Instead of splitting your application up into a billion pieces we bundle it up with everyone else’s app into a huge monolith.

Then every user gets their own copy of it.

And because of that each service actually has to be tiny and do a single job only.

In fact you need to be even more obsessive about making sure that’s true.

Obviously you can’t just put everyone’s app on the same machine and expect that to work.

In addition to many other problems the database would get HUGE immediately.

Every app in the world writing to the same database? No way. It’ll get too big.

There needs to be a throttle.

That’s where gas comes in. Users bid to get their transaction into the database next. This makes sure that the most economically important transactions can always get in quickly and the ones that are less important can wait.

Authors of less economically important apps tend to get mad at this idea. NFT folks complain about gas a lot because it feels silly to spend $100 to transfer a jpeg.

So in a way spending $100 on gas to mint an NFT is like paying to make a necklace out of gold. You’re using a scarce resource that is in high demand and you’re making some dumb bullshit out of it.

That’s jewelry. That’s how rich people have shown off for millennia.

In web1 and web2 to scale up a venture a group of software developers still needed someone with money to help them grow.

In web3 that’s still true but the thing is your users have money. They provide that fuel. Gas on Ethereum is like $15–200 depending on what you’re doing and what time of day it is.

Think of how rich you’d need to be to throw that around like. Well…every user on Ethereum is doing that. People complain about it but they still do it. Because they have money and because they believe making that transaction is an economic opportunity they can’t pass up.

In web3 your users help provide infrastructure. When you launch an Ethereum dapp you actually don’t have to run ANYTHING. Just launch your contract and the users will host it and pay all the fees no matter how big it grows.

Is there ANYTHING like that in web2? I don’t think so. The devs need money. Which means the devs need the bankers. Which means the bankers end up owning all the actual assets in the system and they just pay devs for labor.

Well this changes the game. You can just build an app, get it out there for a few grand, and then as users get interested THEY pay the fees to grow the network not you. In return you give them tokens that are useful in the app and also users can just sell to each other to help create a market for them.

To me the biggest thing here is the ability to directly use money in code without a trusted third party means a software developer can recreate most of the same systems by themselves. Without needing a rich friend who pays for all expansion.

There’s nothing like it.

I’d also note that because the users of the app are also the owners of the network there’s no creepy ads. No one wants to creep on themselves. This is a hammer to help solve the creepy google problem.