Crypto/Web3 Startup Ideas (2023 Edition)
alliancedao.notion.site
alliancedao.notion.site
On-chain games? I don't want to feel like I'm in a laggy casino, I just want to blast zombies with a rocket launcher and I can already do that perfectly fine.
Uncensorable Github? Yeah, it's called "git".
Decentralized DNS and Postgres? Yeah, it's called "DNS" and "Postgres" respectively.
Web3 twitter?
> The winning Web3 Twitter will ultimately offer the features we have been eager to see: data truly owned by users themselves, uncontrolled by one entity or even one man, multiple clients permissionlessly built, multiple options of curation algorithms that users can choose from.
Congratulations you just described Mastodon and ActivityPub. No blockchain required (though it does depend on those boring web2 technologies like HTTPS and DNS).
But also reading from the blockchain is not fast, and I don't know why you think that.
Anyway, there is an obvious application of DNS here. We're talking about a decentralized ledger --e.g., who owns what. A ledger describes who owns what. In the case of DNS, we'd be recording who (public key/address) owns which names.
It's a very sensible application of the technology/networks.
Much like our current system of banking, our current DNS system requires authorities and institutions, and requires us to trust in those institutions (e.g. ICANN).
Want a system which requires no such trust? Put it on a decentralized chain --but understand, there's probably under 3 such chains in existence currently.
I think HN is one of the few places that actually applies critical thinking when it comes to crypto/web3. It can be a bit jarring if you come from a Reddit echo-chamber.
> Anyway, there is an obvious application of DNS here. We're talking about a decentralized ledger --e.g., who owns what. A ledger describes who owns what. In the case of DNS, we'd be recording who (public key/address) owns which names.
And it all falls apart because the system as described is unable to deal with mistakes nor intentional abuse.
Haven't played any, but I am fan of crypto as a currency.
I _think_ the appeal is the rewards earned (whatever token on offer) can be traded outside of the game ecosystem. So people might feel like they are earning real money.
Just an assumption.
It’s just gambling—and/or “play to earn”—with all the toxic incentives that brings. The enthusiasm is in this space is just a race to leverage to relative lack of regulation of this form of gambling.
Once there is real value on the table won't its extraction be optimized as hell by a small group of determined "entrepreneurs".
It seems that my (casual Gamer) position will always quickly turn into "customer" in this case. Then it's just a plain old microtransaction (for varying sizes of micro) game.
Many people enjoy those (weirdly enough) but once again blockchain adds little.
This is vaporware though, real game companies will never create content for tokens they've already sold. The only game I know of that had anything like this was GW Hall of Monuments giving some kind of bonus in GW2, and that obviously didn't require a blockchain, because the company running the game has your account data in a database. And obviously no third party company would ever develop content for a token they didn't sell.
It seems like a lot of the blockchain stuff is like "You give me USD and I give you this stupid dream", instead of looking at it from the other side "why do you want my USD?"
You have to host your git repository at some URL, and the people hosting that URL can be required to pull the content, the hostname can be blocked by firewalls, and the domain name can be revoked at the registrar. "It technically is available, but no one can ever find it" is not "uncensorable".
- What really astonishes me, is that for each and every one of these ideas there is probably a VC funded company or group of individuals working to build the thing.
- anyone in web3 is working for hype and for funding. Bunch of clout chasers. If you can make the thing sound good, you win. Your shitty GitHub repo is mostly ignored; as is your ability to integrate with the real world.
- No one is working for actual market share of anything meaningful because there is no real market for any of this crap.caveat-
- The only actual market that exists is a self-feeding one, so you have startups building dev tools or doing things like recreating web2 data systems on web3 in horrid/obscure ways.
Overall it seems like a big fun money scheme. A few privileged and/or greedy individuals chase some hackers pipe-dream, convince a bunch of young fools to join & build for them, and then a bunch of idiots to fund them/pump their token.
EDIT: while I’m knocking current state, I believe in a lot of the ideals of decentralization and expanded uses of cryptography. I’m investing a lot of time & effort in understanding what could possibly be meaningful. I really, really struggle with the noise in current state.
If you are doing something real you’re spending all your time doing something real. If you are pumping hot air you’re spending all your time pumping hot air. Guess what wins in this environment. Real stuff can barely be noticed.
Your comment really captures the fatigue I see in the industry and near it.
I personally know quite a few folks who have been scammed in one way or another via crypto, but I still hold out for the future state. I think all this noise just needs to fall away.
- NFTs commemorating the “decentralized” companies that used to host NFTs that disappeared along with said companies
- Black market for about a year before everyone goes to prison
After writing that, it sounds ridiculous to say this, but: I actually would be pleased if something useful and good for the world came out of this whole mess. There’s been so much youthful energy and excitement put into the cryptocurrency space, and if it turns out that the kids are right and I’m just being a curmudgeon, great! Good for all of you!
It’s been over a decade, though, and the least harmful piece of crypto I’ve seen is Helium, which is probably about to get steamrolled by 5G.
Coffeezilla has a great video on it here: https://youtu.be/LDhU295bUv4
Also after so many people trash crypto on HN daily - why’d you think it was even worth our time reading your post? At least some folks are funny with their takes.
Very little time.
ML has been creating meaningful results since the 1960s.
> Just because a space is riddled with 80% grifters
It is a strong indication that nothing useful will come out from the remaining 20%, which is probably wishful thinkers.
But then again, hope is not proof, lines of code is not a product, hours spent tinkering is not quality, big ideas is not real world impact.
Right now, and for the past 10 years, this space has been a lot less useful than what came out from imagining FTL travel or colonizing Mars.
But costed nearly as much (actually, more: going to Mars costs around ~2.7 billions, while This year, more than $3.8B has been poured into startups in the Web3 space)
If I believed in conspiracies I would say that the criminal cartels of the World have found the perfect tool to wash their dirty money. It works much better than pumping art.
I mean...yeah! Go builders! I wish you success. But I have my doubts around these ones.
Decentralized file storage seems maybe to be better addressed by IPFS, which uses cryptographic protocols but isn't cryptocurrency.
Stablecoins are mathematically and conceptually fascinating (like most of this space!), but what do they get you that you don't get with fiat currency? The answer I've actually seen applicable here (aside from "enable black markets") is to enable fairly paying people across borders that live in places with absurdly distorted exchange rates. So that's a win as a transfer medium; less so for storage (Cf. all the stablecoins that've unpegged recently).
I freely admit not being sufficiently educated around the current state of lending protocols in the cryptocurrency space to have an informed opinion.
Whether it's about extracting money from few rich people (VC) or many not-as-rich (or even poor people), this just seems like a document full of "The AirBNB of blockchain. The Uber of blockchain. The Google of blockchain. The government of blockchain. The Vattenfall of blockchain". It doesn't actually mean anything. It's a parody of a parody. (the parody being "We're the AirBnb of Uber. The Microsoft of Amazon. The Uber of AirBnb")
None of these startup ideas even show that they know enough about their space to even know what the problem is.
They're the "not even wrong" of startup ideas. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong)
Next… decentralised Postgres, what does that even mean? Like if we have a decentralised system that is a database, where do I write data? How do I know where to read data? Do you have redundancy? If so what’s the cost? Are you literally just hosting multiple Postgres’s with duplicate data behind some load balancer? Do you need multiple load balancers? What’s your consistency model?
It’s just very unclear to me what this person is asking for?
Just stick with mongodb, it’s webscale…
Few so called absolutists would stand behind child porn. Yet that's what absolutist platforms get.
there really should be a deep study to understand what has (not) happened and why. I believe one conclusion of such a study might be that the tech sector in its current incarnation is too detached from the core of society. unregulated, unchallenged, arcane and self-absorbed, essentially untethered, yet at the same time endowed with enormous resources on the premise that it is a golden goose (the very naming web3 alludes to this projection). in essence it operates in a different universe (so metaverse may not be too wide off the mark)
whatever the next tech era will look like it will bear the scars of this recent past
Supply chain visibility, transportation and logistics, reviews, bidding, work history (commercial activity), etc.
I have some supply chain optimization experience and if I had the resources and connections I’d love to build out a blockchain based scheduling and fulfillment protocol.
Enough with the gorilla png and rug pulls.
I know people who worked at large FIs that were dumping millions of dollars into blockchain projects led by smart people (long before they'd ever admit it). Nothing ever came of it.
Or maybe worse. A blockchain is a distributed system and is subject to the CAP theorem. And they handle it pretty badly: they are global and they are utterly intolerant of network partitions. They handle consistency by throwing out conflicting transactions, which is probably not what you want for something like supply chain visibility.
Just use a database.
Totally. But I’m thinking of protocols that give people insight into what’s happening and a way for them to join that protocol and start working.
Like imagine activity pub (mastodon protocol) or xmpp - both are protocols to enable real time comms.
If there were protocols to run your business that you could be a part of, and attempt to fix the issues of loads getting cancelled last minute due to dispatching errors, etc. stakeholders would know where the fault lies and payments could be adjusted based on where things went well or wrong.
In any event, sticking real world logic on a blockchain is no more open than sticking code on GitHub. You still can’t interact with someone else’s deployment unless they let you.
But I'm not completely sure we should put them in cars or motorbikes.
Like, at one point, Supreme was able to sell a literal brick with its branding stamped on it, for something like $30 for a brick, and who knows how much it was sold on secondary markets. Along with the literal brick, Supreme also did a "collabo" with the MTA of NYC, where the back of the MetroCards had Supreme branding. Hypebeast idiots were buying as many of those cards as they could to resell for 5-10x the actual value.
To me, web3, everything in it, is the Supreme of the tech world. Some alternative "next big thing" fueled by hype and money, and what you're buying and selling is branding & associations, rather than practical functionality (aka, utility).
web3 is all bs right now with everything on aws and then scam defi stuff in the background on chain moving tokens around. building sites on chain is the next step in blockchain tech
As a Web3 incumbent (more than 200 research, development, and security auditing projects done since 2014 in several blockchains and layers) I would start adding the following:
- Provide one or more robust multi-party computation (MPC) libraries. Awesome-MPC [1] provides a big list but most are not maintained or security audited, were acquired and closed by companies (cough, cough Coinbase [2]). There are existing projects such as https://web3auth.io/ but the core elements are not open source. Shameless plug: we have created an MPC wallet that is accessed through https://walletconnect.com/ the interesting point about MPCs goes beyond Web3 and involves data custody in general.
- Encourage coopetition using data privacy offerings for computing over encrypted data. Companies such as [3] provides technologies around this using different strategies such as homomorphic encryption or security enclaves. For example we are working with pharmaceutical companies to share stats without revealing their private information. This could also be appled to a lot of industried. Idea: share Google Analytics / AdWords data for improving markets? The problem is politics, not technology, the technology already exists.
- Full backed stable coins to provide more liquidity to the ecosystem. It is a nice business: you create a stable coin backed by real money, the real money gains interest (efective FED rate at 4.25% - 4.50% [4]) while the stable coins are the same.
- Declarative programming languages for smart contracts. Since smart contract use cases could be reduced to a few use cases (beyond outliers) it could be useful to just declare and compose their features. Some blockchains such as Algorand have been playing around this but a lot of work needs to be done.
- Automated and assisted tools for security code reviews (static, dynamic). More stuff like [5]
- Descentralized stable coins: there are less popular ones that worked better than the top one (DAI). This means they resisted the fluctuations while DAI failed. For example https://moneyonchain.com/
- Better testing and sandbox infraestructure. For example, if you want to play with Uniswap protocol in the testnet the coin pairs don't have the real price and/or fake liquidity to play with. They could even put mocks to play with.
- Adversarial analysis of popular blockchain models. Bitcoin is most studied one but we have a blind spot on others.
[1] https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc
[2] https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-to-acquire-leading-cr...
[3] Examples: https://dualitytech.com/ https://secretarium.com/ https://www.dpella.io/ https://inpher.io/ https://www.stealthsoftwareinc.com/
[4] https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmle and https://semgrep.dev/