A not so gentle intro to web3 - Koos Looijesteijn

Anybody can ‘mint’ an NFT of any piece of art (whether they made it, own it, or just found a picture online), or sell a token that claims access to a piece of land on the moon. But if you want to buy and sell real ownership of an object with such a token, you need to trust the party who created the token. That’s why certification agencies, government bodies and trading platforms exist. They put their trusted name at risk every time somebody does a transaction with them. Quoting Benedict Evans: “The blockchain can’t lie, but you can lie to the blockchain”.

Every single, and I do mean every single, story I hear from people who think blockchains are the future of everything involves trusting people to do the right thing. Everything from NFTs being minted by the people who made them to companies making all of their products interoperable to that Constitution thing that required you to trust the people at the head of the project to do the right thing. For something that is supposedly “trust-less” by nature, it sure seems like a lot of it only works (if it works at all) because “so far, only the good guys are here.”