I'm not sure what specific claims you're arguing against, but most people in the space aren't making them. It's a straw man. It sounds like you mainly take issue with the name web3, which I don't disagree with.
Blockchain provides incentives, those incentives can be transformed into cash for the end user. Web2 basically focused on 2 aspects. Transforming the browser into a OS that can run on any computer, using advertising for the generation of money for stakeholders. In regards to advertisement the reason why this was use d was because it worked in the past. Printing press --> newspaper --> advertisements, Radio --> audio advertisements, Movies --> pre-movie advertisements, tv --> commercials. This mechanism has worked before and worked for web2.0. The problem now is that so many companies are involved in data collection on individuals that it has become quiet scary, this was not possible with previous mediums (not to the same degree). Game companies have tried to transition to micro-transactions, psudo-gambling, upgrades as a payment form. Web3 offers a different incentive model that if successful can replace these arguably more scary methods.
Web3 kind of IS just blockchain at this point. Some are even calling for a Web4, as a non blockchain more performant version of web3 not focused on financial features.
I suspect if any P2P tech gets big without a token, people won't actually call it web3.
If it’s credit cards..we’ll now you’ve created a massive centralized link in your “p2p” system.
I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most.
A huge number of things can be done purely P2P with no payments, with almost no infrastructure. That should be the core feature of Web4.
Even more things can be done semi-decentralized as in BitTorrent+a seedbox, and that works just fine.
Some of those things can even be donation supported in a profitable way and don't need payment from most users in any way that actually connects to the service. They can just put a PayPal and bitcoin link and people can donate however they want.
In Wikipedia can do it, Facebook and maybe even Youtube can, with appropriate P2P load balancing.
This is almost essential because the competing centralized services are totally free(via you-are-the-product models).
An email service or something that costs money and requires linking your bank to some coin payment service is going to have a hard time competing with gmail for the general public.
If something needs payment, it probably shouldn't be a core layer of the whole system. The first priority should be make things too cheap to meter where you can, and then figure out how to decentralize the remaining stuff, assuming there is demand.
Blockchain inherently can't do offline first LAN apps properly, you can't have consensus without communication. If I can't talk to someone on a mesh network without internet, a large amount of the advantage of P2P is gone.
I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments.
Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?
Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud.
Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases.
Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled.
For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue.
P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.
What incentive? Users forced to mine to view content? Or just as a paywall? Because the former isn't an incentive (it's just ads taken to an even more extreme level), and the latter is already doable on 'web2' and vastly cheaper at that.
> Blockchain provides incentives
No, it absolutely does not. Blockchain is just a public ledger. It doesn't provide incentives of any kind, just an append-only list. Proof of Work provides "incentives" to burn power pointlessly, which is a pretty awful incentive. Proof of Stake provides incentives to hoard "money", which is... well actually a pretty big regression from the current state of the world, even. And that's about it.
And in both of those cases the money (and thus "incentives") still have to come from somewhere. Blockchain technology itself isn't generating any value, nor do things like IPFS. They need externalized funding to function. Filecoin then tries to make IPFS make sense for people to participate in, but that's then just a mediocre twist on AWS S3 or Backblaze or any other cloud storage provider. "Mediocre" because it completely lacks things like customer support & uptime guarantees. Kinda important things if you're trying to build a business on top of it.
That transaction fee is itself highly variable & dependent on load, though. The more people that actually try to use bitcoin to transfer money, the more expensive it gets. It actively resists using it to transfer money.
That, combined with the long transaction times, make it completely useless as a general purpose currency. You can use it as a variant on a wire transfer, where you only use it for rare, large transactions. And even then only one where you're ok waiting load spikes out (which can last for months as was the case in the first half of 2021). But then you're still spending extra time & money on each side of that transaction moving back out of bitcoin and into something usable for "normal" transactions.
> I think you have a misunderstanding of what exactly web3 is. All the apps with any traffic (loans, gambling, NFTs, insurance, derivatives) are using the money transfer capabilities of blockchain. It's the whole point.
But that's not what web3 proponents claim it is. Yes right now all the "web3 dApps" are money-related (or less charitably but more accurately, pyramid schemes), I don't disagree with you on that at all. But the claims are that it can be a decentralized replacement for web2. And web2 does a whole lot more than just shuffle money around.
That's why it's billing itself as "web3" and not, idk, "visa2".