Awesome sensemaking for crypto/web3
Awesome rigorous evaluation of crypto/web3, etc. Contributions are welcome.
Critique
General
- The problem with NFTs - 2022-01-21 - by Dan Olson (Documentary) đș [đ Highly recommended đ]
- Stephen Diehl series - https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog.html
- The Case Against Crypto - December 31, 2021
- 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
- On Unintentional Scams - July 23, 2021
- How to Destroy Bitcoin - July 13, 2021
- The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency - July 7, 2021
- The Oncoming Ransomware Storm - May 11, 2021
- Et tu, Signal? - April 7, 2021
- The Political Case for a Blanket Cryptocurrency Ban - March 30, 2021
- Bitcoin: The Postmodern Ponzi - February 27, 2021
- The Crypto Chernobyl - February 10, 2021
- Gamestop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage - February 3, 2021
- 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.
- https://watershed.co.uk/studio/news/2021/12/03/case-against-crypto
- The European Money and Finance Forum - The encrypted threat: Bitcoinâs 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
- Tante's Web3/NFT FAQ
- https://rufuspollock.com/2016/07/02/reflections-on-the-blockchain/ - 2016-07-02 - by Rufus Pollock (mainly a critique of early DAOs and techno-solutionism)
- 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
- Molly White series - https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/
- 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 blockchainâs had its day - 2021-12-06
- Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies: Burn It With Fire - 2018-04-20 by Nicholas Weaver đș 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 âblockchainâ 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 âput a bird^H^H^H^H blockchain on itâ hype to unregistered (and mostly fraudulent) securities with âInitial Coin Offeringsâ to an invitation for massive theft in the form of âsmartâ contracts."
- Ross Anderson et al: Bitcoin Redux: crypto crime, and how to tackle it (full paper)- 2018-06-01 - Anderson is a Professor of Security Engineering at the University Cambridge. Bitcoin Redux explains whatâs 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 theyâre 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. Weâve been looking at the details.
- 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 series that discusses whether blockchain can solve various real world use-cases better than traditional technologies
- Kai Stinchcombe: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain - 2017-12-23 - "Each purported use caseâââfrom payments to legal documents, from escrow to voting systemsâamounts to a set of contortions to add a distributed, encrypted, anonymous ledger where none was needed. What if there isnât 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. Thatâs 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).
If you've spent much time around cryptocurrency people, you've probably heard a rant or two about "sound money" and the need to "depoliticize money." This is a foundation of blockchainism: the belief that money is born separate from states, and states invade on the private realm when they "meddle" in the money system.
There are at least two serious problems with this ideology. First, it's plain wrong on the historical facts. Money did not emerge from barter systems among people. Money was and is a product of state.
But even if you stipulate that money didn't originate among private markets there's another serious historical problem with "sound money." ... It's this: central banks didn't emerge to usurp the private sector's control over money. Central banks were created because without them, finance was subject to wild, terrifying, ruinous boom/bust cycles. What's more, without a central bank, money was subject to naked political meddling, which central banks (sometimes) moderated.
- Internet pioneer/Silicon Valley legend Tim O'Reilly on Web3:
- 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:
- That the externalities I describe don't exist. You'll have a hard time proving that the waste of electricity and hardware, and the crime wave, are imaginary.
- That although the externalities do exist, the benefits of decentralization outweigh them. The problem here is that since the systems are not actually decentralized, we get the externalities but don't get the benefits.
- That although the externalities do exist, and the systems aren't dencentralized, they're making so much money that we shouldn't worry. The problem here is that the amount of actual money you can get out of a cryptocurrency equals the amount of actual money that has been put in, minus the actual costs of mining. So the big picture is that although there may be winners, in aggregate the system loses money.
- 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: âif you look beyond the hype, youâll find nothing more than a pyramid scheme posing as currency.â
- Centralizing Control: Why Bitcoin is Dangerous - 2022-04-02 - Sal Bayat: âDemocratic governance is fundamentally incompatible with existing cryptocurrency systems as they can only represent the interests of those in control of the system.â
Economists
- Stephanie Kelton Cryptocurrency and Fiat Money - 2017-12-23
- Richard Thaler Economics Nobel prize winner, Richard Thaler: âThe market that looks most like a bubble to me is Bitcoin and its brethrenâ - 2018-01-22
- Various 'Only good for drug dealers': More Nobel prize winners snub bitcoin - 2018-04-27
- Robert Shiller The Old Allure of New Money - 2018-05-21
- Abhijit Banerjee Nobel Prize Winning Economist Abhijit Banerjee: Is Blockchain the Key to Financial Inclusion? - 2020-01-20
- Steve Keen Cryptocurrencies, Debt, and the Economy: Steve Keen interviewed by Layne Hartsell - 2021-02-17
- Amartya Sen Prannoy Roy's Townhall With Amartya Sen On Economy, Farm Laws: Full Transcript - 2021-03-06
- Jeffrey Sachs Famed economist Jeffrey Sachs rails against Bitcoin: Highly polluting and âalmost like counterfeitingâ - 2021-03-16
- Paul Krugman Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin - 2021-05-20
- Tyler Cowen What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
- Yanis Varoufakis What is money, really? And why Bitcoin is not the answer (even if blockchain is brilliant & potentially helpful in democratising money) - 2021-08-02
- Daron AcemoÄlu The Bitcoin Fountainhead - 2021-10-05
- Joseph Stiglitz Nobel Prize Economist Joseph Stiglitz Calls Regulators to Ban Cryptocurrencies - 2021-10-28
- Richard Thaler Economics Nobel prize winner, Richard Thaler: âThe market that looks most like a bubble to me is Bitcoin and its brethrenâ - 2018-01-22
- Yanis Varoufakis Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism - 2022-01-26
- Tyler Cowen The Crypto Crash Strengthens the Case for Crypto - 2022-01-27
- Jesse Frederik 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 wonât 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: âCrypto Ruined My Lifeâ: 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
Ponzi aspect
Crypto and energy consumption
Scams/frauds
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:
Fancy technology can obscure our assessment of what is really going on. The DAO solves a single problem: the corrupt trustee or administrator. It replaces voluntary compliance with a corporationâs charter under threat of lawsuit, with automated compliance with software defined rules. This subtle change may be enough to bypass regulatory hurdles facing traditional trusteeâs and administrators, but it doesnât solve most of the problems the regulations were attempting to address.
What The DAO doesnât solve is all of the other problems inherent with any joint venture. These are people problems, economic problems, and political problems. In some sense, The DAO creates many new problems caused by its ridged rules and expensive machine-enforced process for change.
The DAO doesnât solve the âgroup trapâ where by losers subsidize winners. It disempowers the individual actor and forces him to submit to group decision making. It doesnât make raising money cheaper for companies, it just adds blockchain-enforced bureaucratic and political processes.
- DAOs and the nature of human collaboration - 2021-08-12 by Marin Petrov. A critique of DAOs and technosolutionism.
NFTs
Non-fungible tokens.
Specific use cases
Humour
Twitter users
Whilst these users may not solely discuss crypto or web3, they do discuss it regularly, and have consistently provided well-written critique.
Tether, and other stablecoins
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."
Trading/Market Microstructure/Security Risks
Former bitcoin enthusiasts turned skeptics
Religious skeptical angles
Buddhist
- Sujato Bhikkhu on Crypto by Sujato Bhikkhu. A monk explains why crypto is incompatible with the teachings of the Buddha from both moral and spiritual dimensions.
Christian
What is blockchain, web3, etc.
Best intros/overviews of blockchain, crypto, web3, etc.
Iron-manning the pro arguments
Here we collect the best theses for why blockchain/cryptoâcurrencyâ/web3 is supposedly important/interesting/world-changing.
Bitcoin
General
Web3
- Sean Bonner: Why Web3 - 2021-10-26 - by Sean Bonner. "Web3 upends the power structures weâve grown accustomed to and puts artists and creators back into the drivers seatâŠWeb3 offers a future where people are in charge of their own identities, not beholden to the whims of data hoarding corporations. People control their own accounts, own their own futuresâŠSo if you are asking âWhy Web3?â The answer is simple. Web3 is the future."
Fat protocols
From https://www.usv.com/writing/2016/08/fat-protocols/
The previous generation of shared protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) produced immeasurable amounts of value, but most of it got captured and re-aggregated on top at the applications layer, largely in the form of data (think Google, Facebook and so on). The Internet stack, in terms of how value is distributed, is composed of âthinâ protocols and âfatâ applications.
This relationship between protocols and applications is reversed in the blockchain application stack. Value concentrates at the shared protocol layer and only a fraction of that value is distributed along at the applications layer. Itâs a stack with âfatâ protocols and âthinâ applications.
Fairer governance
Can support more democratic, distributed governance, e.g. cooperatives (somehow). Can save Democracy.
- If I Only had a Heart: a DisCO Manifesto - Dec 2019 - A joint publication by DisCO.coop, the Transnational Institute and Guerrilla Media Collective. "Value Sovereignty, Care Work, Commons and Distributed Cooperative Organizations. The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over its 80 colorful pages, you will read about how DisCOs are a P2P/Commons, cooperative and Feminist Economic alternative to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The DisCO Manifesto also includes some background on topics like blockchain, AI, the commons, feminism, cooperatives, cyberpunk, and more."
- Wired: The Father of Web3 Wants You to Trust Less - 2021-11-29 - Gavin Wood, who coined the term Web3 in 2014, believes decentralized technologies are the only hope of preserving liberal democracy.
Fairer Economy
Reference
History of speculation, manias, etc.
Inbox
This is a section for links that haven't yet been reviewed and/or allocated to a particular section.
Pros
Other suggestions
- New topic concerning the psychological harm, such as: gambling, greed, cultism, etc.