Web3 is expensive P2P

Ok but we’ve had this technology for decades and nobody cares. Why is doing this via the blockchain suddenly going to make it work?

There is also a lot of work being done on light clients and faster proofs, so we can bundle them into browsers/apps and not rely on third party nodes for messaging/transacting. This would solve quite a few of moxies concerns right away. Alongside this the work being done on rollups shows us ways of facilitating services for others, without them being dependant on it or locked into it.

For comparison, signal is great example of cryptography protecting users, but users being dependant on signal. there is no exit- so in critical situations what happens? Thats the kind of power-dynamic people working in crypto are grappling with. This is a hard problem but it is something worth attempting to solve.

How can we provide services to users but have them be able to leave with all their assets when then need to (not when its convenient to us who run the servers). I hear a lot from non-crypto people about how they agree with these ideas but you dont need blockchains to do them, but it seems most of the work to do with this is being done in the crypto/blockchain community (look at who is funding/doing the research on zk-proofs/snarks/starks, which can have a much wider impact outside of the crypto space too! => https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-mnist )

Those are the only credible use-case(s) that the cryptocurrency folks should be looking at. I can see a few projects surviving like Stellar [0], Ripple (XRP) [1], Algorand [2] and Nano [3], ENS [4], Handshake [5] and Skiff [6].

Unlike the other projects that are slapping blockchain, crypto on to anything they can find and are filled with scams being reported, daily on web3isgoinggreat, there are a few that are not silly meme coins / tokens, or vaporware but stuck to their goals / whitepaper(s) and seem to be still useful and have a use-case.

This is what these skeptics won't tell you and will ignore and filter out.

[0] https://stellar.org

[1] https://xrpl.org

[2] https://algorand.com

[3] https://nano.org

[4] https://ens.domains

[5] https://handshake.org

[6] https://skiff.com

As soon as I opened "yahoo.com", he asked "how am I paying to view Yahoo?". I said you're not paying anybody, you're just paying for the Internet connection. He nodded.

I then showed him Hotmail. He kept asking "ok so now, how did they charge me to view this page?". I kept telling him, "that's the beauty of the internet, you don't pay for each site you visit, you just have access to this enormous body of knowledge".

He was thinking of sites in terms of making long distance calls, since he knew the Internet used the phone line, so to him it was normal to pay for each "site call" (if that makes sense), because that's how phone calls worked.

This interaction stayed with me for a long time, because it was natural for him to think about paying for each website visit, but to me it was all 'free'. As social media and user data became more monetizable in the years after, we found out pretty fast that there was no such thing as free.

At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could support their existence without ads, since each customer would be a paying customer. Ads would still be around, but perhaps people would have demanded a nicer experience once they know they are paying for the visit.

In many ways, that's the lense through which I look at web3. It might be too late to switch to a pay as you go system. It might be too late to educate people about the importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user data. Nothing about this payment system requires a blockchain, but internet-money is a good enough excuse to introduce an alternative pay-per-click approach to the Internet, because, to be honest, I think the Internet ended up being a cesspool of abnoxious ads, paid content, ads disguised as content, dark patterns, etc, like the world's dirtiest third world country bazaar.

Maybe if we paid for each click, the experience of using the Internet could be more like a supermarket.

It would certainly be different.