Welcome to Web3

Perceiving web 3

Learn to make sense of what is actually going on right now in the larger context of history.

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The goal is to learn to see this new world we are now living in.

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Please complete as many of these core activities as possible before we meet. The more of this you finish, the clearer your picture of our time together will be. Of course, the learning experience will be more fun as well if you are better prepared.

Good luck and have fun!

Welcome to the future

the most interesting news to come out of crypto in the last decade is the fact that we now have a global public digital clock that pays people who keep it ticking. this is one clock. one history. one record of truth.

actually 3 of 8 references in the Bitcoin whitepaper are about decentralized time keeping

incentives around consensus (agreement about history, tick by tick by tick) can get a little confusing but … basically each tick can hold some datam any data, and if you want to sound smart just call it a "Merkle tree of transactions" and go read something about Ralph Merkle

Proof of Work leaks some money per tick while Proof of Stake pays people interest on their "at risk" investment to keep ticking. You lie, you lose … about our shared, public history.

Ethereum adds a Turing complete virtual machine onto the clock, tracking function arguments, return values and code deployed to the virtual machine as data in each tick of the clock

there are a bunch of modern implementations of the Ethereum model in NEAR, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche and others who have found a viable way to parallelize the single threaded virtual machine of Ethereum – driving to make everything faster and cheaper so this idea can operate at scale and www shopping cart speeds

if you can get past the emotionally charged hype and news cycles vying for our attention, you will notice, with few exceptions, that the coins of 2017 and NFTs of 2021 are very early and relatable applications about things we care about and understand: money and shiny things. DeFi (decentralized finance) is about porting the financial system to this new new forever-clock

but the brand new primitives are what matters

(a) time: enabled by a chain of discrete "data moments"
(b) identity: enabled by public/private key cryptography
(c) money: time + value
(d) ownership: identity + money
(e) provenance: identity + money + time

… are all just starting to build up

we're only just now learning to use this digital clock so we're thinking of it, naturally, as a permutation of what we already know, not something completely new. see tech adoption cycle, etc

your best bet in this environment, imho, is to focus on the actual tech – it's no more complicated than a slow, expensive database that can't tell a lie (as long as it's economically viable to keep the clock ticking, and who knows how long that will be). at least that's good enough for the first year or so until you get used to it.

CORE Activities

Something to learn (~30 mins)

• [10 mins] searching in unfamiliar territory
• [10 mins] surveying large bodies of work
• [10 mins] for NCD only, please review before the orientation session

Something to do (~1 hr)

• [ 10 mins ] CREATE your first NEAR account
• [ 30 mins ] REVIEW the NEAR University page
  • NEAR in a Nutshell
  • NEAR Academy
  • Figment Learn Pathway
• [ 10 mins ] READ "Getting Started" with NEAR
• [ 10 mins ] EXPLORE awesomenear.com

Something to see (~25 hrs @ 1x speed)

• [ 40 mins ] Peer-to-Peer Money in a Historical Context
• [ 60 mins ] Bitcoin and the coming Infrastructure Inversion
• [ 35 mins ] Money as a Content Type and the Grand Arc of Technology
• [ 50 mins ] Applications: Today & 2025
• [ 90 mins ] NEAR 101
  • Review the slides
  • Watch a recording
• [4 hrs ] NEAR Blockchain Concepts
• [ 4.5 hrs ] Token Economics Series
• [ 10+ hrs] a16z Crypto Startup School

Something to hear (~4 hrs @ 1x speed)

• [ 60 mins ] Bitcoin's Pre-History and the Cypherpunks
• [ 90 mins ] The History of Bitcoin
• [ 90 mins ] Altcoins, A History of Failure

BONUS Activities

If you have the time to look around the corner, here's a little more for you.

Something to read

• Web3 is an Open Public Database
• My first impressions of web3 (discussion) and response (discussion)
• Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
• Ethereum Yellow Paper
• Anything on nakamotoinstitute.org Literature

Something to blow your mind

• Blockchain 101 - A Visual Demo
• But how does bitcoin actually work?
• How secure is 256 bit security?
• Bitcoin is Time
• 2021 Electric Capital Report

Use Cases

• awesomenear.com
  Explore hundreds of applications in the NEAR ecosystem
• AstroDAO
  Create a DAO to organize your community
• thewiki.near.page (and near.page)
  Create a decentralized wiki running directly from a smart contract

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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points

– Alan Kay

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Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points

– a teacher, probably

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