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Crypto is a trustless consensus engine. It's not about the money, in fact it's not about money at all. It just happened that the banking system was due for a big upgrade, and was the easiest thing to disrupt. Everything else comes next.
If you think about it, the only innovation here is a decentralized database, a global computer. All the ERCs & EIPs are just about agreeing on shared interfaces so that everyone can benefit from each other's data. It's not money blocks, it's data ownership and interoperability.
Before discovering crypto, I tried to build an operative system. I wanted data schemas to be the root of everything, and apps would just read and write to common schemas. Twitter, Insta, FB, etc. would just all share a "post" primitive, that any other app could interact with.
I was fascinated by what this could enable. Apps could work together on your benefit. It would all boil down to app-agnostic "stories", "posts", "messages", "notes" any app could add to and display as you wanted. I ended up giving up on the project, but the idea stayed with me.
When I was interviewing for Showtime, @AlexMasmej mentioned one of the goals was to eventually make a "social media protocol" that anyone could build on top of. I know it's cliche, but I really think "crypto solves this", or at least it gives us the tools to get started.
This is why I'm really excited about @AaveAave's decentralized social protocol. This is why I believe users owning their data (vs providers) does matter. This is why I'm always excited about people building crazy new things. In Ethereum, everything is composable by default.
While we're at it, NFTs! NFTs are just an interface we've all agreed on for a piece of data you can own. Sure, 99% of NFTs today are just title-description-image, but I really believe that will change very soon. Once we have web3 social media, what do you think posts will be?
I'm personally not interested in DeFi. I also strongly dislike speculation in general. I want to see more projects that understand that Ethereum is just a gigant database, and take advantage to build new, original apps. Especially if they aren't related to money at all!
So go ahead, build crazy things. Let's show everyone that web3 really can be that utopian version of the internet that we failed at a few years ago, with open standards and the user in control. Let's explore the amazing things that a list of data everyone agrees on can enable.