The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful.
> One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd.
[1]: https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/fchollet/status/1612178630494...
But actually it’s just social bubbles especially in VCs.
It’s not a response or a clarification it’s a change to the meaning of his headline.
Because nobody agrees what web3 even means, it's a totally useless term, not that dissimilar to AGI or consciousness, which nobody can properly define. People who hate crypto define web3 in terms of all the negative stuff, while people who have a vested interested in pumping token prices (like VCs) will define web3 in terms of all the potentially positive stuff.
I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes.
Crypto has a much more negative image because it's full of scams, but that doesn't mean anything. It's just significantly easier to create scams with crypto because money is at the very base layer, than it is to create scams with AI. But that doesn't imply anything about the usefulness of these technologies.
Could you elaborate? It's been 15 years since the bitcoin paper and I still don't see where the game changing commercial applications of crypto are beyond the black/grey market uses for which it has already been adopted.
For example, Filecoin lets you store data for $2.33 per TB per year. If you used S3 that would be $150. The Golem network let's you run compute jobs for $0.003 per CPU core per hour.
The only barrier here is software. There just aren't enough developers to build anything useful. There could be a user-friendly web service like the AWS console that enables normal developers to use this stuff, but nobody has built one yet. Golem could support GPU compute so that people can use it to train AI models cheaply, but they are short on devs so that feature is still in the backlog.
Give it time. Encrypted email has been possible since at least the 90s, but many hospitals still haven't adopted it and are using fax machines. Before people can adopt crypto, they first need to understand it, and that's not going to happen for a long time.
While Amazon might cost more, they're unlikely to go out of business tomorrow or in ten years. They also have an SLA and predictable prices and predictable capacity. if you build something on AWS that works today it'll likely work tomorrow.
The pure IP routing networks of 20 years ago were not full capable of making VoIP work well enough for general usage.
It might not work at all, but it's not necessarily a Ponzi scheme (which isn't even really an accurate way to describe NFTs, which are a mostly worthless asset bubble; ponzi schemes require lying about transactions having taken place, not lying about the future value of an asset)
What is a web3 website/product that can be called a hit?
The rest could be Pokémon or fonts for all I know without Googling.
On the other hand, I did hear about MtGox and FTX.