Awesome critique of crypto / web3

Awesome critique of crypto / web3 etc. Contributions welcome.

General

• 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
  • Revolution Now! With Peter Joseph | Bitcoin and Financialization - May 21, 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)
• https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html - 2022-01-07 Moxie Marlinspike, co-founder of Signal etc
• Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin by Paul Krugman in NY Times - 2021-05-20
• 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: Bitcoin’s 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
• 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
• The Web3 Fraud - 2021-12-16 by Nicholas Weaver on usenix.com
• Molly White series - https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/
  • Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are

Ponzi Aspect

• Financial Times: Why bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme - 2021-12-22. A Ponzi scheme is a zero-sum enterprise. But bitcoin is a negative-sum phenomenon that you can’t even pursue a claim against, argues Robert McCauley. Original
• https://seattletimes.com/opinion/bitcoin-is-basically-a-ponzi-scheme/
• https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html

Bitcoin and Energy Consumption

• https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
• https://newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-bitcoin-is-bad-for-the-environment

Scams / Frauds

• People Building ‘Blockchain City’ in Wyoming Scammed by Hackers - Vice - - 2022-01-12 - On Monday, CityDAO—the group that bought 40 acres of Wyoming in hopes of "building a city on the Ethereum blockchain”—announced that its Discord server was hacked and members' funds were successfully stolen as a result.
• Web3 is going just great - A timeline of scams related to cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and web3 projects since the beginning of 2021 by Molly White

Critical views of specific use cases

• Event ticketing: NFT tickets — a realistic look at a big trend – 2021-12-14

Twitter Users

Whilst these users may not solely discuss crypto or Web3, they do discuss it regularly, and have consistently provided well-written criticism.

• https://twitter.com/web3isgreat
• https://twitter.com/ncweaver
• https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF
• https://twitter.com/smdiehl

Tether (and Stablecoins)

What is blockchain / web3 etc

Best intros / overviews of blockchain, crypto, web3 etc.

• There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology - June 2, 2019 by Bruce Schneier

• The Myth of Decentralization and Lies about Web 2.0 - 2022-01-07 by Emily Gorcenski

Iron-manning the pro arguments

Here we collect the best theses for why this is important / interesting / will change the world.

Inbox

• https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/web3-a-map-in-search-of-territory/ - Jan 2022 - by Evgeny Morozov
• Vivaldi CEO: Why Vivaldi will never create ThinkCoin - 2022-01-13
• Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, and the Stablecoin Centralization Problem - good overview of PoW vs PoS and the complexity/problems PoS adds. Second half of the article expounds on how "any smart contract blockchain that relies heavily on DeFi for its use case, can have the outcome of its hard forks significantly determined by centralized stablecoin custodians." Long article and could fit under multiple headings here.