I have friends who are artists and musicians who completely drank the koolaid and are convinced that NFTs and web3 will liberate them from poverty. They will repeat all of the talking points about blockchains but have no idea what a database is. I ask them to show me a web3 website and they can't name one, show me someone they know who buys NFTs and they can't name any.
Here are some recent quotes from one of my friends:
"crypto is fairly new it’s quantum mechanics as well."
"NFTs make you a shareholder"
"yeah the Internet didn’t exist until people applied concepts to it as well. blockchain is a system where new concepts can exist on the Internet. "
"the meta data you're able to embed can be anything now so creators can make any type of art. whereas before it was just mp3 or MP4 but now u can monetize any type of digital content"
"You can protect your music or visual via an NFT and control the royalty split "
"Having the ability to retain royalties to creators is a feature we’ve never had we can sell links to exclusive bonus content, recipes, any idea whereas u post it on reg social media and it’s unprotected w no protection "
and the ponzi scheme argument is very tired. there are far better arguments against crypto at this point if youre going to be on the anti train.
Many of us have a practical attitude which is effectively that the technology has massive potential, and at the same time, that it's probably overvalued for the current state of technology.
Of course, overvalued is subjective. It could all still amount to nothing, but it could also replace tons of legacy/traditional infrastructure and systems, and/or create a new global financial layer based on currencies whose supplies can't be manipulated by governments. The valuation is of course massively coupled to the perceived potential and the varying levels of conviction speculators have in it, which incentivizes a lot of disingenuous behaviours.
The only exciting potential use case of crypto that I've seen so far are DAOs, but I'm not convinced that there's any reason why they need to be on a blockchain instead of postgres or sqlite.
You have an easy way to win the argument, a simple proof by example will be enough to prove me wrong. So please list the amazing scientific breakthroughs or concrete examples of web3 tools that my mother could use.
my main argument with your arguments is that close mindedness and flippancy doesn't get us anywhere.
OK, what are they?
I definitely agree that a TON of the crypto space is super scammy, and think it's an absolute shame, I don't blame anyone for being scared off.
The advantage it has over IPFS is guaranteed permanence and the incentivization is core to that functionality.
Mostly it is Ethereum which is the prime enabler of all of the things you listed above. ICOs, Tokens, DAOs, NFTs, Web3 and expensive gas fees. All of it.
Every, single feature it has introduced has created tons of scams in the crypto universe with the users who are new to this are none the wiser.
This is why we need a crash to get rid of the crypto hype-squads and focus on actually useful blockchain projects that are fast, scalable, cheap, affordable and are regulated which make it harder to create such scams that Ethereum consistently enables.
Cryptocurrencies that do not fit in future regulations will simply not survive. Especially the meme-coins.
Nobody actually knows yet.
> Is this a pivotal moment unfolding right in front of our eyes without us seeing it?
Yes I think so. I see parallels with the early days of the dotcom boom (mid to late 90s) when there was a mad gold rush by "entrepreneurs" for anything Internet or Web based, and a bunch of nerds (including me!) were scoffed at for twiddling with some computer and network based nonsense that was just glorified letters and phone calls and bulletin boards.
I think the current web3 craze needs its version of the dotcom bust for the fundamentals of the tech to be truly allowed to shine through, away from the current blaring foghorns of the snake-oil peddlers and scam artists and rug pulls.
At present, all web3 offers is various communities that come together around some sort of a totem (monkey pictures, lion pictures, "buy an old document", "play an mmorpg", "have a cryptocurrency-based TLD", whatever), but all these sound quite un-compelling to me personally.
I have no idea what form the core of this "web3" stuff will ultimately take, and I don't think the nascent Google or Facebook or Netflix or Amazon of this space exists yet, but I truly believe there's something in the works, that is being obscured by an unfortunate amount of noise.
Edited to add: I own exactly 0 of any cryptocurrency or NFT or ICO and don't even participate in those communities, and am in actual fact quite more anti-web3 (in whatever its current form is) than my tone above would indicate.
But responding to your "but I truly believe there something in the works, being obscured by an unfortunate amount of noise": One passage of the article that really struck me was this one:
> When an engineer looks into a problem, they will at first gather the requirements. What does the system they need to build need to do and how and for whom etc. Afterwards they will look at existing technologies and see which technology and platform fits best to the requirements.
Notice how that implies the availability of "existing technologies" such that the engineer can choose whichever "technology and platform fits best to the requirements". There is a circularity to this argument! How do any of those existing technologies come to exist if all engineers are merely choosing existing technologies upon which to build the thing that meets their requirements?
I'm still incredibly unsure about this, but I think the scriptable blockchains (ie. the ones that aren't Bitcoin) could well be the "existing technology" for some set of requirements (either in the future or in the present but in a way that is unclear) that I lack the vision to see.
And then the 2008 housing crisis happened. A massive betrayal by the government against its own people. Many people lost their houses, their retirement savings, and their investments. And who did the government bail out and prop up? The bankers, the elite, and the stock market. And this happens over and over again in countless banana republics across the world — the elite propping up the systems that support themselves and not really caring about anyone else.
So now, you have this massive movement against wall street (r/wallstreetbets & GME/AMC), the elite (Trumpism), centralized financial institutions (Bitcoin & DeFi), and the upper class of tech workers (web3). And you wonder why? People were promised a path towards wealth and have had it stolen away from them countless times. Now they are rebelling.
It doesn't matter if — technically & logically — Bitcoin, DeFi, and Web 3 aren't everything they're promising to be... People still need a place to turn to put their hopes that isn't the current system. They've just been burned too many times by it.
But none of this is going to work out in the long run... It'll be just like every other mania throughout history. Tons of investment, tons of apparent growth fueled by FOMO, and then a massive collapse when people realize no one actually cares about this stuff for its intrinsic value... But enough effort & pain & money will have gone into it by then that it will have created a nascent industry that will maybe, one day 10-20 years from now, take over the world and become the new normal.
TLDR: DeFi & Web 3 is an emotional reaction to a system that just doesn't work for most people, not the logical next step towards a better version of the status quo.
Except for the 1% of products/services that people recognize do have value even after the collapse. What percentage of YCombinator start-ups make it? What's the percentage if you include all rejected applications? What's that percentage if you expand it to "web2" companies that didn't bother to apply to YCombinator or failed before they even got to that point? Or from a more historical lens, what percentage of companies survived the dotcom crash? It's likely that most of the web3 products you see today will inevitably not survive.
I would guess the percentage that survives a massive crash will be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower for web3; especially considering web3 is in its infancy. But the number of ideas/products could be higher for various reasons. Until regulation catches up, the number of scams will inevitably be higher as well. The ethical parts of web3 should welcome regulation even though other parts of it never will and probably will never be forced to (depending on where they live).
The narratives that web3 is going to "take over the world and become the new normal." or that it;s all just going to go to zero are 2 extreme views. It's a set of technologies that will find it'sb(large or small) niche and do well there; everywhere else, the advantages that centralization brings will enable those central solutions to win.
Additionally, what percentage of YCombinator start-ups that make it rely exclusively on infinite investor money?
Now with DeFi, "Web3" and all these articles I'm starting to think the cliché "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" may actually be true. Why are people spending so much time arguing against it if it wasn't significant? We see all these rational arguments and yet the industry keeps growing exponentially.
What is actually going on? Is this a pivotal moment unfolding right in front of our eyes without us seeing it?