Is Web3 Bullshit?

> I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies?

This is the key question that gets overlooked in these discussions.

Web3 is a vague term, but it’s difficult to get straight answers about who’s using Web3 technologies because most of the Web3 narrative refers to hypothetical future technologies.

But even though these hypothetical future Web3 products don’t exist yet or aren’t actually useful in their current form, there are numerous ways to buy their tokens in preparation for their imagined future usefulness.

More specifically: These projects will sell you arbitrary tokens now that supposedly will become more valuable in the future when other future people actually want to use the service. As an early adopter, you will be well positioned to sell your tokens to them at a huge markup!

The obvious question is: Why does every new service need a new, unique token to pay for it? Why must these products built on chains like Ethereum go out of their way to not use Ethereum as their payment method? The reason is that they can’t generate huge speculative profits unless they introduce arbitrary new tokens, so of course they must play the new token game.

But now the profit comes not from building an actual usable service, but from selling tokens for hypothetical future services. In fact, even the developers understand this and will often jump from one new project to the next, capitalizing on token speculation instead of actually finishing anything because that’s where the money is.

If any of the web3 projects want to be taken seriously, they need to stop introducing new arbitrary tokens and just use the existing infrastructure and coins. Build an actual service, not a new currency with a grand idea of a future Web3 service attached to it.

For awhile I insisted that all cryptocurrencies were bullshit and also Ponzi schemes, but given how many people take pleasure in buying them, selling them, and talking about them, I've come round to viewing them as a kind of in-game currency, with the game being a bit like those role-playing games that you play in your neighborhood while interacting with the real world. Anyone who grew up playing some variation of Assassin, especially the multi-day assassin games where you and your friends were still playing even when you went to school, and occasionally you had to tell teachers "I don't want to run this message to the main office because I think my friend Jim has a plan to get me if I go there." Much laughter.

Cryptocurrencies are starting to feel like that, a massive game that people take pleasure in. Nothing wrong with that. I've enjoyed real-world role-playing games, so I don't want to judge anyone else who is into such things.

Is it crazy to make a game currency your main form of investment? Maybe, but not automatically. You should, of course, invest in a diversified portfolio, but if you want to go long on this particular kind of game, it might pay off huge in the end.

I recall when I was a child me and my friends played Dungeons and Dragons -- long running campaigns that went on for years. One of the parents of my friends was upset by this and said it wasn't really a game because it didn't end and nobody could be declared a winner. I'm afraid my initial reaction to cryptocurrencies was similar, not seeing it as a game and rejecting it as not being real.

Of course, a big difference is that we insisted Dungeons and Dragons was a game, whereas the proponents of cryptocurrencies continue to insist that this is not a game. Some make some variation of the argument "there is so much money in this, it's too big to be a game" but that's an incorrect understanding of a game. There is a lot of money in esports, but we are still talking about games.

I've come round to accepting that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I no longer consider them Ponzi schemes, I do regard them as a kind of play activity, one that deliberately tries to blue the line between play and non-play. To the extent that they enable certain kinds of criminal activity, they become real and can be used in non-play contexts. But mostly, this is a kind of play that some people find pleasure in, and there is no point in berating them for it.

Yes.

> Last year Uber dropped considerably when it's IPO got out of the gate.

Some exchanges or other cryptocurrency businesses fizzle out.

Bitcoin price gets hit on world stability news.

> The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.

People have no idea what TSLA is planning on doing besides "cool car", and ape into the stock because of FOMO. Address this?

Web3 or what is meant by it is just a database in the form of a blockchain. Nothing else. And to interact with this database, you still need a centralized server. This is the main problem, having solved which, I believe, we could reach a new level. If browsers could communicate directly with the blockchain, bypassing centralized servers, this would take the technology to a new level.