The middle ground would be people who aren't invested in crypto, but have tried a few dApps and think they can be neat sometimes but maybe are rough around the edges and might be better in a few years.
These people don't exist because web3 technologies have nothing appealing to end users, only to investors. This might change eventually, but for now there's literally no reason to use blockchain if you aren't looking to invest or speculate in something.
There’s definitely a lot of potential. Judging a technology based on what the first few applications to materialize is extremely short sighted and has never been a good estimate of its future usage.
Personally I dislike full blown crypto zealots and also I dislike the Perl clutching tech crowd.
Just remember distributed tech has never been the most efficient way to get something done so if you’re looking at web3 from a purely better faster cheaper perspective then you won’t get it.
However, lucky for us, these aren’t the only problems to exist.
I'm kind of a middle ground person, perhaps leaning slightly 'against' rather than 'for', over predominantly environmental concerns. I've distanced myself from crypto since I learned what the chinese were up to, and since china is putting a stop to that now (allegedly?), and the rest of crypto seems to be quietly moving in a PoS direction, recently reintroduced myself.
Most of the objections I have, other than the climate concern involve valuation, stability vs. valuation, etc.
Because I have some experience in the open source virtual worlds arena, and because 15m square plot of decentraland just sold for over 2 million $US, I decided to make a personal investigation of decentraland and it's relationship to ethereum. I went into this quite optimistic and hopeful, because I enjoy such things. What I found, however, was no cause for joy.
Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. In any case, as I said before elsewhere, they have fallen victim to the touch of Midas: Their various holdings became extremely overvalued in a very short period of time, to that extent where no one else can afford them.
When I posed this issue to them directly, the general attitude was 'well, Walmart and Nike can afford us, so...', but zero acknowledgement that their entire value to those corporations is based on the number of product consuming users they can bring to the table.
Their self-governance machine, the DAO, is a thing of beauty, in that it could be employed to actually produce an autonomous, self governing organization that embraced everyone on equal terms and let everyone involved behave as the peers they should be in an ideal community; instead, they have pretty well implemented everything bad about today's governments, arriving at a functional oligarchy made up of those with the most land and currency, which they call 'voting power' - and the so called officers of the various supporting and ideally moderating concerns (their foundation, their DAO, and, due to the concept of voting power, their property holders), are all the same people.
They do a steady job right now in their discord channel of gaslighting these concerns where ever they are indicated, to the extent that they tossed me out this morning for calling them out on it; I haven't troubled myself to see if they just tossed me out or banned me, because I really don't much care.
I do know that their behavior in every respect will alienate users not just to virtual worlds and cryptocurrency, but to the whole endeavor they are labeling 'web3'.
DAO or not, this is not The Way.
Not sure whether that was on purpose, but Chinese 道 Dào is literally the 'Way' (same syllable as in "Taoism" or "Judo" or "Aikido" etc... :-)
Everything I've seen so far are either people trying to get rich quick, or people trying to be, or trying to be seen to be edgy.
I'm ignoring it until somebody breaks the existing internet. Oh good, we're incentivising that now...
Anyone can buy a share of a coin, and make a profit as long as the amount of fiat currency put into the chain keeps growing. Every new user convinced it's going "to the moon" pays dividends to existing holders. This automatically creates a financial incentive to become an astroturfer for the project.
Whilst it's possible to avoid those, I'd guess it's beyond many participants to do technically, so the exchanges become defacto centralization, and instead of regulated stock exchanges that operate in the same judicial location, in many cases these exchanges explicitly try to avoid regulation or accountability.
> This is not really that rare online, where basically all discourse is subconsciously understood to be people taking speculative positions on various topics (called "takes") against the value of their online brand, but it's particularly acute in the web3 world, where every project and community is blockchain-based, and all of your beliefs can be and usually are securitized into crypto tokens that can rise and fall in value
And also, as I agree with the OP, about blockchain and about our world in general right now:
> But my feeling is also: Why do I have to bet at all?! Why am I in this awful, ugly, unfun casino in the first place?? Is there a way out of the casino?? And if not, can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins?
Either they are sure crypto is a scam or fad and will soon go to 0. Or they know for sure banks and fiat will go out of business.
I see this mentality more on the anti-crypto side.
My opinion is that there is a small chance that web3 can be huge. So I'm on the pro-crypto side. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time with this "SMALL chance it can be HUGE".
But I love and value actual (sadly minority) projects that solve (or realistically aim to/can solve) real problems in genuine ways. I love how I can use my money that isn't regulated by a corrupted government (I'm from a country between Europe and Asia with an extremely corrupted government so this has extra importance), without a middleperson/controlling entity without trust where I can only trust mathematics and fully public code. Sure they bring their own problems and risks, but I'd still prefer them over current "real world" system of corrupted governments, banks, and evil corporations.
Consider on the other side of the table how the economics and network effects have created incentives for everyone to depend on centralized architecture to the point where if you’re not acting through any of the top two companies in any given market, you’re effectively shut off from large parts of modern economy and social life.
Incentives are broken all over, that doesn’t mean the cause is wrong.
I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in.
It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for unbiased opinion in the interviews of pundits talking finance. This is since it's become expected that none of their advice is going to be untethered to their investments, but given the opportunity they're talk their book all they long. I don't see that much wrong with talking your book, but desperately trying to cover it up under the guise of "knowing the tech is superior" while only having superficial understanding of what's going on - makes intelligent people reading your stuff distrust you immediately.
I know people on both sides of the fence. I know of only one person that's skeptical of Web3 but still hedges on its success. I'm surprised that there is no middle ground - there are either fervent advocates or fervent opposition, and with very few exceptions (!), the opposition seems to think more clearly and is better informed.