web3 — Solving trust issues using math

Are crypto people on to the next big thing and did you miss the boat? Are they about to lose everything in the latest get-rich-quick scheme?

From the outside, crypto looks a lot like a casino. Its mechanics reveal something far more exciting: the blockchain.

Here's a question. What do you trust more?

*   Institutions like banks and governments.
*   Internet platforms like Facebook and Uber.
*   Mathematics.

There's a history lesson in there.

Human societies first integrated when institutions allowed two strangers to do business by acting as trusted third parties. Then, the Internet replaced middlemen with monopolistic digital platforms. Now, blockchains use cryptography to get rid of intermediaries altogether. **They unlock self-governing economic networks that make rulers obsolete and scammers impossible – through code.**

Blockchain networks usher in a "new" Internet: web3.

### This post helps you get web3 in one take

It uncovers:

*   what web3 is, why we need it and how it works
*   what cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have to do with it
*   how to get started with web3
*   web3 use cases: DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, social tokens, play2earn, the Metaverse

**It's a thoughtful attempt to demystify the blockchain as a tool for building better societies.**

If you let me be the one crypto friend you listen to, you'll learn why web3 ís the next big thing. You'll care not because it'll make you rich, but because it can propel humanity forward and makes us all richer in the process. Also: you didn't miss the boat. **It's still early.**

## 1. Short history of the web

The original Internet was invented in the 1970s by the US government to protect its nuclear weapons from hacking.

They realised a single computer controlling all the rockets in peak Cold War was a recipe for disaster. So they built a decentralised network of multiple computers instead.

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This meant the US could keep its part of the "mutually assured destruction" bargain even in case of a Soviet cyberattack.

### web1

In 1990, the Internet was a bunch of connected computers. The web was its first application, created by Tim Berners-Lee.

**Web1 was designed as a "hyperlinked information system."** A giant library of data sourced together on a screen from computers all across the network for users to browse by clicking around linked text and images.

Sounds familiar?

30 years later, three billion users are connected to a much bigger, faster and more ubiquitous web, powered by monstrous data centres. The clicking around has remained largely the same.

In its early days, the web was a niche tool, used almost exclusively by academics. Mass adoption came five years later with the introduction of browsers like Mosaic and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

These were the good old surfing days. You'd dial in. Downloading a picture took years. Altavista was the default search engine. Nobody had thought of web design yet.

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Web1 was:

*   **Decentralised** — Powered by regular computers from regular users.
*   **Open-source** — Anyone could build on the web.
*   **Read-only** — Publishing content required some technical skills, so most users were readers.

Web1's decentralised infrastructure symbolised its original ethos. **Anyone could publish information of any kind, to anyone in the world, without the permission of central gatekeepers.**

### web2

Fast-forward 10 years, the Wild West had grouped around winners like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, pulling in huge numbers of users and talent black-hole style.

For the first time, anyone could publish online. As barriers faded, users and usage surged. The Internet had something for everyone.

![](https://mirror.xyz/\_next/image?url=https

Information Asymmetry

### The logic of myths, propaganda and conspiracy theories.

The evening of February 27, 1933 in Berlin. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are playing gramophone records at Goebbels' home. The phone rings. “The Reichstag is on fire!” Goebbels struggles to contain his excitement. It's the pretext the Nazis had long been waiting for.

As Hitler and Goebbels race out, Hermann Goering, already at the scene, strikes the iron while it's hot. “This is the beginning of the Communist Revolution. We must not wait a minute! Every Communist must this very night be strung up!"

The Nazis double down. With the parliament cupola still smouldering, they clamp down on liberties and opponents. Storm troopers roar through the streets, rounding up victims at will. Freedom of speech and press are gagged, meetings banned and properties seized. Hitler assumes dictatorial powers. The German people went to sleep in a democracy and wake up in a tyranny.

![German parliament building in flames, 1933.](https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/6076e883f818f442d417dae6/612f525675b76ee37050ed68_reichstag-fire.jpeg)

The fire was a godsend for the Nazis. The sort that feels too good to be true. To this day, nobody knows what really happened. Those who did are long dead, many slain in the months that followed. The Nazis guillotined a Dutchman by the name of Marinus Van der Lubbe. While there’s no doubt Van der Lubbe was at the scene playing with fire, it’s doubtful he acted alone. So much is suspected from the sheer scale of the inferno, as flames sprung up from scattered gasoline pools — clearly poured in advance. Goering in particular is said to have been planning the plot for months, as well as boasting about it at Hitler’s birthday in 1942. A known arsonist and communist, Van der Lubbe was the perfect fall guy.

## Daydreaming apes

Whether the Reichstag fire was serendipity or scheme is a moot point. The history lesson is not in what kindled the fire but in how it was exploited for power through humanity’s greatest skill: fiction. Though all complicit, it wasn’t brain size, walking upright or fire that separated humans from the animal kingdom. We emerged from the African savannahs to conquer the world by crafting imagined realities with complex language.

As real as they feel in our daily lives, things like money, the Church, companies, democracy and the Belgian nation have no grounds in the material world. They are figments of collective imagination we perpetuate by believing in them. Such myths can unite millions of strangers in narrative networks that coordinate their actions towards common goals. The same way code programs machines, stories program human beings. The more people believe a myth, the larger its power over society. Ultimately, multiple myths mesh together in grand cultures — like liberalism, capitalism, catholicism and nazism. Mass-scale socialisation in the name of the greater good.\\

> "You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven." — Yuval Noah Harari

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/01LqOpEal4OmgTH4D8nmw.jpeg?height=1012&width=2024)

Myths are not synonymous with lies. Telling you I’m on my way while I have yet to leave the house is different from explaining the Universe’s mysteries as divine presence. To lie requires knowledge of the falsifiable truth. In fact, there is little doubt most Nazis religiously believed their myths. History is a sequence of ideological battles between parties believing to be on the right side of it.*‍*

### Intermezzo: notable Nazi myths

The Nazis knew how to tell a good story. Their Third Reich was constructed on a series of myths that cunningly explained the suffering of Germans as injustices done to them by enemies — justifying the aggression that would escalate into World War II as a matter of survival.

* **Stab-in-the-back** — The Nazis asserted that Germany didn't lose World War I on the battlefield, but was in