ON A gloomy Thursday morning in Newcastle, UK, I sit with my laptop open playing a game. But I am not, I will admit, having much fun. Besides the occasional pixelated images of a space hero, it is mostly a text-based, multiple-choice offering, with prompts encouraging me to imagine that I am on the planet Veles and asking where I would like to mine next. The experience isn't enhanced by the fact that I have had to spend 20 minutes linking a cryptocurrency wallet to the game in order to get this far. Why am I putting myself through this? Because, believe it or not, this game is supposed to be the future of the internet, or at least part of it. It is one of the world's top-rated distributed apps, a manifestation of what some see as a shiny new phase of the online realm called web3.
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