An Engineer's Hype-Free Observations on Web3 (and its Possibilities)

• Blockchains are databases built from three parts, and "cryptocurrencies and blockchains are inseparable; they’re flip sides of the same coin
  • A tamper-evident historical log (the “chain” itself)
  • A trustless distributed consensus protocol
  • A system of incentives to compensate participants and ensure they play fair
• Blockchain is great for maintaining ledgers but there are issues to use on-chain data

• • quite a few projects working on decentralized storage is working on the cost and longevity of data storage problem, Arweave is definitely a good ecosystem to look into
  • similar to the oracle issue redstone on Arweave ecosystem is working on this direction
  • Constraints on smart contracts? → real-world data/ upgrade issue / smart contracts can’t reference smart contracts on different blockchains
    • Some smart engineers use an "admin" to control a set of smart contracts to lower the upgrade cost and some cross-chain infra (like the !ink language) is working toward the target to enable cross-chain smart contracts to talk to each other

  https://github.com/paritytech/ink

  • Do we need blockchain to do xxx? → money is here to drive the technical innovation

    • The technology industry is immensely path dependent. Particularly when buckets of money appear, feedback loops can form whose outcomes seem all but inevitable

  • Crypto is a (well-funded!) random walk towards discovering productive economic ends

  • DAOs are exploding, but it is only another form of organization;

    • It's cheaper in some way with blockchain as a better tool, but it cannot solve human related issues.

  • Web3 is Decentralization (p2p network) with a proper incentive layer

  • blockchain help the decentralized protocol to better "monetize" :

    • mastodon is acquired by "mask network" , and a decentralized social network with a proper " token incentive layer" could better support the creator and users without monetizing their data and privacy

  • 1Password but for your crypto private keys

    • this issue is actually hugggggge ,cannot imagine if 1password or enpass got hacked someday. Normal people still don't have a good way to manage their ultimate private key. Guys with coding skills could encrypt their private key and save the ultimate JSON file somewhere, but this is definitely not a way normal users could adopt. Smart contract wallets like Argent or ZENGO ( support bio - password) might be a solution, but still a long way to go. I personally support bio-password ( but seems to have an additional challenge with the "bio" part )

Sth interesting, the top 30 NFTs sold above 30ETH