When I went to look up what “web3” even was, I found no end of articles talking about how one company or another was doing something with web3, or how some venture capital firm was setting up a web3 fund, or how all the problems with the current web were going to be solved by web3… but very few that would actually succinctly describe what the term even meant. ... This definitely set off the first alarm bells for me: it’s concerning to me when people are trying extremely hard to get people to buy into some new idea but aren’t particularly willing (or even able) to describe what it is they’re doing.
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In a lot of ways, people are also tying themselves to the technology in ways that I haven’t really seen before. You don’t see a lot of people pick a type of data model—say a linked list—and say “okay, how can I solve [x problem] with a linked list?” But that’s exactly what’s happening in web3: “How can I solve selling real estate with a blockchain?” “How can I solve voting integrity with a blockchain?” And inevitably some of these people are more tied to the idea of blockchains than they are to solving their chosen problems in a good way.
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As far as specific projects, if anything good comes out of web3, I expect it will emerge despite the technologies rather than as a result of them. There are all kinds of people trying to solve very real problems, but they are putting all their eggs in the one basket: a type of datastore that’s often very expensive and inefficient, and which introduces complexities around decentralization, immutability, and privacy that many projects will find impossible to overcome.
Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto at The Verge
Excellent interview with Molly White, creator of the site Web3 Is Going Just Great.