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Making sense of web3 & crypto. Introduction to key concepts and ideas. Rigorous, constructive analysis of key claims pro and con. A look at the deeper hopes and aspirations.

Last updated Jul 7, 2026
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#awesome#awesome-list#bitcoin#blockchain#cryptocurrency#ethereum#technosolutionism#web3
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README

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

* 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 * 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 - 2018-05-04 - "Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong direction." > If you've spent much time around cryptocurrency people, you've probably heard a rant or two about "sound money" and the need to "depoliticize money." This is a foundation of blockchainism: the belief that money is born separate from states, and states invade on the private realm when they "meddle" in the money system. > > There are at least two serious problems with this ideology. First, it's plain wrong on the historical facts. Money did not emerge from barter systems among people. Money was and is a product of state. > > But even if you stipulate that money didn't originate among private markets there's another serious historical problem with "sound money." ... It's this: central banks didn't emerge to usurp the private sector's control over money. Central banks were created because without them, finance was subject to wild, terrifying, ruinous boom/bust cycles. What's more, without a central bank, money was subject to naked political meddling, which central banks (sometimes) moderated.
  • Internet pioneer/Silicon Valley legend Tim O'Reilly on Web3:
- Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 - 2021-12-13 - "Get ready for the crash" - CBS Money Watch - 2022-02-09 - Crypto and NFTs are "Pretty Serious Speculative Bubble" - 2022-02-10
  • David Rosenthal: Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies' Externalities? - 2022-02-09. Having built a decentralized consensus system using Proof-of-Work (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/945445.945451) the author has the technical knowledge to explain the design faults and limitations of permissionless blockchain systems, as well as highlighting the economic and environmental issues. Summary of critique:
> * That the externalities I describe don't exist. You'll have a hard time proving that the waste of electricity and hardware, and the crime wave, are imaginary. > * That although the externalities do exist, the benefits of decentralization outweigh them. The problem here is that since the systems are not actually decentralized, we get the externalities but don't get the benefits. > * That although the externalities do exist, and the systems aren't dencentralized, they're making so much money that we shouldn't worry. The problem here is that the amount of actual money you can get out of a cryptocurrency equals the amount of actual money that has been put in, minus the actual costs of mining. So the big picture is that although there may be winners, in aggregate the system loses money. * Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks - 2014-10-07. Network effects lead to centralization in p2p (e.g. Bitcoin) and no good way to mitigate this.

Economists

Ed Zitron: Solutions That Create Problems - 2022-02-22 - The thing about Web3 is that it is uniquely useless. I have actively searched for an explanation as to why it's the future, what products it would allow us to build, what sort of good* it would provide, and I cannot even at my most optimistic find a real use case

Ponzi aspect

> 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

Scams/frauds

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.

NFTs

Non-fungible tokens.

Specific use cases

Humour

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/rufuspollock
  • 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"
  • https://twitter.com/doctorow

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.

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."

Trading/Market Microstructure/Security Risks

Former bitcoin enthusiasts turned skeptics

Religious skeptical angles

Buddhist

  • Sujato Bhikkhu on Crypto by Sujato Bhikkhu. A monk explains why crypto is incompatible with the teachings of the Buddha from both moral and spiritual dimensions.

Christian

What is blockchain, web3, etc.

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

Iron-manning the pro arguments

Here we collect the best theses for why blockchain/crypto“currency”/web3 is supposedly important/interesting/world-changing.

Bitcoin

General

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.

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

* 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.

Inbox

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

Pros * Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/samerP2P/status/1317123399295041541

Other suggestions

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