The two previous pieces of content (In 2025, the four things young people should have as soon as possible) (Web3: The Dark Forest - A Guide for Young People) achieved good results.
Starting today, a series of creations will begin: Web3 General Knowledge, welcome to follow for updates.
My investment views and content will also be updated in sync.
Let's start with the first chapter.
Leaving the soil of Web2, the ideal country of blockchain is nothing but a castle in the air.
The parallel worlds of ideals and reality
Most young people who want to enter the circle or have already entered it should have fantasized about such a scene: At two o'clock in the morning, I put on my headphones, blocking my parents' nagging about 'finding a proper job.' On my screen, a whole new world is unfolding - I am voting on the future treasury of the project with tokens in the DAO channel on Discord; those NFTs and tokens in my crypto wallet truly and completely belong to me, with no bank or intermediary able to freeze them; I imagine that in the near future, with my identity as an early contributor in the metaverse, I will gain the honor of another digital life.
I feel like I am standing at the forefront of a complete revolution that disrupts the old world.
Now, let's zoom out a bit and look at the cornerstone that supports this 'ideal nation':
I log into a decentralized wallet on a phone made by Huawei, Xiaomi, Apple, or Samsung, running Harmony iOS or Android; my main battlefield for project information and hype is X and Tg; my only channel for fiat deposits is transferring money from a traditional bank account to a centralized exchange, also known as CEX; and the 'blue-chip' NFT avatar I take pride in requires screenshots to be sent to Ins and WeChat Moments to garner admiration and recognition from my real-life social circle; finally, if I am truly fortunate enough to make some money, the tax notification and local financial regulatory laws will penetrate the anonymity of the blockchain and find me precisely.
This is the almost cruel truth that we must face and deeply understand today: In the veins of Web3, the blood of Web2 flows; the new continent it attempts to build has its foundation firmly planted in the soil of the old world.
Why do we have the illusion of 'detaching from reality'?
This illusion of 'detaching from reality' is not baseless; it is woven together by several powerful forces.
The charm of ultimate narrative
'Revolution', 'disruption', 'complete ownership', 'financial autonomy'—these terms construct a grand narrative that is highly compelling.
It accurately hits our general anxiety regarding existing monopolies by major companies, privacy breaches, and high financial thresholds.
The more exciting the story, the stronger our desire to sever ties with the 'decaying old world', subconsciously imagining Web3 as a parallel and independent digital utopia.
Cognitive barriers of technology
Public and private keys, mnemonic phrases, gas fees, smart contract addresses, DAO, AMA... a whole set of strange and obscure technical terms builds a high cognitive wall.
People within the wall gain identity recognition by mastering this set of 'black language'; this technical 'sense of isolation' can easily be misinterpreted as 'independence' at the ecological level.
It's as if we are playing a brand new game with rules that have nothing to do with the outside world.
The early massive speculative drive
During a bull market cycle, the myth of wealth creation of hundreds or thousands of times draws everyone's attention to price curves.
When attention is completely captured by the digital fluctuations of the secondary market, we will overlook a fundamental question: Where does the practicality, productivity, and real demand that drive the long-term value of these assets come from?
Speculative bubbles create an illusion of prosperity, temporarily making people forget that the anchor of any asset's value must ultimately sink into the soil of reality.
The six dimensions that anchor Web3 to reality
Let's peel away the shell of ideals and systematically examine the unshakable forces that firmly anchor Web3 in the real world.
First anchor: Physical and hardware layer
The operation of any digital world relies on the entities of the atomic world.
Ethereum nodes run on servers from Amazon, AWS, Google Cloud, or Alibaba Cloud; the roar of Bitcoin miners once consumed electricity from Inner Mongolia, Texas, or Siberia; and the only window through which we enter this world—our phones or computers—has chips from TSMC, assembled in Foxconn.
Blockchain cannot operate in a vacuum; it consumes real energy and relies on physical infrastructure.
Second anchor: Entry and user layer
Over 90% of users are first exposed to cryptocurrencies through centralized exchanges like Bn and Coinbase.
And these exchanges are the places where traditional financial rules like KYC and AML are most strictly enforced, with company structures and operating models no different from real-world tech giants.
The life and death of a project are closely tied to the community's heat on Discord, the marketing volume on X, and evaluations from YouTube KOLs.
These Web2 social platforms are the lifeline for project cold starts, user acquisition, and consensus maintenance.
Third anchor: Financial and fiat layer
This is the most critical 'umbilical cord'.
Unless only conducting closed-loop transactions of on-chain native assets, the vast majority of profits or principal need to be exchanged with the fiat world.
The channels for depositing and withdrawing dollars, euros, and renminbi are completely constrained by traditional banking systems, payment networks, and national capital control policies.
The most important value metric in the entire DeFi world—wendingbi, like USDC and USDT, directly anchors to the US dollar, and its issuers, like Circle and Tether, are highly centralized and strictly regulated financial entities.
Tether shouldn't be considered strictly regulated now, especially after going to El Salvador.
Fourth anchor: Legal and regulatory layer
Anonymity is fragile in the face of sovereignty and law.
The development team is a limited liability company registered in Singapore, the Cayman Islands, or Wyoming in the USA; vulnerabilities in smart contract code leading to losses of hundreds of millions of dollars ultimately need to be traced and adjudicated through real-world courts; a lawsuit from the SEC is enough to define whether a token is a 'security', thus determining its life or death.
Most importantly, regardless of where the income comes from, taxes will arrive as scheduled.
The IRS and tax authorities around the world have classified cryptocurrencies as assets. The dream of 'code is law' must first confront the reality of 'law governing code'.
Fifth anchor: Talent and collaboration layer
Building Web3 are real people who need to eat, rent houses, and support families.
This point is no different from Web2.
Core developers may graduate from Stanford or MIT; community operators may have honed their skills at Meituan or ByteDance; project founders need to persuade real-world venture capital firms.
Their daily collaboration still heavily relies on Zoom for meetings, Google Docs for writing proposals, Figma for designing prototypes (my old line of work), and GitHub for code management.
The organizational laws and collaborative tools of human society do not magically change just because they are put on the chain.
Sixth anchor: Value reference layer
This is the deepest cultural and psychological anchoring.
The value of a CryptoPunk NFT comes from its embodiment of the cyberpunk subculture, early internet memes, and identity markers—these cultures are rooted in reality; the economic model design of GameFi needs to draw on a century of wisdom from macroeconomics, monetary theory, and traditional game design; the issues faced in DAO governance, such as voting apathy, oligarchic monopolies, and inefficiency, are essentially the same challenges humanity has encountered in political science and organizational behavior over thousands of years.
We are using the cognitive framework of the old world to understand and construct the rules of the new world.
From 'disrupting illusions' to 'integrating thinking'
Recognizing that Web3 cannot exist detached from reality is not a pessimistic conclusion, but a critically important cognitive reboot.
It points us toward a more pragmatic and constructive course of action.
Perspective shift
When analyzing a Web3 project, we must ask that 'soul question': Where is its feasible and sustainable connection point with the real world?
A project that claims to 'disrupt everything' yet refuses to consider compliance pathways, an elegantly designed application that cannot onboard real users and needs, bears risks far greater than its opportunities.
True value capture occurs at the intersection where blockchain addresses real-world pain points or efficiently maps real-world value.
Personal growth
For young people hoping to enter this field, the most sincere advice may be: Don't just focus on Solidity.
Go learn finance to understand why central banks raise interest rates; understand the legal framework to know why compliance is a prerequisite for survival; delve deeply into product design, community operations, and content creation.
Almost all the skills you honed in Web2 are not outdated in Web3, but rather precious assets that are in extreme scarcity.
With both feet firmly planted on the experiences and knowledge of the real world, can your hands reach out more powerfully to touch the future.
From 'alternative narrative' to 'augmented reality'
The most promising future of Web3 may not be about building a parallel utopia, but rather serving as an enhancement patch for the real world.
It enhances trust and traceability using an immutable ledger; activates community contributions and value distribution with token economic models; strengthens the system's risk resistance with a decentralized architecture.
Its mission is not to 'escape', but to 'optimize'.
Cultivating new paradigms at the edge of the old system
Web3 is not Noah's Ark, it cannot carry us away from an old world full of problems to a perfect new continent. On the contrary, it is more like a set of new farming tools deeply cultivated in the soil of reality, attempting to cultivate production relations and value networks that are more efficient, fair, and empowering for individuals in the wilderness of the digital world.
True revolutions always occur at the intersection of the old system and the new paradigm, not in a theoretical vacuum.
Acknowledging and deeply understanding Web3's dependency on the real world is our first lesson in abandoning impatience and rationally participating in this social experiment, as well as the cornerstone of general knowledge.
In the upcoming (Web3 General Knowledge) series, let us gradually break down, based on this cognitive foundation: the essence of blockchain as a trust machine, the dual nature of cryptocurrencies and token economics, the dreams and realities of DeFi reconstructing financial intermediaries, how NFTs carry multi-dimensional value beyond images, the difficult yet great organizational experiment of DAOs, and the looming sword—regulation and compliance in the future.
This series may have hundreds of chapters, or it may continue to be updated indefinitely.
Let's stay awake, remain curious, keep our feet on the ground, and explore together.
Stay tuned
Web3 General Knowledge (Part II)
#Web3 #BTC #ETH #美国伊朗对峙 #黄金白银反弹
