No it's not.
Web2 exploded largely because of XMLHTTPRequest which from the second it was released was simple to understand, simple to use and solved an immediate problem.
To this day I'm still yet to find a problem that Web3 solves uniqely well other than money laundering, sanctions evasion etc.
Many of cryptographical constructs of the past 4 years were and are spearheaded by blockchains, in particular fast signature aggregation, threshold signatures protocols and zero knowledge proofs. This translates to protocols for:
- voting.
- splitting a critical company secret between say the CEO, COO, CFO, Head of HR, Compliance, Legal and requiring 4 out of 6 to sign off critical actions, without ever revealing that secret.
- proving that you did or you own something without revealing what. Which could be quite interesting for law enforcement for example.
Not to mention the adoption possibly going on behind the scenes.
Adoption? More like, speculation. I still don't know anyone who's doing any real world transactions with crypto, but I know people who hold it for speculation purposes.
Adoption has mostly increased thanks to centralization, via exchanges, which seems antithetical to Bitcoin's foundation. What's the number one use case? Speculation and scams.
I'm not sure it's going in the right direction.
I recall some videos/articles dissing internet as a passing fad at that time - does anyone who remember what it was like then think the crypto industry going through something similar?
The utility of systems like email was very quickly apparent, and while the 90s web was much more about publishing structured information than any sort of interaction, again it was pretty immediately recognised as a powerful, useful thing.
I don’t recall any negativity to “the internet”, but a lot for the dot com hype cycle, which is what I think cryptocurrency most closely resembles, but it has dragged on for years
"The Internet, bah. Hype alert"
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg
"What is the Internet, Anyway?"
To be fair, so is Linux.
Good news is, those topics change and become more accepted after some time. It's an endless cycle of Bash-and-Move-on. If something is "too popular", then it's obviously the worse technology ever, according to HN.
What is the widespread problem crypto is solving ?
Hint: darkness and obscurity most of the time don't hide shy virtuous people.
Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch.
Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent.
Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the Internet if you look in the archives.
Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in the history of computer science and tell me that the Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes boring, and then we do the dance again.