainly still be hacked through side channels). Is that worth the energy cost of supporting a system like Bitcoin for every transaction? Not in my opinion, but I wish people would at least make an attempt at understanding what they hell they're talking about. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 EDIT: a certificate of authenticity with proof of ownership included and modifiable only by the owner.
rafale 5y ago
Isn't Uniswap a web3 product? It's the only way to create a Dex.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  Uniswap v2 perhaps started the idea of defi, at least in a 'mainstream'-accessible way. But it's not the only DEX model
WanderPanda 5y ago
If you want to cut through all the bullshit then you should directly look into web3 the ethereum js browser library. Sadly the term seems to have been hijacked in the recent months. Additionally you might want to look into ENS and ipfs as "mature" web3 projects
contravariant 5y ago
Going off topic a bit, but is web3 a twitter thing? The only times I see it show up is usually somehow connected to twitter. Also most of the stuff I see is a countermovement of people pointing out how the whole idea is silly, so I started wondering where people initially started talking about it positively and if they might all be on twitter (explaining why I only saw the counter-movement)
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  web3 is a JS library used to interact with the Ethereum RPC on Ethereum nodes or services which offer the RPC (like Infura). I'm not sure why it's become so charged from Twitter folks recently. I'm gonna guess it went viral on someone's Tweet is why.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thinkingemote 5y ago
All crypto projects appear the same to me, make the hype, the hype makes it valuable, step 3, profit. It doesn't matter if the idea is good, workable or needed (and many are), they are all hyped primarily as it's all about making money and hype makes the money with crypto, not the idea. Most discussions get bogged down in the "is it a good idea" question, where it's really about a kind of big vision or aim. Crypto doesn't have any attractive (e.g. for me, libre/freedom ) ideals it seems. It's basically like a startup putting all of its runway into marketing. But with crypto, I suppose, the marketing produces the product and becomes more valuable if it succeeds.
sascha_sl 5y ago
The one app comes to mind that does what web3 promises, but doesn't need a blockchain at all, is Scuttlebutt[1]. [1]: https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/
TimJRobinson 5y ago
I highly recommend the recent Tim Ferris Podcast + Naval + Chris Dixon episode on web3 (https://tim.blog/2021/10/28/chris-dixon-naval-ravikant/ https://tim.blog/2021/10/28/chris-dixon-naval-ravikant/) The podcasts Bankless and Tapping into Crypto are also good general explainers of what's going on. The biggest thing people get stuck on on HN is the "Dropbox is a stupid idea, I can replicate it with rsync" problem. Lots of things in web3 are possible without blockchain but they are a far worse experience. Some things I'm excited about: - Royal allows bands to sell an NFT of their songs on release, and then the owner of that NFT gets royalties on all future sales of that song. - Alchemix gives you no interest loans that pay themselves back over time. - Pool Together is a decentralized savings account where instead of getting a small interest payment all the interest is pooled and payed out as weekly prizes like a lottery. - DAOs allow massive decentralized companies to be created around any mission - charity work, building new tech, or even buying a copy of the constitution. - I work for a company called Balancer where you can create an index fund of your favorite coins and you earn interest from your investments rather than pay fees, as traders can use your fund for arbitrage opportunities. Just being able to provide liqudity to decentralized finance and get a 10 - 30% yearly APY on it is amazing. These are all still just the tip of the iceberg. When NFTs are mainstream and we have a global permissionless financial system - that's when creativity will really explode.

cblconfederate 5y ago

yeah despite whatever VC money they have the perception isn't good. Like, suppose i want to add Metamask login to a site. It's not easy, plus it forwards all requests to some server. I thought where we are going we don't need SPOF!!

KarlKemp 5y ago

The whole ecosystem is locked in this tiny box that is amendable to complete computation. It is impossible to connect that paradigm to the real world without, in some way, falling back to concepts they reject, like trusting someone’s testimony that a product was physically delivered. That’s why they copied the concept a second time with NFTs: it’s a bit awkward to just keep trading fictional currencies for other fictional currencies. Now, you can trade something real: fictional ownership of fictional “art”.

throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
My mindset is anyone who is a "maxi" is just an idealist. Most (all?) idealists end up being wrong; that includes 100% decentralized viewpoints and 100% centralized viewpoints. Anyone who thinks that bitcoin is going to be somehow the most efficient to buy a beer at the local bar is an idealist. Anybody who thinks that their nation's fiat currency is the only safe thing to store value in need only look at Turkey and Venezuela as counter points (or find a list of defunct currencies throughout history if you want to get more philosophical). If you want to make more nuanced arguments about making global investments go ahead; but bitcoin is attractive because the narrative is more simple. Does that guarantee Bitcoin is the answer, nope. NFT's aren't just digital art; digital art is just an easy implementation of NFT's. DAO's are a decentralized usecase. Centralized entities issuing NFT's redeemable for services at a future point in time is another category. For example, Nike issuing a NFT which can be redeemed for a limited edition shoe rather then selling the shoe online directly, having it be bought up by bots and resold on the 3rd party market. Nike gets a cut of the resale value every time the NFT is resold at minimal effort; they don't even have to build/host the marketplace. Consumers get a limited edition shoe shipped to them directly from the manufacturer with worry about middlemen or authenticity. To your point, people already trust Nike (and many other companies) to send them products. Do the decentralized "maxi's" like that nike example, probably not. But they don't really get a say whether it exists or not. Everyone is so quick to declare web3 100% dead or 100% going to take over the world. If this was pre social media, nobody would know about web3. The value would be orders of magnitude lower and you'd probably only find out about it once there were "useful products" or never at all if it's a complete failure. But that's not the world we live in anymore.
- rileyphone 5y ago
  I think these are some good points. I’m a typical HN skeptic when it comes to crypto, but I think a lot of that comes with web3 being such an encompassing and thus refutable concept. I hope some parts of the tech that is being developed is ultimately helpful, but taking the humans out of the systems we rely on is just going to make them less adaptive and more fragile. Idealists don’t understand that our world is built on messy, imprecise systems and the strongest ones can change over time - defining them in immutable code is a mistake, though at least a noble one.

opportune 5y ago

If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero. It offers anonymized payments with low fees. Like Bitcoin but without the chain being visible to anybody. Unlike with regular payments, the transactions are anonymous, irreversible, and requires no KYC. Most crypto are not fully anonymous. Beware other privacy coins based on zksnarks since their creators are generally anti-anonymity (in the sense they don’t want their tokens to be used in illicit transactions and have pledged to make that harder - this defeats the entire purpose of a privacy coin, and any solution to this would reduce privacy). While monero is not fully anonymous under 100% of cases - it’s possible to do something to allow transactions to be linked back, such as using the same receiving and sending sub addresses multiple times for transactions - it’s pretty dang good. It’s pretty close to being digital cash. And the fees are pretty low (last I checked maybe $0.10?), which is more or less a permanent feature because it has dynamic block sizes. BTW, for any blockchain, it’s a good thing for ex fees to be non-zero. Otherwise there is no cost to “spamming” the blockchain which congests the network and increases the size of the chain (potentially making it harder to host). It is unfortunately based on POW, but on the bright side it uses an asic resistant CPU-based algorithm to prevent centralization.

bern4444 5y ago
> If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero. Genuine question, is crypto sometimes not counted as part of web3 by people in the space? I understand blockchain technology is distinct from crypto currency, but crypto always seems to be included as part of web3 no? I'll check it out. I know generally one focus of "web 3" is to simplify transactions especially by not having to integrate or work with credit card companies, local regulations etc especially in countries that don't have that infrastructure to as strong a degree. Certainly an admirable goal, and one I'd love to see - but I don't believe that a lot of these issues can't be solved better and faster with "web 2" technologies (minus the anonymous piece which is a fair and clear advantage).
- opportune 5y ago
  I would include general crypto tokens in web3. Though monero is not exactly “WWW” which maybe some people think is what web3 is on? The only reason I mention monero is that it’s one of the only cryptos that is not vaporware (it isn’t hyped up based on some as-yet unimplemented capabilities) and has real world uses (digital cash. Battle tested, most popular token for tx on the dark web). You can also imagine that instead of being used on the dark web, it can be used to route around oppressive regimes or evade censorship. It’s permissionless and anonymous which is a unique combo for payment systems. It also has a decent online ecosystem for onboarding from fiat at localmonero.co

princekolt 5y ago

The reason you haven’t heard a coherent answer to what problems web3 is supposed to solve is because there aren’t any. It’s just a continuation of the past 5-10 years of cryptocurrency pump and dump schemes (which also include ICOs and NFTs). Just a bunch of hot air. As you correctly put it, it’s just a bunch of opportunists making money off of tech-gullible people.

salawat 5y ago
You forgot the more important part: What Web3 is pitched to be is completely antithetical to what most people want in the sense that by it's nature, Web3 basically makes AML and other financial controls pretty much impossible to reliably implement and enforce. You will not get trivial money transfer over the Internet without a gatekeeper. Not permanently anyway. As soon as the primitive for doing so comes into existence, it is guaranteed to be regulated on a when not if basis. Whether you try to exploit the short time before the law catches up to it says more about whether you're a gambler or not than anything else.
- Sargos 5y ago
  Do you have any citations for your claim that most people want KYC? All the data I've seen indicates it's a government initiative and not debated or discussed with the general public. In fact the polls we do have show an overwhelming support for cash which is private and peer to peer.
  - salawat 5y ago
    it really doesn't matter whether the public hates KYC or not, because Law Enforcement will alwaya have the regulators ears, and eventually the KYC and AML can get pushed hard enough to increase traceability enough to start potentially prosecuting white collar crimes. And if you don't think there's a war on cash with the push for CBDC's you're high. Or have you not noticed the going on 2 year coin shortage entirely because someone just isn't interested in keeping up the coinage supply? Or how there are currency transaction reports to law enforcement on any sizable cash withdrawal, or how banks train employees to red flag any type of regular transacting just below the SAR monitoring point? It is too profitable and powerful a diplomatic tool to be a realistic outcome in my cynical view for government to do anything but double down on financial surveillance.

pessimizer 5y ago

> NFTs - which is just digital art? I don't think it's that: it's a key associated within a particular distributed database to a hash of some digital (or digitized) art, as far as I know.

bern4444 5y ago
Yes, I agree. It's slightly more indirect than digital art but the consequence is the same. It's equivalent to copyright. I own this thing. Here is the proof - the NFT. If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can license it from me. It's no different than a standard contract.
- saberience 5y ago
  Except an NFT is basically just a link to some JSON which has a URL to an image. You could easily make another NFT yourself with a different link to the same image, whose NFT is the "real one"? How could you prove who made the original image and who sold it? NFTs don't any actual rights to the image and certainly don't stop people copying and using it. It's a load of crap basically.
  - grog454 5y ago
    I thought "the real" NFT is determined by what people decide "the real" one is. This is not actually a problem. NFTs are (or at least can be) a certificate of authenticity within a cryptographic framework. You can forge any physical certificate of authenticity with enough time and effort, but if you manage to forge a cryptographic one in our lifetime then congratulations! You just broke encryption. Tangentially related: It amazes me how poorly people seem to understand anything in this space but especially cryptocurrency. In maybe one out of hundred discussions on cryptocurrency do I see any mention of a ledger, which is the entire point. If you use Venmo or any similar cash exchange app then you automatically stand to benefit from the use of a cryptocurrency. Venmo is a ledger. The only reason you are able to send $1 a thousand times a day to your friend with no transaction fee is because you're not actually sending any money to anyone (as most people would understand it). You're changing values in Venmo's database which is an implementation of a digital ledger. Only when you "square up" with Venmo by transferring money out of Venmo into your own bank account does any money move anywhere (in a way that would cost Venmo a non negligible amount of money themselves). Cryptocurrencies are digital ledgers that, unlike Venmo, are decentralized and cryptographically backed. This means its physically impossible for Venmo (or anyone) to freeze or seize your assets, and impossible for your balances to be hacked or manipulated by a bad actor with too much authority (although your private keys can certainly still be hacked through side channels). Is that worth the energy cost of supporting a system like Bitcoin for every transaction? Not in my opinion, but I wish people would at least make an attempt at understanding what they hell they're talking about. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 EDIT: a certificate of authenticity with proof of ownership included and modifiable only by the owner.

rafale 5y ago

Isn't Uniswap a web3 product? It's the only way to create a Dex.

pcthrowaway 5y ago
Uniswap v2 perhaps started the idea of defi, at least in a 'mainstream'-accessible way. But it's not the only DEX model

WanderPanda 5y ago

If you want to cut through all the bullshit then you should directly look into web3 the ethereum js browser library. Sadly the term seems to have been hijacked in the recent months. Additionally you might want to look into ENS and ipfs as "mature" web3 projects

contravariant 5y ago

Going off topic a bit, but is web3 a twitter thing? The only times I see it show up is usually somehow connected to twitter. Also most of the stuff I see is a countermovement of people pointing out how the whole idea is silly, so I started wondering where people initially started talking about it positively and if they might all be on twitter (explaining why I only saw the counter-movement)

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
web3 is a JS library used to interact with the Ethereum RPC on Ethereum nodes or services which offer the RPC (like Infura). I'm not sure why it's become so charged from Twitter folks recently. I'm gonna guess it went viral on someone's Tweet is why.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

thinkingemote 5y ago

All crypto projects appear the same to me, make the hype, the hype makes it valuable, step 3, profit. It doesn't matter if the idea is good, workable or needed (and many are), they are all hyped primarily as it's all about making money and hype makes the money with crypto, not the idea. Most discussions get bogged down in the "is it a good idea" question, where it's really about a kind of big vision or aim. Crypto doesn't have any attractive (e.g. for me, libre/freedom ) ideals it seems. It's basically like a startup putting all of its runway into marketing. But with crypto, I suppose, the marketing produces the product and becomes more valuable if it succeeds.

sascha_sl 5y ago

The one app comes to mind that does what web3 promises, but doesn't need a blockchain at all, is Scuttlebutt[1]. [1]: https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/

TimJRobinson 5y ago

I highly recommend the recent Tim Ferris Podcast + Naval + Chris Dixon episode on web3 (https://tim.blog/2021/10/28/chris-dixon-naval-ravikant/ https://tim.blog/2021/10/28/chris-dixon-naval-ravikant/) The podcasts Bankless and Tapping into Crypto are also good general explainers of what's going on. The biggest thing people get stuck on on HN is the "Dropbox is a stupid idea, I can replicate it with rsync" problem. Lots of things in web3 are possible without blockchain but they are a far worse experience. Some things I'm excited about: - Royal allows bands to sell an NFT of their songs on release, and then the owner of that NFT gets royalties on all future sales of that song. - Alchemix gives you no interest loans that pay themselves back over time. - Pool Together is a decentralized savings account where instead of getting a small interest payment all the interest is pooled and payed out as weekly prizes like a lottery. - DAOs allow massive decentralized companies to be created around any mission - charity work, building new tech, or even buying a copy of the constitution. - I work for a company called Balancer where you can create an index fund of your favorite coins and you earn interest from your investments rather than pay fees, as traders can use your fund for arbitrage opportunities. Just being able to provide liqudity to decentralized finance and get a 10 - 30% yearly APY on it is amazing. These are all still just the tip of the iceberg. When NFTs are mainstream and we have a global permissionless financial system - that's when creativity will really explode.