> Confession: I Barely Use Web3

Barely anyone uses Web3, Crypto is just about entirely for financial speculation now.

In context the author is a founder of Auditless - "a strategic partner to crypto companies helping design & develop new protocols".

> Meanwhile, the actual products of the crypto industry are volatility and internet entertainment (fun, but hardly transformational).

You left off ransomware.

Breaking: Web3 devs reach sentience before AI.

I'm a web3 guy. Big believer in blockchain, and I know web3 is not limited to that. I think the consequences of blockchain tech might take several decades / centuries to become apparent ("the Romans had steam engines", etc).

When you take a break from it and come back you notice the significant usability hurdles with little-to-no functionality payoff to justify them.

The vast majority of people simply do not need a less trust-based, more complex financial system.

The penny-- er, satoshi-- finally drops, eh? Even the true believers are starting to wake up.

The democratisation of access to financial markets has had some beneficial knock-on effects like much cheaper cross-border payments.

Prior to 2010, banks were charging around 5% for a GBP-EUR transaction.

This is a benefit we all see - banks now can't get away with ripping people off like they used to, when I could make a cross border payment for less than 0.5% using a crypto exchange.

Also having the ability to hedge against quantitative easing has been a life-saver for many people.

"Web3"? Wow, that's a blast from the past.

The level to which Crypto has complicated my taxes in previous years has largely sucked the fun out of the concept. I just sit on my existing hoard like some sort of digital dragon.

A younger, more idealistic me thought some day it would replace cash, but having to track the value of every buy and sell is just too punitive for that purpose.

I suspect its largely because the one place where it could have world altering potential - replacement of fiat currency as general currency - got massive pushback. The reasons are varied & ultimately don't matter, just that it did.

That leaves just memes, speculation and illegal stuff basically.

There are many interesting Web3 apps, like decentralized social media, decentralized web (IPFS), decentralized domain names, decentralized organization management, etc, but they have not seemed to mature enough to become mainstream. They all have various kinds of problems with usability especially for "ordinary people". But the core idea is there and it's good: Make the Internet truly decentralized and peer-to-peer again, and enable it by incentivization via crypto transactions. But it's going to take time.

> Existing lobbying organizations, legacy industry, media, internet trolls and other anti-bodies are actively hostile to the space and intentionally slowing down progress. Even the rest of the technology industry actively hates crypto.

So everyone hates crypto and that's why Web3 is not taking off? Really? It's much more likely that there are simply no convincing practical use cases for it, and that's why all these people have been ignoring it, rightly so.

Who does?

I guess 2024 is the year "we're selling the future" and "the right side of history" strats were nerfed. Though, I suppose, they were just a disguised form of FOMO which will be perennial. At least, this is one a generation should now be inoculated against.