Perhaps the really big idea is that lower middle, working class and poor people have access to the financial system that they never had before, and access to business formation that does not have to satisfy the gatekeepers.
In this new world the large corporations, banks, brokerage firms and financial institutions most supremely symbolized by Wall Street and The City in London will suffer a declining influence as security guards watching and controlling access to the immense wealth of the very rich. This could explain why the ultra rich like Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffet hate bitcoin.
Put in a historical context, before the printing press people were ignorant. After the printing press, the common folk had access to books and learned to read, democratizing both information and religion. People no longer had to have a priest to read the Bible to them. This knowledge explosion among the ordinary people fueled the industrial revolution.
Before the internet it was difficult to publish your writings. You had to write a letter to the editor, print pamphlets and hand them out, or if you were lucky get someone to publish you. After the internet everyone could publish to the whole world. People began to teach each other. What people learned was that the money system was rigged against them.
web3 is an attempt to decentralize and democratize finance and business.
When I think about my working class father, who had plenty of great ideas, I remember how he had to go to a stuffy bank hat in hand to try to get a personal loan. This was difficult and mostly did not work.
When I think about myself, I was able to participate in the stock market through an IRA, but I had to deal with a broker and buy in lots of 100 usually and pay a fee. I had to park money and couldn't do anything with it.
Now anyone can download an app and buy fractional shares and then trade them like money. A digital coin is essentially a hybrid between a stock and money. DAO's circumvent normal corporations. And so on.
I could be wrong, I could be right
They talk about decentralization which has been done so often before and only worked for niche use-cases.
What if crypto is just a big money pump and dump scheme? It‘s sold to the poor to solve their financial situation which mostly don‘t have bank accounts. But the ones loosing the most in crypto crashes is not the new-generation web3 developer earning a good income. It‘s the poor guy somewhere with a bad local currency which was now using crypto which is now not worth anything too.
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People are always repeating that many people didn‘t e.g. saw the need in the internet and had been totally wrong in it. But crypto isn‘t new anymore like the internet was at that time! Bitcoin is almost 13 years old and Etherum 6! The internet had already shown very good usecases after that time and crypto is still searching for it‘s _one_ use case than money speculation on a highly volatile asset which doesn‘t have any real money.
More interesting what will happen to crypto in a real world economy crash like 2008!
"Imagine ... that they're not very good at articulating what the intuitively feel to be right about web3. When they talk about decentralization it much less about technology than routing around the central locus of control that serve as gatekeepers to keep people down."
And this describes exactly people who haven't really thought through the web3 concept -- especially indicated by the emotional perspectives of "feels rights" that the status quo is filled with "gatekeepers to keep people down". This makes it seem like a trend amongst the cool kids, which to me is what it actually is at this point.
I don't think I follow how crypto would help in your situation. At least your father could get a loan from the bank--and he got that loan because the bank looked at his history, trusted him, and took a bet he would succeed. And he can trust the bank, because it has authority and governmental checks and balances to hold it accountable. There is no trust in crypto as far as I understand it. In fact being trust-less is one of the designing principles of the block chain. Can loans exist in crypto? Wouldn't this be significantly more difficult for someone like your father to break into? And significantly more risk-y? Whereas he could get a loan from a bank with relatively little financial investment and risk, how much time & money would he need to invest in a cryptocurrency before he has enough to do what he wants with the finances? What's the risk?
Sorry if I'm missing something here, my econ-fu is weak.
(or, better yet, move back into consulting and wait until past wisdom is required, which shouldn’t take long).
Edit: Currently second page, my mistake.
Only children and other people with nothing to lose want a world of perfect liberty. Powerful and obsessed people might want that world because they think they are equipped to bend it to their will.
It’s not a paradise, it’s a nightmare. We need social order. We need responsible gatekeepers. I haven’t heard anyone explain how web3 leads to a kinder or safer world.
From what I've seem over past two month it's all about deregulated money, nothing to do w/ decentralization/trustless/demarcation, it's much worse.
Is it a one-in-a-decade career chance? Absolutely, scam unsuspecting plebs, rug dumb coiner/NFTs, be an exchange and be rich, write a mixer/tumbler and laundering blood money. As long as you know when to jump before the heat is too much.
Just...don't lie to yourself. Same stuff, different flavors, world is not going to be a better place because of you, actually, quite the opposite.(Same applies to traditional corps)
this is a utopian dream. The current state of the web3 dotcom bubble is anything but.
What if blockchains are the best way to conduct personal finance? Digital and physical ownership? What if blockchains are the best way to conduct Big Finance? That's quite a large market, maybe even the largest market there is to conduct. Wouldn't crypto naturally be adopted then? The comparative advantage would make it a "no brainer." It seems to me stranger that we would live in a world where the business of money was perfected in the late 20th century. Do you really think bank transfers are going to take 2 days to clear in the year 2100?
[0] https://jjo.media/articles/cryptocurrency-vs-internet-adopti...
Huh? Routing around? You are advocating for the "central locus of control that serve as gatekeepers to keep people down". You don't eliminate that by "routing around" it. You eliminate it by organization, education and then agitation around it. Advocating that people unhappy with this scurry about trying to "route around" their central locus of control is exactly what they want.
No one can really predict the future, but if I had to put money down on it, I would bet that if Web3 attains its technological goals, it will not attain its social goals. If dapps replace web sites, the infrastructure becomes truly decentralized, cryptocurrencies supplant fiat currencies, and people accept the legitimacy of digital scarcity through NFTs, it will probably be a net benefit to some people, but leave most people worse off.
The impacts will be felt differently between the US, the rest of the developed world, and the developing world. I'll start with the US.
Assuming your father was working class in the United States, and assuming that he was unable to secure a business loan from a bank or attract investment money, prior to crpytocurrencies, his only option for securing a loan would be a loan shark. If this was the 1990s or the 2000s, that loan shark could come in the form of a payday loan service. These services are the logical conclusion of unregulated capitalism for a financially struggling working class. Before they were regulated, they would give out loans with interest rates in the hundreds of percent. These rates were a response to the incredible financial risk the lenders took in lending to people who could not get traditional loans. Many would disappear or file for personal bankruptcy to avoid repayment, so they had to make as much money as they could from the people who made repayments.
Nowadays, payday loans are regulated at the still incredibly high rate of 36%, but if crypto projects like Web3 succeed in circumventing government regulations, I suspect we'll see a return to the hundreds of percent loans that were once ubiquitous across the US. Lenders aren't going to get stupider just because they're lending cryptocurrencies. They're still going to calculate the risks of lending money to people like your father and act accordingly. We know this is how they'll act in the absence of regulation because it's how they acted in the absence of regulation in the recent past. Specifically, the ability to take out loans will not improve for those with little or no capital from what it was before.
For the US and the rest of the developed world, ubiquitous cryptocurrencies will cause an increase in money laundering, scams, and robberies. For whose with access to banking, deposits are insured up to a certain amount. This benefit is largely theoretical for the unbanked, and it doesn't cover enough for the upper classes, but it's typically a good amount of protection for the admittedly shrinking middle class. Storing money in cryptocurrencies loses people that protection. Cryptocurrencies also don't have chargebacks or protections against certain kinds of scams. If cryptocurrencies supplant banks, banking becomes much riskier to the middle class, and thefts and scams will accelerate the decline of the middle class, widening the wealth gap.
The ease at which cryptocurrencies can be stolen and laundered is already helping rouge nations like North Korea to finance weapons development and oppressive regimes. It's not that these regimes couldn't and haven't stolen money in other ways, but the mere existence of cryptocurrencies is making these nations richer than they otherwise would be, and I suspect that will have very negative international consequences. [1] For that matter, the existence of cryptocurrencies is fueling ransomware attacks against hospitals, governments, and infrastructure. I expect those will increase as well.
For the developing world, I'm not sure what the net effect will be. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the details issues facing people in these countries. If I had to guess though, I suspect that crypto will offer them not much more than false hope. El Salvador's bitcoin program is basically a desperation play. Their own currency failed, and they're having lots of issues using the US dollar as a currency, because they have so little control over it. I can see why they felt like they had no choice but to try bitcoin, but I think the same lack of control over bitcoin will lead to similar issues in the long run. For countries which see cryptocurrencies as a threat, I don't think it would be difficult for them to crack down on mining and trading operations in their country. For countries that are indifferent to it, their residents can be crypto millionaires on paper, but if they try to actually import any of that wealth to the country in the form of goods and services, the governments will take notice and tax or seize it.
Some may be able to use cryptocurrencies to migrate to the developed world and establish themselves, but I imagine this will become harder and harder the more cryptocurrencies proliferate. Once the general public get use to them, figure out how they work, they'll start to move them around in the same patterns as fiat currency. The developed world isn't going to start gifting wealth to the developing world and the lower classes just because the money is free from government control.
Similarly, in the US, I know some trans people who got in on bitcoin or etherium early and were able to use it to fund health care that they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. This is absolutely a net good, but I suspect this too will become more difficult as Web3 ascends. It was only possible because they got in early. But more importantly, it was only necessary because the US doesn't have universal healthcare, and they were financial losers in capitalism.
The core problem with Web3 and cryptocurrencies is that they're more capitalism. I've blogged about this [2], but in short, the fact that your father couldn't get a loan was a consequence of capitalism. Whether that's a feature or a bug of capitalism is up to interpretation, but you can't change capitalism with more capitalism. You can't fix capitalism's flaws with more capitalism. If you really want to improve the ability of anyone to be an entrepreneur no matter their financial status, you have to look to non-capitalist systems like universal basic income, universal healthcare, and other socialist initiatives.
1: https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-cryptocurrency-theft... 2: https://meipouchou.com/blog/web3-metaverse-lain/
Nevertheless, the answer to the title's question is: we'll all be living in abject poverty while you're yelling "told you so"