My First Impressions of Web3

I don't like that when an actually good successor to web2 comes along it won't be called web3 because of this bullshit that they call web3.

And his arguments in favour of centralization are flawed. Sure, regular people do not want to run their own (email, chat, etc) servers. But they DO want to be able to chose from a handful of available servers the one they like best (or the one they trust most), without losing connectivity with their contacts. Tired of Google's shenanigans, move from Gmail to Protonmail, tell your contacts your new email, set up an autoresponder, all is fine. When you move away from a centralized silo like Signal, you'll have to move all your chat buddies with you to a new platform.

As an engineer, I feel like this single post helped me better understand Web3 and how it worked under the hood better than any of the heavily hyped Discord and Twitter announcements of new projects over the past year.

It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.

>When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use.

That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for purely digital goods might be a concept with a future. Having standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and query and update these goods might make sense (although I still think it goes opposite to the general trend of walled gardens vs. decentralized web, I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control).

The thing is that in most case those NFTs wouldn't be trustless. I see people putting forward that a use case would be an NFT that proves that your Rolex is real, or for Fortnite skins, or for the ownership of your house. But in all these situations, there's a very clear authority (Rolex, Epic Games and the municipal authorities, respectively). These authorities will be allowed to mint new NFTs at will (because who else?) and as such have to be trusted. That opens up interesting questions btw, like "who is Rolex exactly?" which creates a chain of custody of trusted authority involving trademark management among other things. But I digress.

But then as soon as an authority is identified, why bother with the extreme overhead (it terms of resources and costs) of blockchain tech? Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature?

Like cryptocurrencies, the subset of problems that can only be solved using NFTs is incredibly tiny and speculators rush to make up use cases that, if you think about it for five minutes, clearly make no sense and could be better solved using good old centralized tech.