I guess as some counterpoints:
I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from the forming centralising forces (which do get established because people like convenience/reliability/familiarity) without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave without losses. That is a critical difference.
His nft is delisted from a platform and his wallet calls the api of that platform. That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it. He can still get all the data, there are other wallets, you can run them in your terminal if you like, or you can set your metamask to use your own - or someone elses - node (instead of infura). There is a choice. There are things like TheGraph making distributed indexers/search engines and something like that will replace opensea as the main nft api (if they arent building it themselves).
Add to this the more recent developments of light clients, which are coming along great and which allow us to run in-app/in-browser direct connections to the chain for calls/transactions without needing infura or a third party node.
> Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency.
Absolutely agree. there are a lot of people in this space who have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives pursuing their interests in it, and they will. It isn't going away and we should engage with making it as good as we can. Will it be a big thing in ten years? who knows, I can say that everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality. What will we see in the next 5?
We can absolutely bring better privacy too. Layers like aztec are working on exactly that, and zero knowledge proofs and other forms of commitments (sismo) are exploring how to do that. I think a lot of people in the space follow the ideal of "privacy for the individual, transparency for the institutions". We will get there.
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.
i sort of agree with this, we can accept that full nodes will be ran be organisations, businesses, and nerdy individuals who also have their own funkwhale instances and homelabs. those commited to the ideals -> same as home email servers or mastodon communities.
but we can also find ways to distribute infrastructure to bring resilience to those who dont think much about these things and just want to use an app. (again with things like light clients replacing api calls to third parties). so that we care for the non-committed users and make sure the points of fragility are lessened as much as we can.
I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either.
I'd be much more interested in his thoughts on Whisper/Waku and messaging protocols, tradeoffs in validity/volition/optimistic rollups, distributed indexers, etc. He is smart enough and involved in similar things to just take that extra step to the dev forums and discussions and maybe give meaningful, helpful critique. I'm not sure what response he is expecting tbh?
The rest on gold rush and money i don't have much to say on, but mass speculation and desperation to make money is, imo, a symptom of the abusive system of work and finance that we are all forced into and everyone wants to escape. That didnt just appear with crypto/nfts. So sure, people are using something because they are making money and might not actually care about the details and the ethics - but we are also building a free(libre) opensource p2p programmable value network, and there are lots of people who also think that is amazing and worth indicating as different from the current stacks with the 'web3' tag.