Awesome critique of crypto/web3

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

Critique

General

• The problem with NFTs - 2022-01-21 - by Dan Olson (Documentary) 📺 [👉 Highly recommended 👈]
• 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.
• 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
  • It's not still the early days
• Against Web3 and Faux-Decentralization - 2021-10-19 by Soatok
• The Case Against Crypto - 2021-12-03 by Martin O'Leary
• The Register: The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day - 2021-12-06
• Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies: Burn It With Fire - 2018-04-20 by Nicholas Weaver 📺 Nicholas Weaver is a staff researcher with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and lecturer in EECS, where he teaches machine structures and computer security. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley in 2003 and joined ICSI to study network security and measurement. "The entire cryptocurrency and blockchain ecology is rife with frauds, criminalities, and tulip-mania style hype and needs to be properly disposed of into the ashes of history. A “blockchain” is just a horribly inefficient append-only file which costs a literal fortune to secure without actually providing meaningful distributed trust, while cryptocurrencies are provably inferior than actual currencies for legal real world transactions. Beyond the sheer uselessness have emerged a whole host of bad ideas, ranging from the “put a bird^H^H^H^H blockchain on it” hype to unregistered (and mostly fraudulent) securities with “Initial Coin Offerings” to an invitation for massive theft in the form of “smart” contracts."

Economists

• Paul Krugman Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin - 2021-05-20
• Joseph Stiglitz Nobel Prize Economist Joseph Stiglitz Calls Regulators to Ban Cryptocurrencies - 2021-10-28
• Yanis Varoufakis What is money, really? And why Bitcoin is not the answer (even if blockchain is brilliant & potentially helpful in democratising money) - 2021-08-02
• Stephanie Kelton Cryptocurrency and Fiat Money - 2017-12-23
• Tyler Cowan What the Crypto Crowd Doesn't Understand About Economics - 2021-06-20
• Robert Shiller The Old Allure of New Money - 2018-05-21
• Jeffrey Sachs Famed economist Jeffrey Sachs rails against Bitcoin: Highly polluting and ‘almost like counterfeiting’ - 2021-03-16
• Abhijit Banerjee Nobel Prize Winning Economist Abhijit Banerjee: Is Blockchain the Key to Financial Inclusion? - 2020-01-20
• Amartya Sen Prannoy Roy's Townhall With Amartya Sen On Economy, Farm Laws: Full Transcript - 2021-03-06
• Steve Keen Cryptocurrencies, Debt, and the Economy: Steve Keen interviewed by Layne Hartsell - 2021-02-17
• Daron Acemoğlu The Bitcoin Fountainhead - 2021-10-05
• Richard Thaler Economics Nobel prize winner, Richard Thaler: “The market that looks most like a bubble to me is Bitcoin and its brethren” - 2018-01-22
• Various 'Only good for drug dealers': More Nobel prize winners snub bitcoin - 2018-04-27
• Yanis Varoufakis Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism - 2022-01-26

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
• Seattle Times: Bitcoin is basically a Ponzi scheme - 2018-01-30
• Bitcoin is a Ponzi - 2020-12-13 by Prof Jorge Stolfi
• 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.

• Jacobin: Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme - 2022-01-21

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

• Is The DAO going to be DOA? - 2016-05-16 - by Dan Larimer (founder of BitShares and much else). Larimer sets out most of the basic critiques of DAOs as governance innovation extremely well:

  Fancy technology can obscure our assessment of what is really going on. The DAO solves a single problem: the corrupt trustee or administrator. It replaces voluntary compliance with a corporation’s charter under threat of lawsuit, with automated compliance with software defined rules. This subtle change may be enough to bypass regulatory hurdles facing traditional trustee’s and administrators, but it doesn’t solve most of the problems the regulations were attempting to address.

  What The DAO doesn’t solve is all of the other problems inherent with any joint venture. These are people problems, economic problems, and political problems. In some sense, The DAO creates many new problems caused by its ridged rules and expensive machine-enforced process for change.

  The DAO doesn’t solve the “group trap” where by losers subsidize winners. It disempowers the individual actor and forces him to submit to group decision making. It doesn’t make raising money cheaper for companies, it just adds blockchain-enforced bureaucratic and political processes.

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

NFTs

Non-fungible tokens.

• OpenSea, Web3, and Aggregation Theory - 2022-01-05 - Ben Thompson of Stratechery
• Brian Eno on NFTs & Automaticism
• Detailed twitter thread by @NFTEthics alleging fraudulent or close to fraudulent behaviour by a major NTF influencer named BeanieMaxi - 2022-01-17 ([cached](./assets/Thread by @NFTethics re beaniemaxi.pdf))
• Jacobin: NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit - 2022-01-26

Specific use cases

• Event ticketing: NFT tickets — a realistic look at a big trend – 2021-12-14
• NFT games: “Play-to-earn” and Bullshit Jobs - December 28, 2021 by Paul Butler - An interesting reflexion linking web3's "Play-to-earn" concept to David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs
• NFT games: Crypto Games: Report from hell - Good video reviewing and discussing crypto games

Humour

• Crypto Curious - 2021-12-21 SOUTH PARK on NFTs

Twitter users

Whilst these users may not solely discuss crypto or web3, they do discuss it regularly, and have consistently provided well-written critique.

• https://twitter.com/web3isgreat
• https://twitter.com/ncweaver
• https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF
• https://twitter.com/smdiehl
  • Crypto Criticism Threads
• https://twitter.com/troll_lock
• https://twitter.com/CasPiancey -"Under promise, under deliver" co-host @cryptocriticpod opinions are mine, not my employer odds and ends @protos hold no crypto or crypto stonks
• https://twitter.com/BennettTomlin - I do data science and track down frauds | 74% backed | Co-host @CryptoCriticPod | Writing @fud_letter | Discord: https://discord.gg/YpAUqNkhSC
• https://twitter.com/SilvermanJacob (staff writer New Republic) & https://twitter.com/ben_mckenzie - "apparently I now write about crypto"

Tether, and other stablecoins

• Bennett Tomlin: Tether and Bitfinex Introduction - 2021-08-10 - Tether and Bitfinex are two of the most important companies in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Tether is the largest stablecoin, and the primary driver of volume and liquidity. Bitfinex used to be the largest cryptocurrency exchange, and still is a frequently used exchange. Tether and Bitfinex have an incredibly problematic past and are quite possibly the largest corporate fraud in history.
  • Detailed overview of Tether and Bitfinex and their connection.
• Tether Papers: This is exactly who acquired 70% of all USDT ever issued - 2021-11-10
• Bloomberg: Tether’s Latest Black Eye Is CFTC Fine for Lying About Reserves - 2021-10-15 - Biggest stablecoin issuer hit with $41 million penalty. Affiliated crypto exchange Bitfinex also fined $1.5 million.
• Bloomberg: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions? - 2021-10-07 - A wild search for the U.S. dollars supposedly backing the stablecoin at the center of the global cryptocurrency trade—and in the crosshairs of U.S. regulators and prosecutors. [paywalled] (cached)
• Bloomberg: Tether Fails to Dispel Mystery on Stablecoin’s Crucial Reserves - 2021-12-03 - Holding include $30.6 billion in commercial paper and CDs. About $1 billion moved from reverse repo notes to money funds

Central Bank Digital Currencies

• Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation - provides a high level overview of the current state of central bank and private sector currencies in the US, and identifies risks and challenges with the implementation of a central bank digital currency. From the paper summary: "The paper summarizes the current state of the domestic payments system and discusses the different types of digital payment methods and assets that have emerged in recent years, including stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies. It concludes by examining the potential benefits and risks of a CBDC, and identifies specific policy considerations."

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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.

Bitcoin

• Bitcoin for the Open-Minded Skeptic - May 2020 - by people/Matt Huang. Note: more an argument for why Bitcoin will "make it" than any argument why that is socially valuable (or not).
• 7 Things To Read About Bitcoin (For Institutional Investors) - May 2020 - by people/Matt Huang

General

• JumpCrypto Crypto Reading List (on Github)

Web3

• Sean Bonner: Why Web3 - 2021-10-26 - by Sean Bonner. "Web3 upends the power structures we’ve grown accustomed to and puts artists and creators back into the drivers seat. ,,, Web3 offers a future where people are in charge of their own identities, not beholden to the whims of data hoarding corporations. People control their own accounts, own their own futures. ... So if you are asking “Why Web3?” The answer is simple. Web3 is the future."

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). Can save Democracy.

• 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."
• Wired: The Father of Web3 Wants You to Trust Less - 2021-11-29 - Gavin Wood, who coined the term Web3 in 2014, believes decentralized technologies are the only hope of preserving liberal democracy.

Fairer Economy

• Li Jin on the future of the creator economy - Shared ownership and control of online platforms is the way forward (via crypto)
  • Note: we probably all want that wonderful outcome it's just that crypto is neither necessary nor likely to get us there. See https://rufuspollock.com/fixing-facebook/

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)
• Francesca Bria on Decentralisation, Sovereignty, and Web3
• Booming NFT art market plagued by 'mind-blowing' fraud

Pros

• BanklessDAO: State of the DAOs #7: Social Tokens and the Future of Work - 2022-01-13

Other suggestions

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