Can you elaborate on the last two sentences?
A lot of activity like this is going on behind the scenes. You also have bleeding-edge innovation in capital through structures like Venture DAOs that will blow up the entire space in ways that people haven’t fully thought through because half of this industry is stuck on the “crypto is a scam” narrative of someone with a 2014 understanding of what’s happening in the space.
Web 2.0 was arguably not as expensive, but then again you could also argue that it was not as big a step. If you think about it, web 2.0 is really just taking web 1.0 and adding a lot of fancy stuff like SPA, new fancy protocols and social media.
Web 3.0 however, depending on which vision of the 3.0 you support, ranges from "just" another upgrade to a completely different thing than what we have today.
And to make it quite simple: Completely different things are loads of work. Work means people need to dedicate their time to it, which means they need to be paid.
Data centers, research & development, operations, national infrastructure (eg telecom), chips & hardware, software (R&D to maintenance). Now climb inside any of those segments and walk the horizon of the businesses and costs and what was required to build out what eg semiconductors can do today, or what fiber can do today, or what networks can do today, or what harddrives can do today, or what GPUs can do today, and on and on and on and on it goes.
Do a tally on Google's capital investment since 1998 (year by year and final tally), then tell me Web 2.0 wasn't as expensive; then do it for Apple, Microsoft, AWS, etc. It was drastically more expensive. Web 2.0 also includes China's Internet build-out era, and the global mobile build-out, I really don't need to say anything more than that given the scale everyone here knows we're talking about: Web 2.0 was massively more expensive than Web 1.0, by at least a magnitude globally.
Web 1.0 was laughably trivial in cost compared to Web 2.0. It was petite, tiny, itsy bitsy small, versus scaling to billions of global users across all major economies, and shifting tens of trillions of dollars of GDP online.
Just the entertainment wing of Web 2.0 is larger and more expensive than all of Web 1.0 combined.
Where can I get a concise, recent, high quality and big picture summary of the space? It would be useful because I am out of the loop.
There is so much happening in the field that it’s hard to keep track without spending a few weeks full time first to wrap your head around the main concepts.
https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2022...
A full view is actually even bigger than that, but this covers the prominent, well-capitalized and hyped players of the past year, at least.