Blockchains are cities

Blockchains are cities.-written by Haseeb Qureshi, medium .

City has a relatively low network effect compared to platforms like Amazon, Meta, and Twitter. Ethereum has the first mover advantage which attracts more developers and users than its competitors. But since Ethereum has some limited constraints and cannot scale unlimitedly, other layer 1 can partially attract some part of the users and developers.
I think this metaphor is very impressive. Here are some quotes.

Networks are the wrong analogy for blockchains. Blockchains are physically constrained. Blockchains cannot expand to infinite block space because blockchains require many independent small validators; if blocks were arbitrarily big, the blockchain would no longer be decentralized.
Smart contract chains are more like cities. If you embrace this mental model, then the dynamics around L1 blockchains becomes less mysterious.
The answer is obvious. There’s a power law distribution to city dominance, but there are many cities that matter.
Other L1s will be valuable too. But they will continue to differentiate. NYC, LA, Chicago, and Houston are enduring cities because their institutions and cultures are different from each other.
Application-specific blockchains will remain niche.
In the physical world, transportation accounts for almost half the GDP of housing. If we see anything like that in crypto, cross-chain bridges will become extremely valuable.

Crypto Moats

Crypto Moats-varunsrinivasan

In web2, the moats are a very strong network effect, since every web2 app has built its own “great wall” to make cross-app interoperability almost impossible. However, in Web3, despite the network effect which still exists but become weaker, data transfer and sharing between apps is much more easily. So what are the crypto moats for web3 apps? varunsrinivasan think it is the brand and ownership.

Network effects are becoming weaker, while brand effects are getting stronger.
Platforms, on the other hand, create network effects when they aren’t interoperable. Ethereum has a community of developers building tools, which attracts more developers and users. Competing blockchains must convince developers to switch and rewrite years’ worth of software. Because the value isn’t transferrable, Ethereum has a strong moat. These network effects reward first-movers and work against all kinds of competitors.

Criticism about the scarce property of NFT

Many people have criticized NFT is built on scarce, but the Internet is built on abundance. cdixon and Sylve both think that NFT doesn’t make the Internet more scarce instead creates another choice.

cdixon.eth-twitter
NFTs make art, music, writing, games, and other creative content more abundant, not more scarce
Many critics of NFTs claim the opposite — that NFTs restrict access to creative content.
This is not a critique of NFTs. This is a critique of a fictional caricature of NFTs dreamt up by critics.

The Fundamental Ideological Divide Between Web2 and Web3-mirror.xyz
The argument is the following: the Internet is not based on property but abundance. Native digital content has the very weird property of being naturally abundant. If you create a GIF or a JPEG you can generate unlimited copies of it and distribute it to everyone. Unlimited stock. Cornucopia of copy/paste. Internet communities have flourished on the premise of remixing and sharing content for free with others, and it works really well: memes, copypastas, webcomics, emerged because of this. Therefore, if the Internet is based on abundance, why would you divide up the commons and sell them? Why would you introduce scarcity? Why would you introduce property? Why must you be so greedy?
And history tells us we don’t need records of ownership, token incentives, ICOs, or even money, to build impressive projects. Think about what has been achieved by the FOSS movement: Linux, Wikipedia are testament to the heritage of this ethos. The blockchain community cannot forget that we built most of the incredible stuff the Internet runs on with no records of ownership or money.
This is why I don’t necessarily like Web3 as a definition of the blockchain technological paradigm. It is not a necessary strict improvement compared to what came before, it’s not an optimization, it’s a choice. It’s a technological paradigm that enables creating what was previously impossible (native digital ownership for example) but this does not entail that it is strictly superior to the ways of the past or that it will replace it. disruption]]
In the end I believe there’s room for both frameworks. Just like video didn’t actually kill the radio stars (podcasts anyone?), Web3 will not kill Web2.
Digital ownership will not kill abundance.