Leaving the Web3 cult
dope.bearblog.dev
dope.bearblog.dev
And none of this was relevant to the article. There was no description of cult, no details about how hard it is to leave the cult. The whole article is about trashing a project I've never heard about that even someone who never cofounded or worked in the area could have written.
But I’m not mad, just disappointed.
One thing he said during that conversation when it became clear he only understood it well enough to put big lego blocks together was "oh it's hard to talk to you web2 guys". Just 0_0 lol what.
That's about my take of what web3 has meant to me ever since. The evm ethereum virtual machine is interesting in it's own right as well as some adjacent things. I don't really want to make any claim as to if any of that stuff is 'going anywhere'. He couldn't elucidate any of that to me in person, just an ol web2 guy, sadly.
What is your standard though?
Whether you can you build a business that extracts value from activity?
Whether its supposed to have a profound impact on the world?
"Ethereum" was going to be a suite of tools of which what we call Ethereum today was only one. There was supposed to be a swarm protocol to enable distributed transfer of files, a message transport protocol, a human readable naming system (ENS does exist but it is not quite what was defined early on) and all coming together in Mist browser.
So then we got IPFS, which replaced Swarm, and the EF decided to focus on the EVM and let the community develop other compoenets that could become web3. Ok, cool, why reinvent the wheel. They ditched Mist and stopped maintaining a reference implementation, again, letting the community build. Then Metamask came out, and the rest is history: "web3" is now just websites that pitch you NFTs.
Today, Ethereum is cool; it's a place to launch unregistered securities that cannot be stopped, to trade assets in a decentralized manner. It gives everyone censorship resistance for finance. Some cool things have been built in the process, liquidity pools are revolutionary. But web3? Where is it? I can't even see it being over the horizon no matter how hard I squint. It's a bunch of webdevs pitching tokens to get rich.
Old man yells at cloud.
"P2P web" needs a new name.
We had a number of discussions about it, and found a potential route forward, but it was a very different business model from how he is making money now. In the end, he decided he didn't want to risk the money he's making now for a more uncertain path.
It was an extremely useful exercise, though, and a good way to understand what's out there and how it can be used. I think the version of web3 you mention is possible, but it's so different from how businesses operate now that it will take a very successful high profile company built from the ground up around web3 for the ideas to go anywhere. The risk just feels too high for existing companies, and even most new startups. You're turning over a lot of control and trying to succeed anyway.
Which is also what leads to the parasocial relationships crypto enthusiasts wind up having with web 3 projects and their founders
The founders need economic incentives and the successful ones do that to great efficacy, and all the other participants have far more risk and fewer resources to make anything with the new protocol, so they dont
It requires incredible privilege to be able to launch something for free, and its equally laughable for web 3 communities to suggest that
So the market moves towards these big token sales and everything else is tolerated fallout
Unfortunately most people require trust to get into something new and unknown, and the "web3" moniker has lost that ages ago. Sometimes a rebrand of the best of the crop is not a bad idea, we need a filter to all the bullshit that was bombarded around this the past decade... I was excited by it in 2012, I'm exhausted to wade through all the bullshit by now, so I simply ignore it until the signal to noise ratio gets better.
There are lots of startups trying to combine technologies in different ways, they should be looked at individually on their own merit. Those who are just trying to profit off a hype should be eschewed, that's pretty much end of story. That some made the mistake of taking on an unpopular tag like "web3" is unfortunate but not a reason to vilify.
To zoom out a little bit I think a lot of us would agree that the internet is broken in some way - a small number of entities have control over all of our data. I do not know what the solution to that will look like but it will certainly involve some re-arrangement of incentives. Internet is driven by money, in the current system largely by money generated through advertising. So whatever a solution to internet ailments will be it necessarily has to do with how money flows. To some technologists blockchain is part of the puzzle. Unfortunately to them the technology often has speculative value, but in a way it is a byproduct of experimentation with money and who and how pays for computing resources. But there are other technologies, some revolving around how internet data is retrieved (IPFS). Some are focusing on identity via novel cryptographic method (sometimes using crypto wallets, but without actually using the chain, like disco.xyz for example).
The point I guess I am trying to make is that a lot of people are trying to improve the internet in a lot of ways and we should be supportive, even if skeptical. If blockchain is not to stick around it has funded great leaps in cryptographic research, it has disseminated cryptographic wallets to more people in the world than anything has and a whole generation of people is growing up with an understanding what a cryptographic signature is, it has fueled research into cooperative organization and probably much more that we will only see in hindsight. Throwing anybody who is associated with blockchain or "web3" or whatever it is into the same heap as Azuki is doing a disservice to everybody who has ever used the internet. We will not make progress this way.
and that has nothing to do with the technology where parasocial relationships arent needed. there are plenty of web3 projects that provide utility and without the parasocial relationships described here
(and yes, tools for speculators are utility, people really act like they never heard of financial services as soon as someone mentions crypto/web3 and utility in the same sentence)
I get utility out of Multisender.app and similar competitors because it saves me time and money repeatedly in batch sending
I get utility out of zapper.fi and debank because it saves me time and money in accounting
I get utility out of Filecoin because the nodes pin IPFS links, solving a costly problem for me as all the Web 2.0 pinning services like Pinata are costly subscriptions
Snapshot for offchain voting has been a helpful coordination tool for communities that dont want to burden with transaction fees, and its been useful for me to see the results of votes quickly
I exist in the real world and these are successful businesses in the real world extracting a little value by providing a convenience
By comparison, the Web3 (and broader cryptocurrency sphere) is largely predicated on two downstream sources of money: cynics attempting to profit on greater fools, and the greater fools themselves.
aka Smart Marks