Imagine a system where people are rewarded based on their ability to provide value. The more effort, insight, talent and achievements you acquire, the more you should be rewarded — both financially and through social recognition. So, the higher you climb in any organisation shows the value you’ve provided and are able to provide. That is the core ideology of a meritocracy.

It’s such a “no duh” concept, we almost expect it to be happening everywhere and at every level, from small businesses to world governments. But is that really the case?

… However, the reality is not quite as smooth sailing as the movies make it out to be.

… We see similar issues in the DeFi space. When it comes to influencing crypto projects, one obstacle is that protocols don’t often even attempt to recognise merit, or to put it another way, they don’t even begin to think about how to recognise the value of an individual’s opinion. Most code simply grants every individual’s vote with equal weight, in a fully democratic, one-person-one-vote style. Or they increase the size of your vote based on the number of tokens you stake. This has a tendency of recognising wealth above all else. And, in turn, ensuring that future decisions are biased in favour of those that provide the most rewards to the — already — wealthiest members, which of course reduces meritocracy and opportunities for progression. Read More

The title of this article, if anything, is being as mild about Web3 as I can possibly be. It is worth less than nothing — the world would be better off without it.

This articles goes into why that is, and is split into two sections: historical reasons, and technical reasons. There is of course some overlap among them. Read More

20+ documentations, tutorials, and videos to help you get started with Web3

Twitter went crazy last month when Musk and Dorsey mocked the idea of Web3. Few called it the future of the internet and few called it to be bogus. But do you know what exactly is Web 3.0 and how does it work? In this article, you’ll be introduced to the new dimension of the internet and how to get started in this field from a developer’s point of view.

Key Takeaways

• Beginner-friendly Introduction to Web3 and its ecosystem
• Is Web3 a hype or the future of the Internet?
• Roadmap to learn Web3 technology

Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than I am the latest NFT drop.

Also – cards on the table here – I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy.

Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing. Read More

In recent months, there has been a resurgence in the usage of the term “web3”: a nebulous term that (like it or hate it) has suddenly become a banner for much of the innovation happening in the space of blockchain and distributed ledger technology. The term has been around for a while (since 2014 when Gavin Wood originally coined it), but now it seems to have, for better or worse, reached critical mass.

With this has come a large amount of discourse and criticism. The field of discourse has seemingly been almost perfectly split in two: first, the “blockchain likers”, who are a broad group of individuals ranging from dogmatic “moon boy” traders to seasoned cryptographers like Dan Boneh who are working on the core technology associated with the field. On the other side, there are the “blockchain dislikers”: people like Stephen Diehl (who himself actually works on a private blockchain), who consistently produce highly reflexive, reactionary, and dismissive critiques.

These critiques are usually unmoored to anything actually happening in the blockchain space, and unaware of the technological development and cultural vision. This bifurcation is extremely harmful for the health of the emerging technologies: these technologies are not going to go away, so if your only answer is dismissal and anger, you’re actually just ceding the power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world. This pattern of discourse creates a negative-sum feedback loop that does a disservice to all. Read More

2021 proved to be a breakout year for crypto with BTC price gaining almost 70% yoy, Defi hitting $150B in value locked, and NFTs emerging as a new category. Here’s my view through the crystal ball into 2022 and what it holds for our industry. Read More

#metaverse

The buzz-term Web3 is trending quickly. The current reality of Web3 is this— most people have absolutely no idea what it means; large corporations and political institutions are playing Public Relations games with the term; and technical people are having a terrible time defining it.

We are in limbo somewhere between “wtf is Web3?” and “let’s make sure we both have the same definition of Web3…” I’ve been stumped by both the former and the latter. 

… There are large corporate, institutional, and political players trying to co-opt the term Web3. Management consulting firms like McKenzie and Deloitte need a new term that can be synonymous with the next wave of Internet innovation consulting services. 

… On the surface, the ambiguity and lack of consensus around Web3 are all a bit silly. However, beneath the surface of the non-specific, insecure, and postural Web3 narratives lies a fascinating set of concepts and innovations that are 1) exposing a new ‘access layer’ of distributed Internet-based applications, and 2) growing into an absolutely dissonant threat to the dominant order of our existing monolithic financial and political institutions. Read More

This story is part of Digiday’s Masters of Uncertainty series, a look at people and companies at the center of media’s defining storylines. Find the rest here.

Vivek Sharma likes to play video games on company time.

Fortunately, this qualifies as research. Sharma leads Meta’s Horizon team, which is tasked with constructing the company’s place in the metaverse — the persistent, immersive virtual space that Mark Zuckerberg sees succeeding the modern internet.

In spite of its new name, Meta is not trying to become the only metaverse platform in town. Sharma acknowledges that a true metaverse is more likely to take shape as a spread of interconnected platforms, not a single dominant virtual world. As vp of Horizon, the major sub-brand encompassing all of Meta’s VR products, the 43-year-old will have to thread the needle of establishing Horizon’s position as a leading metaverse builder without staking an outsized claim to the metaverse itself. Read More

I’ve long been interested in the decentralization of computing and communication in general, and of the web in particular. The trend of communication and information becoming more and more centralized in large corporations is worrying and worth fighting against, particularly from the perspective of systemic risk. I think it even makes sense in many cases to trade efficiency for resilience, by way of decentralization. How does “web3” do on these axes?

The funny thing is, web3, as it exists today and appears to be building towards, is actually more centralized than the web it seeks to replace. Read More