We can create digital tokens, which enables us to design financial incentive structures for products on the web. In the past, if you wanted to take a coding class, you paid whatever price the teacher set the class at. However, this doesn't necessarily reflect the value of the class itself. Maybe your teacher didn't do their market research and all their students would've been willing to pay more. Maybe your teacher has now taken on more students and your class got a little larger, but they didn't change the price of the class. In web3, you could imagine a teacher that mints tokens based on the number of students they want to take.Let's say the teacher mints 10 tokens and releases them into the market because they plan to take 10 students. For a student to attend the class, they must buy a token and give it back to the instructor. The instructor then releases the token back onto the market for their next class, and again the cycle repeats. In this way, the instructor's class actually doesn't have a stable price: it's based on however much people think the class is worth. If the instructor mints more tokens, the token price might fall if people think the quality of the class will therefore fall. If the instructor changes their curriculum and students think it's significantly better, the token price might go up. Because this token isn't fixed to some fiat cost but rather to the price of one class, the token's fiat price will change based on the value of the class.

We can take context from one app to another, which creates a shared pool of state online. In the past, you had to create a new account for every service. An action you took on a nature preservation nonprofit's site doesn't get shared with REI unless the two companies team up and form a partnership. However, in web3 world, because the context is at the wallet-level, which is global and not tied to any specific piece of software, anything that happens on-chain is shared with everyone. Let's say that REI wants to create a limited edition tent that is specifically available for anyone who has donated to a nature preservation nonprofit. In a web3 world, they can do that using on-chain data.

Groups of strangers can come together to make decisions without needing to trust each other, which takes middlemen out of the equation. In the past, if you wanted to donate $100 to a scholarship fund, some portion of that $100 would go towards running the fund, e.g. paying employees, paying for office space, etc. Let's say you and a group of others were willing to volunteer your time to review scholarship applications and market the scholarships as long as you could increase the % of dollars going to scholarship recipients. However, because you are all strangers, you're concerned about how to come together -- what if someone runs away with the funds? In web3 world, because on-chain actions are public and you can run code on those outcomes, you could imagine a scholarship fund where the donors to the fund lock up their donations in the smart contract. You each then vote on who should receive the scholarship, and the outcome of the vote automatically splits the funds and sends it to the winners without anyone needing to interact with the other donors, verify the vote, or wait for everyone else to finish voting to manually write the checks.

Shill culture is here to stay. Money is about belief. [1] Because money is only worth something if everyone believes it's worth something and it's actually being used, people are incentivized to convince everyone else to use crypto as well. This leads me back to my original point on "loudest voices in crypto" vs who's actually in crypto. I'll break crypto people down into two camps: (1) mercenary shills and (2) positive-sum shills. I'll start with the positive-sum shills. These are the beacons of optimism who believe that a world where crypto is mainstream is inevitable and thus everyone who owns crypto will benefit. They work to decrease barriers to entry to adoption and teach others how to get involved. I've even seen people in this camp literally give away free money to help others get started. Then there are the mercenary shills. These are the people who are in it for the short-term -- they may not necessarily believe that crypto is the future, but they do believe that the more they can convince other people that it's the future and everything is undervalued, the more they'll be able to sell their tokens at a profit and cash out. There are two sides to every coin. Whichever camp you’re in, you can find your people.