Crypto in 2021

Fundemental / First Principle Efforts

• [scaling]
• Stable Tokens (USDC, Tether, etc.)
• [cross-chain-atomic-swapping] (like Chainlink?)
• [decentralized-exchanges]
• DeFi
• NFT
• KYC/AML
• Digital Identities
• Blogging/Social Media
• Distributed Storage
• Governence
• Custody
  • Self-Custody
  • [social-recovery-wallets]
• UI/UX

To Explore

• https://bottlepay.com/
• Byzantine Fault / Byzantine General's Problem
• Web 3.0
• Secure Multi-party computation
• eth2 deployment
• Wrapped BTC on ETH
• [zk-snarks]
• Linear Types
• Oracle data APIs accessible from a smart contract
• How Does XYZ Cryptocurrency Work
  • Cardano
  • Chainlink
  • Zcash

Ideas

• Unsplash/Getty meets Crypto
  • Pre-purchase future content creation - potentially as a group - and then make a decision on what to do with the content upon creation
  • Formalize the licensing around NFTs
• What if private company cap tables were tokens instead of excel sheets?
• Costs of doing AI is often not feasible. Can we democratize compute: time share everyone's GPU and coordinate via distributed ledger?
• Send people money via email as a signal of priority more details
• MapReduce for human labour (built on blockchain)
• [lightning-network] Stripe aggregator, settle the transactions for free by aggregating
• Build a blockchain distribution network (related: https://bloxroute.com)

What Are The "Thought Leaders" Talking About

• Balaji Srinivasan
• Vitalik
• @Suhail
  • dApp development tools are terrible; auth is too complicated (no-one is going to carry their keys around); dApp security is hard; contract immutability is not practical; build projects that were not possible before
• Investors
  • ...

Cool Things

• substrate - Library Polkadot has been written on. A framework for creating cryptocurrencies and other decentralized systems. It guarantees cross-language support with WebAssembly, a light client, and off-chain workers, allowing for integration with other technologies.

Scratchpad

• [connecting-blockchains-together]
• [[maidsafe]] is a decentralized storage network based on CRDTs
• Bitcoin's consensus via PoW was to solve the double spend problem. What if consensus is not needed?
  • [asynchronous-trustworthy-transfers]
• Can we just rebuild "proven concepts" on other chains (e.g. NFTs for Polkadot); ideally those new chains are a better fit
• What is [web-3]?
• Building a Crypto Company: e.g. you build a social network backed by some token. Early adopters using it get tokens for liking pictures, etc. so are incentivized to use it. Then if the platform matures, those tokens are worth more, and the early users are rewarded.