Awesome critique of crypto/web3

Awesome critique of crypto/web3, etc. Contributions are welcome.

Critique

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
• Financial Times: Albanian lessons for regulators nervously eyeing the crypto world - 2021-07-05 - Albania’s 1990s pyramid scheme debacle highlights risks of regulatory paralysis on the cryptocurrency explosion

  Once upon a time in Albania, a scrappy, alternative finance industry emerged to take on and eventually supplant a sclerotic, technologically-backward banking system. The lessons from its dramatic collapse remain relevant today. 

  Essentially, what was initially touted as a post-communist entrepreneurial success story proved to be pyramid schemes of breathtaking proportions. Slick marketing and lofty promises turned an informal, decentralised, crime-facilitating ecosystem into a mainstream mania that sucked in multitudes of people, unchecked by feeble and fitful regulatory warnings.

Crypto and energy consumption

• https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
• https://newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-bitcoin-is-bad-for-the-environment
• Energy power usage CryptoArt, ETH, Blockchain spreadsheet

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

DAOs

• DAOs and the nature of human collaboration - 2021-08-12 by Marin Petrov. A critique of DAOs and technosolutionism.

NFTs

Non-fungible tokens.

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
• https://twitter.com/troll_lock

Tether, and other stablecoins

TODO.

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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

• http://kernel.community - A custom web3 educational community with free learning resources at https://kernel.community/en/learn/

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Iron-manning the pro arguments

Here we collect the best theses for why this is important/interesting/world-changing.

Fat protocols

From https://www.usv.com/writing/2016/08/fat-protocols/

The previous generation of shared protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) produced immeasurable amounts of value, but most of it got captured and re-aggregated on top at the applications layer, largely in the form of data (think Google, Facebook and so on). The Internet stack, in terms of how value is distributed, is composed of “thin” protocols and “fat” applications.

This relationship between protocols and applications is reversed in the blockchain application stack. Value concentrates at the shared protocol layer and only a fraction of that value is distributed along at the applications layer. It’s a stack with “fat” protocols and “thin” applications.

• Crypto Tokens and the Coming Age of Protocol Innovation - 2016-07-28 - by Albert Wenger at USV. Move about incentivizing investment in the protocols
• Fat Protocols - Aug 2016 - Joel Monegro at USV - more about incentivizing adoption

Fairer governance

Can support more democratic, distributed governance, e.g., cooperatives (somehow).

• If I Only had a Heart: a DisCO Manifesto - Dec 2019 - A joint publication by DisCO.coop, the Transnational Institute and Guerrilla Media Collective. "Value Sovereignty, Care Work, Commons and Distributed Cooperative Organizations. The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over its 80 colorful pages, you will read about how DisCOs are a P2P/Commons, cooperative and Feminist Economic alternative to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The DisCO Manifesto also includes some background on topics like blockchain, AI, the commons, feminism, cooperatives, cyberpunk, and more."

Reference

History of speculation, manias, etc.

• Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor (1998)
• Manias, Panics, and. Crashes. A History of Financial Crises by by CP Kindleberger (1978)

Inbox

This is a section for links that haven't yet been reviewed and/or allocated to a particular section.

• 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.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/anticryptocurrency/ - reddit with a significant number of links
• https://www.profgalloway.com/web3/ - 2022-01-15 - Prof Scott Galloway @ NYU. Unequal, focused on getting rich, facilitating crime, centralized
• Cryptoeconomics as a Limitation on Governance - 2021-11-11 - Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado Boulder
• Financial Times: Matt Damon’s crypto ad is more than just cringeworthy (paywall)

Other suggestions

• New topic concerning the psychological harm, such as: gambling, greed, cultism, etc.
• New topic along the lines of “Ex-coiners speaking out.”