(On Legitimacy of Blockchains - 10)
Fortunately, there are ways to solve the problem of initial funding.
What the blockchain will need is its own method of giving rewards to activities that can easily be performed by any personal computer with a zero-balance crypto wallet, rather than just the blockchain's fundamental means of operation such as mining or staking. Mining is too hard for personal computers to undertake because it is dominated by large mining pools and their massive parallel-arrangements of GPUs and ASIC. Staking, on the other hand, is not able to become a means of initial funding because an empty crypto wallet cannot possibly stake its fund (because it has no fund at all!).
What can a personal computing device with a zero-balance account do, then, to earn a consumable amount of cryptocurrency without requiring the blockchain to mint coins out of thin air?
The blockchain itself operates on a P2P networking protocol, which means that there are lots of message-routing involved in it aside from the core means of consensus such as mining/staking. Such routing processes can be undertaken by any computing device (even a cheap mobile phone) that is connected to other blockchain nodes, as passing a message from one peer to another is an extremely trivial work (And it doesn't incur any additional fees other than the cost of using the internet). What if we require each message-sender of the blockchain network to include a "digital postage stamp" in each message it sends in order to pay anyone for routing? When a node issues a new transaction, for example, it can attach an "add-on transaction" on top of the main transaction which guarantees that, when the main transaction becomes part of the blockchain, it will also automatically pay a small routing fee to the one who routed the transactional data.
By allowing a new customer's crypto wallet to silently carry out a series of routing tasks underneath the surface and get paid for it, a Web3 application can ensure to fill up the initially empty wallet with at least SOME amount of cryptocurrency for the person to spend (without requiring any kind of fiat-currency exchange). This is how Web3 will be able to convince the general public that it really is a brand new technology, capable of existing on its own without depending on centralized third-party services.