Right after I posted this I logged onto Twitter to read this by Kimbal Musk tweeted 20 hours ago: "Web3 reminds me of 1995 Internet days. So many older people (younger than I am now) just could not get it. It was clear as a bell to 22yr old me. Now I understand those older people better and I'm working as fast as possible to be a better old person"

https://twitter.com/kimbal/status/1465425295393976321

This is simply another form of pushing FOMO for cryptocurrency.

I was a teenager in the 90s, and my dad was my current age and working for an ISP. Everyone there was around his age or older, and they all understood the potential of the early internet and the web. Most of the people in the early 90s internet era that built out the tech were older. It's one thing to say people outside of the tech field can't see the potential in technology, but it's a completely different thing to say that older people in an industry can't see the potential.

I see lots of potential in newer technologies, but web3 is trying to build an inferior version of what we currently have, with rent-seeking middlemen. It's doing so with blockchains, a 13 year old tech, which most of us have been saying for 13 years is a solution in search of a problem (and we've been right so far). Web3 is yet another way of trying to package up and sell it, primarily being pushed by people who have a monetary interest in having you use it, because they're the landlords.

I agree with some of the points you make

But I agree with Stan Druckenmiller that Bitcoin is a brand now and is an asset. It has finally found its purpose.

Also crypto for cross border transactions, unless regulations kill them

And DeFi for cross border finance, again regulation can kill this.

Something being a brand isn't a purpose.

Cross-border transactions are an incredibly niche use-case, and my guess would be that it's primarily used for money laundering. AML laws will probably kill this off, since you still need to turn that crypto into fiat to use it.

DeFi's purpose is avoid taxes on crypto gains. Otherwise, it's the worst form of banking possible.

Sure, most revolutionary ideas are pushed by younger people and rejected by older people. That doesn't make every idea pushed by younger people revolutionary. And the convenient fact that early adopters of this revolutionary idea will become incredibly wealthy if it takes off doesn't really help with credibility.

This is survivorship bias stretched to a pretty crazy extreme. I'm pretty sure you could make a much larger list of differences in the evolution of the web and web3 than similarities.

> It was clear as a bell to 22yr old me

For sure! Pumping and dumping overvalued equity to bigger fools together with his cousin.

People are legitimately making a living trading crypto, you know. It's actually putting food on people's tables. It's a tradable asset like any other, and its value is dictated by supply and demand, like any other. How is someone a fool for profiting from trading it?

I see nothing wrong with that. Bookies have been making a living for a long time trading numbers on slips of paper. Gamblers in Las Vegas make a living in the games. The stock market has been described as a casino.

The skepticism I feel is about the web3 meme and the additional meme that it must be good because old people don't understand it. Web3 is a basket of experimental technologies that may or may not bear fruit, but don't tell me it's so new that skeptics are people who are incapable of understanding it. I'm looking for more detail and I get a lot of hand waving. But I'm open to it.

I hope this isn't an indication of how easy it is to manipulate young people

That wasn't my experience as a young web user in the 90s. Older people definitely "got it". And it took off like a shot for folks of all ages when the .com market opened up.

There are a lot of ideas out there for what web3 would be, but sooner or later, some rubber has to be put to the road. The reason we don't "get it" is because "it" is so nebulously defined.

I read about how people are making the claim of how this will bring back the web of the early days. The web was always introduced as walled gardens and people love walled gardens. From the beginning if was Yahoo telling you what links to click or aol portals. Today its Apple's curated ecosystem and Facebook.

I don't see how decentralizing anything helps.

Indeed, most people talking about how different "web1.0" don't seem to have ever used it.

One theory I have is that the gravity of capital is pushing things towards a world where users pay for more and more web infrastructure costs. Decentralization, it appears, does not lead to democracy, but it does lead to less monolithic servers, and more shared mesh/edge computation. Just good business sense to offload computation on regular users, if the tech is there.

as usual smartest comment in HN thread has no replies

A bit like usenet of old, information could be recreated on everyone running a full node. Making it much harder to censor.

Now this makes sense for a number of industries, particularly financial, where the data is small, and the rewards are large. Storing petabites of porn on a distributed blockchain, probably not efficient.

So extrapolating here, web3 is a new kind of anti-censorship system with blockchain that ensures the original information isn't corrupted and replaced with misinformation? It's an interesting topic, but it seems in relation to finances, we're talking about a system that enables financial crime.

Telex (anti-censorship system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_(anti-censorship_system)

Internet censorship circumvention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvent...

It's trying to solve the problem of crypto bros not being rich enough?

A solution looking for a problem to solve, so they can try to realize their artificially inflated paper profits - so they're not left holding the bag.

I often find it useful to relate the Web3 movement to the introduction of the internet. What problem was did that attempt to solve? The internet solved problems that were only apparent in hindsight. The same could be true of Web3. It could also be nonsense, but I don’t think so. The absence of a particular problem to solve doesn’t necessarily render it useless.

I'm not sure it's trying to solve a specific problem. It's basically the web plus cryptocurrency and related technology which you can use to make a variety of stuff for better or worse. IPFS is cool in principle - being able to store stuff indefinitely on the web without needing ongoing payments to some hoster.

There are a few things that people find exciting, but for me the idea of being able to pay for content frictionlessly is pretty neat. I'd love, for example, if when you get one of those ad blocker blocker popups if there was an option to pay .005 cents to bypass it.

Double spend and censorship resistance are a couple big ones. Privileged westerners have courts and banking which are good enough, so not much reason for them to be interested. Probably nothing.