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.