Awesome sensemaking for crypto/web3

👉 April 2022 Website for the web3 sensemaking project 👈

🎉 Nov 2022 Full guide to web3 & crypto including evaluation of claims pro and con 🎉

Awesome rigorous evaluation of crypto/web3, etc. Contributions are welcome.

Critique

General

• The problem with NFTs - 2022-01-21 - by Dan Olson (Documentary) 📺 [👉 Highly recommended 👈]
  • Three things Web3 should fix in 2022 a response to The Problem with NFTs - 28 Jan 2022
• 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
  • 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.)
• Web3 First Impressions - 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
• Tante's Web3/NFT FAQ
• 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
• Revolution Now! With Peter Joseph | Bitcoin and Financialization - May 21, 2021
• 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
  • Abuse and harassment on the blockchain
  • Anonymous cryptocurrency wallets are not so simple
  • Cryptocurrency off-ramps, and the pressure towards centralization
  • Cryptocurrency’s Robinhood effect
  • Abuse on the blockchain – Guest lecture at Stanford University
• Against Web3 and Faux-Decentralization - 2021-10-19 by Soatok
• The technological case against Bitcoin and blockchain - 2022-03-05 by Luke Plant
• The Case Against Crypto - 2021-12-03 by Martin O'Leary
• The Case Against Bitcoin - 2021-05-14 by Michael W. Green. A portfolio manager discusses the case against bitcoin from a financial and geopolitical perspective.
• 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."
• Ross Anderson et al: Bitcoin Redux: crypto crime, and how to tackle it (full paper)- 2018-06-01 - Anderson is a Professor of Security Engineering at the University Cambridge. Bitcoin Redux explains what’s going wrong in the world of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin exchanges are developing into a shadow banking system, which do not give their customers actual bitcoin but rather display a "balance" and allow them to transact with others. However if Alice sends Bob a bitcoin, and they’re both customers of the same exchange, it just adjusts their balances rather than doing anything on the blockchain. This is an e-money service, according to European law, but is the law enforced? Not where it matters. We’ve been looking at the details.
  • Ross Anderson: Why Bitcoin is Not Cash - 2018-04-10 - 📺 walks through why bitcoin is not cash and the complex legal questions it would need to deal with if it wanted to be.
  • Ross Anderson: Tracing Stolen Bitcoin - 2018-03-23 - 📺
• Simon Wardley: A Spoiler for the Future of Bitcoin - 2013-11-27 - "As you can guess, I'm not a fan of bitcoin. If left unchecked then I find it has the potential to undermine the importance of Government which is actually not good for competition and not good for the market. I hope none of the above happens and would rather see bitcoin disappear in a puff of history." (NB: he predicts massive appreciation in bitcoin and is concerned how it can undermine government and tax revenue.)
• Kai Stinchcombe series that discusses whether blockchain can solve various real world use-cases better than traditional technologies
  • Kai Stinchcombe: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain - 2017-12-23 - "Each purported use case — from payments to legal documents, from escrow to voting systems—amounts to a set of contortions to add a distributed, encrypted, anonymous ledger where none was needed. What if there isn’t actually any use for a distributed ledger at all? What if, ten years after it was invented, the reason nobody has adopted a distributed ledger at scale is because nobody wants it?"
  • [Kai Stinchcombe: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future](ht