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Comment by jeffparsons | Hacker News Reader

Before the rise of "Web3", I never would have believed that so many people would look at that stupid name and conclude that it is somehow inevitable or even a meaningful successor to what we had already. Whoever started calling it that is either very lucky or an evil genius; they somehow got a bunch of otherwise reasonable people to switch off their critical thinking and see a bunch of cryptojunk as something other than cryptojunk.

Everyone building some "crypto", "blockchain", or "Web3" thing claims they're creating some kind of value, and yet in all I've seen so far, they don't actually solve the real world problems they claim to be solving, and if you were to remove the speculators from the game then the whole thing would collapse. I just see one pyramid-shaped casino after another.

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> Everyone building some "crypto", "blockchain", or "Web3" thing claims they're creating some kind of value, and yet in all I've seen so far, they don't actually solve the real world problems they claim to be solving, and if you were to remove the speculators from the game then the whole thing would collapse. I just see one pyramid-shaped casino after another.

The problem I see is "fake innovation", everyone with a new web3/crypto project talks about how their project is going to change the game but when you step back and look at the space as a whole, everyone is just doing the same thing with different variables.

Every new NFT project is just a copypasta of all the other NFT projects with different pictures, not to mention the sheer number of projects that are straight up copying Bored Apes with different animals.

And every new crypto project seems to have the exact same goal of making the investors a ton of money while also talking about how they are going to somehow save the world in the process.

Every new web3 game is some spin on the Metaverse, with NFT items and the promise that you can "play and make money".

There's no innovation in this space, every new "innovation" is just a rehashed old thing with different variables.

The zero knowledge stuff is actually fairly cutting edge (it's not often that academic papers make it into production systems within a few years).

> There's no innovation in this space, every new "innovation" is just a rehashed old thing with different variables.

TBF, much of Web 2.0 was exactly like this.

Lots of innovation came out of web2, from concepts that are ubiquitous today (tags, social profiles, the concept of a feed) to technologies that are very useful (nosql dbs, oauth, lots of web frameworks that were born due to the needs of web2 apps). It’s easy forget that the web1 was almost exclusively about consuming editorialized news and some shopping!

> Whoever started calling it that is either very lucky or an evil genius

It’s aspirational at best. Web 2.0 wasn’t declared up front but rather was coined to describe a sweeping trend.

Web 2.0 was very much coined as a marketing ploy to sell conference tickets. We used to make fun of how little sense the whole thing made and to this day I have yet to see a coherent and meaningful definition of what Web 2.0 actually is. Still Web3 definitely got it beat on all that.

Web 3.0 was often used (again aspirationally) by the semantic web fans. The crypto folks probably should have gone for web4.

Most crypto projects are craps.

But as someone living in China, where there is strict foreign currency regulattion, I have say crypto currency is one of the best investions in the last 15 years.

The charitable take is that they are mimicking VCs. VCs regularly give money to companies on vague missions like "disrupt the vitamin delivery industry".

The VCs don't really have a great understanding or confidence in exactly how the company will be profitable, but they are placing lots of bets hoping one will pay off.

So people promoting Web3 are taking a similar path of making a bet that crypto will be useful someday and hoping to get a piece of the upside.

Well they did solve the real world problem of how to make payments for hostages and ransomware. Not sure crypto has solved much else though.

> Whoever started calling it that is either very lucky or an evil genius

In a world that is currently dominated by the effects of misinformation, I'd bet on the latter.

I think OP is overestimating the critical thinking skills of the population. That is why misinformation is so effective

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