I didn’t even say cryptocurrencies. I said smart contracts. There are myriad applications but in essence what Web3 smart contracts do is secure some sort of community activity on the blockchain to make sure everyone knows the deal and no one can cheat.

It only becomes important once the community grows enough to start securing something valuable. Like for example a marketplace that connects online students and teachers may be holding $20M in credits and you are trusting every employee to not misappropriate these credits. With Web3, the marketplace is just a Web2 interface that sets up the transactions, but at the end each user signs them with their own private keys, so the marketplace site has no liability nor presents a risk to the participants. Its commissions, like all other business logic, is immutable on the blockchain.

Elections - you can make sure that no one can just go in the database and change all the votes, as they can with Stackoverflow moderator elections for example.

Contests

Escrow payments

Auctions

Recurring subscriptions

You can combine them, for example you can make videoconferencing slots on your calendar which people around the world can book, to do office hours with you or take your course. People would bid on the slots and you’d take the top 10 people.

Crypto takes care of all this and around the world. It is like if you asked “what does the Web do, since we have newspapers, magazines, radio, TV”? The answer is that it standardized communication on an open protocol called HTTP. So it allowed anyone to publish information for anyone else in the world to access.

Smart contracts also represent a rebellion against having to trust institutions and governments. Now we have an alternative. The Web 1.0 democratized access to information, Web 2.0 allowed people to communicate and collaborate (but sadly didn’t democratize it) and Web 3.0 is radically open source and allows people to exchange value and participate in programs that don’t require trusting middlemen. The more complex the application, the more you as a network win by trusting the blockchain and smart contracts alone.

Start by clicking the link above if you want to get more examples of applications. Cryptocurrency by itself is just a first generation toy like space invaders or personal home pages. The space will evolve, and you can bury your head in the sand or you can spend 3 mins to click a link.

Here are some more applications that increase donor and investor confidence and break down global barriers:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/

https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...