Web3 is going just great

In real life, if I talk to people about crypto they are curious and open to learning about it and most just don't have the time to learn about it.

However, when I go online and see a post about NFTs or crypto, there somehow is always tremendous backlash, generally by people not involved in the space. I'm curious what about this space brings out the critics moreso than other hot-button issues. Especially since crypto adoption doesn't really impact these people's lives the way other issues such as abortion, vaccine/mask mandates, or drug policy does.

For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art.

But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men.

This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions).

I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed?

Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions.

But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software.

So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become.

I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.

Speculators?

Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators?

> I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways.

That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees.

But your comment is a perfect example of the web3 hype: Proponents are convinced that every current problem is basically solved, we just need to wait for the solution to actually arrive and then everyone will see.

This is wrong. ~98% of the incentive that miners get comes from mining new Bitcoin, not transaction fees. That is unaffected by LN, and if LN is widely adopted, will likely even go up (because it is denominated in Bitcoin and LN adoption may drive the price up).