I liked a lot the period of mid to late 1990 until mid 2000s where I was mostly communicated with strangers over internet and focused on learning things. I installed my first linux version those days, setup a mail server and then later a http server, played with Netscape and Mozaic. Remember using Pine to read emails and I remember how many nights I spent downloading resources from mailing lists as the internet was cheap during the night.
What a wonderful time going from linux to window 3.1 to windows 95 back to Fedora and Redhat and waiting hours with enthusiasm to install a new OS and playing with what it had to offer, discovering almost every default installed program, tweaking and sharing and learning.
Do you think that web3 will really work? My scepticism is related to users hosting content for other users. I don't see yet how this will truly work at a massive scale. But of course I did not read everything about this subject so I am sure there are things that I miss, maybe trends that I am not aware of.
Web3 makes these tasks more complex and slower in order to create a decentralised, privacy-preserving, cryptocurrency supporting network. No average user cares about privacy on the web or paying with anything other than fiat.
And if the user base isn't there, what company will build software to interact with Web3? Every usable browser today is made by a for-profit company.
I can see it being used for niche, nerdy communities, but that's about it. I don't think it will ever be mainstream.
I've heard a lot of positive sentiment around "having you data available wherever you browse" - but does that not create a lot of new challenges? Will I have the same data available from all my devices with browsers installed? Everything has a browser now, even my nintendo switch (kind of). How can I make sure to trust a site to handle the parts of my data that they need to interface with?
I don't believe in users hosting content for other users either. However, why don't users host their own content. I would not let anyone to host anything made by me that took me more than 15 minutes of effort. My stuff, my rule.
There are very few projects doing anything interesting with web3 outside of speculation or "grifter" quasi-MLMs (NFTs). Until that changes, web3 won't be interesting. But, we are on the cusp of that change. Soon, there will be interesting applications on web3, and they will change the web permanently.
Two things stand in the way::
- web3 requires specialized browser plugin or even worse, a special app. You cannot do web3 inside a web2 browser.
- transaction costs and throughput
web3 requires a browser plugin (meaning not on mobile) AND education on how to use it. Those are blockers for 99% of the people, so you only have 1% of the people who will use it, and in that small population, most of them are there to get rich quick or die trying.
And, transaction costs are high for the web3 (I'm equating web3 with Ethereum). It only makes sense to participate for people who are trying to get rich.
BUT: if transaction costs go down, and people can participate in web3 WITHOUT a browser plugin, then people will start building interesting projects OUTSIDE of speculation and MLMs.
That will be the moment really exciting things start to happen.
When will that be?
If you don't know what L2 is, here is why it is important: L2 is a way to scale transaction throughput outside of the mainnet Ethereum. There are many ways to do it, but generally they involve rollups, either optimistic or ZK-proofs.
What's a rollup? A rollup is a way to do lots of smaller transactions off the main Ethereum network, and then roll them all up into a single main Ethereum transaction. You amortize all the small transactions across one single mainnet transaction.
L2 products are still in their infancy, don't work great, and have poor UI. But, they are one of many solutions to solving the transaction cost and throughput problem.
If you are rolling your eyes at ZK-proofs and saying "Oh, those crypto guys, more snake oil!" You should know that Google is using ZK-proofs to guarantee the information they pull from Android devices and processed in ML is has a guarantee of anonymity when shared into Google. There is a lot of interesting research happening despite all the grifting in crypto, so don't miss the good stuff. If you are excited about hard math, crypto has some fun work.
So, L2 will solve the "transaction cost and throughput problem."
The only other barrier is browser plugins, IMHO. The exciting thing is that L2 solutions have their own API. When one of them finallly offers a great UX for interacting with their network, you can interact with it using web2 and not with MetaMask.
Then, everything will open up. It's going to be soon.
There are always tradeoffs, of course. Content produced by people who don't get paid to produce it is certainly cheaper. And being a middleman who gobbles up data and sells ads is cheaper than being a content producer.
Ideological tradeoffs, too, of course. You have censorship on one side and curation and information quality on the other side. Unfortunately, I don't think very many people on either side of this want to acknowledge that there isn't a strict ideology we can just adhere to all the time and say one of those is more important than the other. Resisting censorship is probably more important when you're living under the Khmer Rouge, but when you're living in a time of abundance where the motivations of most information peddlers is solely to sell something to you, curation starts tipping the scales. This is going to be constantly changing and there is no fixed answer.
I’m certainly not the barometer of whether or not a technology or protocol will be successful.