… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.

Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!

I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.

However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!

I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.

I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.

Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!

EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2

  • You can use both systems, and appreciate their advantages and disadvantages. Cryptocurrency is good for discreet transactions where you don’t mind sacrificing some of the protections of the traditional financial system. So far it seems that it’s mainly used to buy drugs and other illegal stuff, but I’ve also seen web hosting purchasable with crypto, and I’m sure there are plenty of other applications that I can’t think of now. Back in the first bitcoin boom, there were restaurants selling food for btc, but the confirmation delay was a concern. That wouldn’t be the case now with the lightning network, but the novelty is gone.

    The web3 stuff built on top of blockchain seems to be 99% scams and grifts. I don’t subscribe to the value of adding artificial scarcity/provenance to digital goods.