14 ms·

Crypto/Web3 Startup Ideas (2023 Edition)

37 points by rnjailamba 4y ago

missblit 4y ago
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. 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. Uncensorable Github? Yeah, it's called "git". Decentralized DNS and Postgres? Yeah, it's called "DNS" and "Postgres" respectively. Web3 twitter? > 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. Congratulations you just described Mastodon and ActivityPub. No blockchain required (though it does depend on those boring web2 technologies like HTTPS and DNS).
- tpetry 4y ago
  Crypto is still a solution that is searching for the problem it wants to solve.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Crypto did find the problem: How to get VCs invest and a how to dump all on retail investors without an IPO if even a SPAC is too much to bother. Other problems: money laundering, tax evasion and sanction circumvention. All of those are, and I mean that, serious problems to solve for a lot of people with a lot of money on the line.
  - therealdkz 4y ago
    the problem it is trying to solve is pretty clear at this point and it is „how to funell money to my pocket”
- thefounder 4y ago
  I think crypto could help with the dns. I don't like the DNS being owned by various corporations
  - olliej 4y ago
    how would crypto help dns?
    - coffeebeqn 4y ago
      Make it a 100x slower?
      - m00dy 4y ago
        Reads on blockchain is fast enough to power dns infrastructure.
        olliej 4y ago
        I'm fairly sure current DNS infrastructure doesn't use as much power as a country to achieve usable performance. But also reading from the blockchain is not fast, and I don't know why you think that.
        m00dy 4y ago
        Blockchains do not necessarily run on proof of work mechanism. Why do you think reads from the blockchain is slow ?
        olliej 4y ago
        Reads from the blockchain are vastly vastly slower than DNS queries, and even then we have many layers of caching between the root DNS servers and the end user. The important thing is that fundamentally getting usable performance for general users means you are unlikely to ever hit a DNS root server directly. The side effect of that is that any claimed "anti-censorship", etc mechanisms that crypto ostensibly provides immediately disappears - pretty much in line with current restrictions on explicit exchanges accepting transactions involving North Korea, terrorists, etc.
- simonmales 4y ago
  > 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. Haven't played any, but I am fan of crypto as a currency. I _think_ the appeal is the rewards earned (whatever token on offer) can be traded outside of the game ecosystem. So people might feel like they are earning real money. Just an assumption.
  - blueboo 4y ago
    If it’s fungible and you can trade it in the open market, yes, it feels like real money because it is a few clicks away from converting to real money. So it’s gambling. It’s just gambling—and/or “play to earn”—with all the toxic incentives that brings. The enthusiasm is in this space is just a race to leverage to relative lack of regulation of this form of gambling.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    I'm struggling to find a use case where entertainment and "profitable market place" don't collide therefore turning it into work. Once there is real value on the table won't its extraction be optimized as hell by a small group of determined "entrepreneurs". It seems that my (casual Gamer) position will always quickly turn into "customer" in this case. Then it's just a plain old microtransaction (for varying sizes of micro) game. Many people enjoy those (weirdly enough) but once again blockchain adds little.
    - ikt 4y ago
      In this case it seems like it's just an online version of magic which retains the card trading: https://godsunchained.com/ https://godsunchained.com/
      - Zanfa 4y ago
        It can't be a very good game given their main selling point on the landing page is the fact that you'll get paid to actually play it.
  - 4y ago
- saurik 4y ago
  > Uncensorable Github? Yeah, it's called "git". You have to host your git repository at some URL, and the people hosting that URL can be required to pull the content, the hostname can be blocked by firewalls, and the domain name can be revoked at the registrar. "It technically is available, but no one can ever find it" is not "uncensorable".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jasfi 4y ago
Automated trading can be a good use, difficult to market though.
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
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???
i386 4y ago
WWW/HTML/SQL Startup Ideas (1999)
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Maybe the crypto kids are too young to realize that this is not a good argument? In 1994(!) we already had Amazon, Yahoo, Geocities, etc. the internet was very much alive and growing at amazing speed
  - i386 4y ago
    Great companies design for the best product experience and work backwards to the best technology to make it possible. Crypto is solutioneering at its very worst.
SilverBirch 4y ago
I kind of can’t tell if this is a spoof? The first point is literally “decentralise ALL the things!”. Ok great. 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? It’s just very unclear to me what this person is asking for? Just stick with mongodb, it’s webscale…
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  How do you query and/or join over a decentralized network without it taking an hour ?
  - knorker 4y ago
    The standard blockchain enthusiast answer for that is a convoluted description of a centralized fast-path, but with a fancy name. Described without irony.
    - turmeric_root 4y ago
      ah yes, just take the decentralized ledger and hide it behind a ~~trusted third party~~ oracle!
theCrowing 4y ago
web3 whatsapp, web3 x, web3 y? Jìan-Yáng would be proud.
hdlothia 4y ago
Also the idea that people don't like censorship is one of the biggest misconceptions in the crypto space. People dislike excessive censorship.
- knorker 4y ago
  They just all disagree what the line is for "excessive". Few so called absolutists would stand behind child porn. Yet that's what absolutist platforms get.
ramoz 4y ago
Here’s what I’ve observed recently in this space. - 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. - 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. - No one is working for actual market share of anything meaningful because there is no real market for any of this crap.caveat- - 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. 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. 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.
- api 4y ago
  The noise and scams and bullshit is deeply harmful to anyone attempting to do anything real. If you are doing something real you’re spending all your time doing something real. If you are pumping hot air you’re spending all your time pumping hot air. Guess what wins in this environment. Real stuff can barely be noticed.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  The bootstrapped web3 projects don’t get as much hype. So much noise but there is proper signal out there! Your comment really captures the fatigue I see in the industry and near it.
  - api 4y ago
    Can you link some?
- hunterhod 4y ago
  I’m hoping real companies will emerge out of the deflation that we’re currently seeing in the space. I personally know quite a few folks who have been scammed in one way or another via crypto, but I still hold out for the future state. I think all this noise just needs to fall away.
Arubis 4y ago
- Distributed corporate liquidators (reacquire assets from remote former employees when your web3 startup runs out of funding/gullible folk) - NFTs commemorating the “decentralized” companies that used to host NFTs that disappeared along with said companies - Black market for about a year before everyone goes to prison 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! 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.
- striking 4y ago
  Helium was also effectively a scam, payouts were based almost entirely on what other people put in to buy the miners. Very few people were actually using the network and once folks stopped buying in others stopped being paid. And in fact they've just now switched to 5G over LoRaWAN, invalidating the investments their users made. Coffeezilla has a great video on it here: https://youtu.be/LDhU295bUv4 https://youtu.be/LDhU295bUv4
  - Arubis 4y ago
    Ooof. I'd seriously considered buying in on a Helium miner, too.
- dsco 4y ago
  Uninformed take. How long didn’t it take for ML to actually create meaningful results? Just because a space is riddled with 80% grifters during bull markets doesn’t mean you get to discard the 20% who are building decentralized file storage, lending protocols, stablecoins (Dai in particular) etc. Also after so many people trash crypto on HN daily - why’d you think it was even worth our time reading your post? At least some folks are funny with their takes.
  - LarsDu88 4y ago
knorker 4y ago
Aren't these just all ideas about how to get VC funding, or ideas about how to get crowdsource funding? 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") None of these startup ideas even show that they know enough about their space to even know what the problem is. They're the "not even wrong" of startup ideas. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong)
mradek 4y ago
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. Supply chain visibility, transportation and logistics, reviews, bidding, work history (commercial activity), etc. 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. Enough with the gorilla png and rug pulls.
- richbell 4y ago
  Plenty of companies have spent the last decade trying to find alternative uses for the blockchain and failed. I know people who worked at large FIs that were dumping millions of dollars into blockchain projects led by smart people (long before they'd ever admit it). Nothing ever came of it.
- amluto 4y ago
  Because mining, staking, and various consensus protocols along those lines are useless for these applications? Or maybe worse. A blockchain is a distributed system and is subject to the CAP theorem. And they handle it pretty badly: they are global and they are utterly intolerant of network partitions. They handle consistency by throwing out conflicting transactions, which is probably not what you want for something like supply chain visibility. Just use a database.
  - mradek 4y ago
    > just use a database Totally. But I’m thinking of protocols that give people insight into what’s happening and a way for them to join that protocol and start working. Like imagine activity pub (mastodon protocol) or xmpp - both are protocols to enable real time comms. If there were protocols to run your business that you could be a part of, and attempt to fix the issues of loads getting cancelled last minute due to dispatching errors, etc. stakeholders would know where the fault lies and payments could be adjusted based on where things went well or wrong.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
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.
- deebosong 4y ago
  I feel like in its heyday, Supreme was selling coolness to a very targeted audience (rich kids who wanted to be seen as having trendy taste with tons of money but both of these expressions not associated with old world wealth, but rather skater/ punk/ hip hop "alternative" culture). Like, at one point, Supreme was able to sell a literal brick with its branding stamped on it, for something like $30 for a brick, and who knows how much it was sold on secondary markets. Along with the literal brick, Supreme also did a "collabo" with the MTA of NYC, where the back of the MetroCards had Supreme branding. Hypebeast idiots were buying as many of those cards as they could to resell for 5-10x the actual value. To me, web3, everything in it, is the Supreme of the tech world. Some alternative "next big thing" fueled by hype and money, and what you're buying and selling is branding & associations, rather than practical functionality (aka, utility).
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    I can't argue against your point. Most of us are still holding out hope that web3 eventually fulfils its original promise, but the culture needs a complete overhaul, and the existing players need to go bankrupt and get out of the system before that can happen.
    - lordes11 4y ago
      internet computer is the only true web3 project right now. everything is fully on chain and nothing is in the cloud. web3 is all bs right now with everything on aws and then scam defi stuff in the background on chain moving tokens around. building sites on chain is the next step in blockchain tech
m00dy 4y ago
I think the list is curated by someone awesome.
wslh 4y ago
Very interesting list to build a discussion. 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: - 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 https://web3auth.io/ https://web3auth.io/ but the core elements are not open source. Shameless plug: we have created an MPC wallet that is accessed through https://walletconnect.com/ https://walletconnect.com/ the interesting point about MPCs goes beyond Web3 and involves data custody in general. - 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. - 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. - 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. - Automated and assisted tools for security code reviews (static, dynamic). More stuff like [5] - 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 https://moneyonchain.com/ https://moneyonchain.com/ - 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. - Adversarial analysis of popular blockchain models. Bitcoin is most studied one but we have a blind spot on others. [1] https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc [2] https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-to-acquire-leading-cryptographic-security-company-unbound-security https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-to-acquire-leading-cr... [3] Examples: https://dualitytech.com/ https://dualitytech.com/ https://secretarium.com/ https://secretarium.com/ https://www.dpella.io/ https://www.dpella.io/ https://inpher.io/ https://inpher.io/ https://www.stealthsoftwareinc.com/ https://www.stealthsoftwareinc.com/ [4] https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmle and https://semgrep.dev/ https://semgrep.dev/
college_physics 4y ago
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. 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) whatever the next tech era will look like it will bear the scars of this recent past

37 points by rnjailamba 4y ago

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. 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. Uncensorable Github? Yeah, it's called "git". Decentralized DNS and Postgres? Yeah, it's called "DNS" and "Postgres" respectively. Web3 twitter? > 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. Congratulations you just described Mastodon and ActivityPub. No blockchain required (though it does depend on those boring web2 technologies like HTTPS and DNS).

tpetry 4y ago
Crypto is still a solution that is searching for the problem it wants to solve.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hef19898 4y ago
  Crypto did find the problem: How to get VCs invest and a how to dump all on retail investors without an IPO if even a SPAC is too much to bother. Other problems: money laundering, tax evasion and sanction circumvention. All of those are, and I mean that, serious problems to solve for a lot of people with a lot of money on the line.
- therealdkz 4y ago
  the problem it is trying to solve is pretty clear at this point and it is „how to funell money to my pocket”
thefounder 4y ago
I think crypto could help with the dns. I don't like the DNS being owned by various corporations
- olliej 4y ago
  how would crypto help dns?
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    Make it a 100x slower?
    - m00dy 4y ago
      Reads on blockchain is fast enough to power dns infrastructure.
      - olliej 4y ago
        I'm fairly sure current DNS infrastructure doesn't use as much power as a country to achieve usable performance. But also reading from the blockchain is not fast, and I don't know why you think that.
        m00dy 4y ago
        Blockchains do not necessarily run on proof of work mechanism. Why do you think reads from the blockchain is slow ?
        olliej 4y ago
        Reads from the blockchain are vastly vastly slower than DNS queries, and even then we have many layers of caching between the root DNS servers and the end user. The important thing is that fundamentally getting usable performance for general users means you are unlikely to ever hit a DNS root server directly. The side effect of that is that any claimed "anti-censorship", etc mechanisms that crypto ostensibly provides immediately disappears - pretty much in line with current restrictions on explicit exchanges accepting transactions involving North Korea, terrorists, etc.
simonmales 4y ago
> 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. Haven't played any, but I am fan of crypto as a currency. I _think_ the appeal is the rewards earned (whatever token on offer) can be traded outside of the game ecosystem. So people might feel like they are earning real money. Just an assumption.
- blueboo 4y ago
  If it’s fungible and you can trade it in the open market, yes, it feels like real money because it is a few clicks away from converting to real money. So it’s gambling. It’s just gambling—and/or “play to earn”—with all the toxic incentives that brings. The enthusiasm is in this space is just a race to leverage to relative lack of regulation of this form of gambling.
- arlcode 4y ago
  I'm struggling to find a use case where entertainment and "profitable market place" don't collide therefore turning it into work. Once there is real value on the table won't its extraction be optimized as hell by a small group of determined "entrepreneurs". It seems that my (casual Gamer) position will always quickly turn into "customer" in this case. Then it's just a plain old microtransaction (for varying sizes of micro) game. Many people enjoy those (weirdly enough) but once again blockchain adds little.
  - ikt 4y ago
    In this case it seems like it's just an online version of magic which retains the card trading: https://godsunchained.com/ https://godsunchained.com/
    - Zanfa 4y ago
      It can't be a very good game given their main selling point on the landing page is the fact that you'll get paid to actually play it.
- 4y ago
saurik 4y ago
> Uncensorable Github? Yeah, it's called "git". You have to host your git repository at some URL, and the people hosting that URL can be required to pull the content, the hostname can be blocked by firewalls, and the domain name can be revoked at the registrar. "It technically is available, but no one can ever find it" is not "uncensorable".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jasfi 4y ago

Automated trading can be a good use, difficult to market though.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago

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???

i386 4y ago

WWW/HTML/SQL Startup Ideas (1999)

coffeebeqn 4y ago
Maybe the crypto kids are too young to realize that this is not a good argument? In 1994(!) we already had Amazon, Yahoo, Geocities, etc. the internet was very much alive and growing at amazing speed
- i386 4y ago
  Great companies design for the best product experience and work backwards to the best technology to make it possible. Crypto is solutioneering at its very worst.

SilverBirch 4y ago

I kind of can’t tell if this is a spoof? The first point is literally “decentralise ALL the things!”. Ok great. 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? It’s just very unclear to me what this person is asking for? Just stick with mongodb, it’s webscale…

coffeebeqn 4y ago
How do you query and/or join over a decentralized network without it taking an hour ?
- knorker 4y ago
  The standard blockchain enthusiast answer for that is a convoluted description of a centralized fast-path, but with a fancy name. Described without irony.
  - turmeric_root 4y ago
    ah yes, just take the decentralized ledger and hide it behind a ~~trusted third party~~ oracle!

theCrowing 4y ago

web3 whatsapp, web3 x, web3 y? Jìan-Yáng would be proud.

hdlothia 4y ago

Also the idea that people don't like censorship is one of the biggest misconceptions in the crypto space. People dislike excessive censorship.

knorker 4y ago
They just all disagree what the line is for "excessive". Few so called absolutists would stand behind child porn. Yet that's what absolutist platforms get.

ramoz 4y ago

Here’s what I’ve observed recently in this space. - 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. - 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. - No one is working for actual market share of anything meaningful because there is no real market for any of this crap.caveat- - 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. 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. 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.

api 4y ago
The noise and scams and bullshit is deeply harmful to anyone attempting to do anything real. If you are doing something real you’re spending all your time doing something real. If you are pumping hot air you’re spending all your time pumping hot air. Guess what wins in this environment. Real stuff can barely be noticed.
bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
The bootstrapped web3 projects don’t get as much hype. So much noise but there is proper signal out there! Your comment really captures the fatigue I see in the industry and near it.
- api 4y ago
  Can you link some?
hunterhod 4y ago
I’m hoping real companies will emerge out of the deflation that we’re currently seeing in the space. I personally know quite a few folks who have been scammed in one way or another via crypto, but I still hold out for the future state. I think all this noise just needs to fall away.

Arubis 4y ago

- Distributed corporate liquidators (reacquire assets from remote former employees when your web3 startup runs out of funding/gullible folk) - NFTs commemorating the “decentralized” companies that used to host NFTs that disappeared along with said companies - Black market for about a year before everyone goes to prison 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! 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.

striking 4y ago
Helium was also effectively a scam, payouts were based almost entirely on what other people put in to buy the miners. Very few people were actually using the network and once folks stopped buying in others stopped being paid. And in fact they've just now switched to 5G over LoRaWAN, invalidating the investments their users made. Coffeezilla has a great video on it here: https://youtu.be/LDhU295bUv4 https://youtu.be/LDhU295bUv4
- Arubis 4y ago
  Ooof. I'd seriously considered buying in on a Helium miner, too.
dsco 4y ago
Uninformed take. How long didn’t it take for ML to actually create meaningful results? Just because a space is riddled with 80% grifters during bull markets doesn’t mean you get to discard the 20% who are building decentralized file storage, lending protocols, stablecoins (Dai in particular) etc. Also after so many people trash crypto on HN daily - why’d you think it was even worth our time reading your post? At least some folks are funny with their takes.
- LarsDu88 4y ago

knorker 4y ago

Aren't these just all ideas about how to get VC funding, or ideas about how to get crowdsource funding? 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") None of these startup ideas even show that they know enough about their space to even know what the problem is. They're the "not even wrong" of startup ideas. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong)

mradek 4y ago

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. Supply chain visibility, transportation and logistics, reviews, bidding, work history (commercial activity), etc. 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. Enough with the gorilla png and rug pulls.

richbell 4y ago
Plenty of companies have spent the last decade trying to find alternative uses for the blockchain and failed. I know people who worked at large FIs that were dumping millions of dollars into blockchain projects led by smart people (long before they'd ever admit it). Nothing ever came of it.
amluto 4y ago
Because mining, staking, and various consensus protocols along those lines are useless for these applications? Or maybe worse. A blockchain is a distributed system and is subject to the CAP theorem. And they handle it pretty badly: they are global and they are utterly intolerant of network partitions. They handle consistency by throwing out conflicting transactions, which is probably not what you want for something like supply chain visibility. Just use a database.
- mradek 4y ago
  > just use a database Totally. But I’m thinking of protocols that give people insight into what’s happening and a way for them to join that protocol and start working. Like imagine activity pub (mastodon protocol) or xmpp - both are protocols to enable real time comms. If there were protocols to run your business that you could be a part of, and attempt to fix the issues of loads getting cancelled last minute due to dispatching errors, etc. stakeholders would know where the fault lies and payments could be adjusted based on where things went well or wrong.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

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.

deebosong 4y ago
I feel like in its heyday, Supreme was selling coolness to a very targeted audience (rich kids who wanted to be seen as having trendy taste with tons of money but both of these expressions not associated with old world wealth, but rather skater/ punk/ hip hop "alternative" culture). Like, at one point, Supreme was able to sell a literal brick with its branding stamped on it, for something like $30 for a brick, and who knows how much it was sold on secondary markets. Along with the literal brick, Supreme also did a "collabo" with the MTA of NYC, where the back of the MetroCards had Supreme branding. Hypebeast idiots were buying as many of those cards as they could to resell for 5-10x the actual value. To me, web3, everything in it, is the Supreme of the tech world. Some alternative "next big thing" fueled by hype and money, and what you're buying and selling is branding & associations, rather than practical functionality (aka, utility).
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I can't argue against your point. Most of us are still holding out hope that web3 eventually fulfils its original promise, but the culture needs a complete overhaul, and the existing players need to go bankrupt and get out of the system before that can happen.
  - lordes11 4y ago
    internet computer is the only true web3 project right now. everything is fully on chain and nothing is in the cloud. web3 is all bs right now with everything on aws and then scam defi stuff in the background on chain moving tokens around. building sites on chain is the next step in blockchain tech

m00dy 4y ago

I think the list is curated by someone awesome.

wslh 4y ago

Very interesting list to build a discussion. 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: - 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 https://web3auth.io/ https://web3auth.io/ but the core elements are not open source. Shameless plug: we have created an MPC wallet that is accessed through https://walletconnect.com/ https://walletconnect.com/ the interesting point about MPCs goes beyond Web3 and involves data custody in general. - 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. - 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. - 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. - Automated and assisted tools for security code reviews (static, dynamic). More stuff like [5] - 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 https://moneyonchain.com/ https://moneyonchain.com/ - 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. - Adversarial analysis of popular blockchain models. Bitcoin is most studied one but we have a blind spot on others. [1] https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc [2] https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-to-acquire-leading-cryptographic-security-company-unbound-security https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-to-acquire-leading-cr... [3] Examples: https://dualitytech.com/ https://dualitytech.com/ https://secretarium.com/ https://secretarium.com/ https://www.dpella.io/ https://www.dpella.io/ https://inpher.io/ https://inpher.io/ https://www.stealthsoftwareinc.com/ https://www.stealthsoftwareinc.com/ [4] https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmle and https://semgrep.dev/ https://semgrep.dev/

college_physics 4y ago

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. 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) whatever the next tech era will look like it will bear the scars of this recent past