7 Reasons That Web3 Yes, But Not Quite Yet.
It might come as a surprise to some of you but we aren't in web3. We are barely in web2.5 and web3 will take years to become our internet reality. Yet with that said, we are living in a Rennasaiance. The impact of technology in the next 10 years will overshadow the advances of the first Rennasaiance, one that included breakthroughs in literacy, art, technology, and business opportunity.
Yet…
The Future of the internet
We have seen this before. The most technical and business savvy people who bet on the internet in the 90's as well as criticized the whole value of the internet being more than a fad. You can watch interviews with Jeff Bezos were journalists literally laugh at the idea of an "online" store for all your needs. Yet here we are in 2022 and web3 (more like web2.3) is the next major phase of the internet. Just like in 2006-2008 when people laughed at the idea of social media, using twitter and Facebook are now as commonplace and more so than a newspaper and your favorite news station. Yet why is there so much buzz, confusion, doubt, and scams? Simple, growing pains. How many websites were made in 1999? How many startups were giving millions to "build the internet" which then literally went to ZERO in 2000.
It is critical that people educate themselves on how web3 elements work and their purpose but it must be driven but individual professional (or hobby) pathways. People struggle to explain blockchain as a step to validate this technology yet how many people can explain TCP/IP? How many people understand how DNS work? You don't need to know how to build a blockchain but you would benefit from knowing a bit about it.
"Blockchain is 100% secure and cannot be hacked.”
Silly. THE DAO (the first DAO created by the original Ethereum network) was hacked and caused Ethereum to fork (separate from the original chain because of vulnerabilities) which liquidated something around 3.5M Ethereum which today is around $9 Billion. Polygon JUST did a silent fork in January because of a discovered exploit that could liquidated the entire blockchain. Blockchain is new. A tech built from the ground up by anyone including you and me. Secure? With hardworking yes. Transparent? For the most part? The future of the internet? 100%.
Crypto is the future of money
Is crypto the future of money? Not in the sense of replacing government and centralized backed currencies but it will definitely be the future of global financial interaction as well as how we engage in different digital and IRL services. This will take time, maybe 2-3 years for any sense of mainstream adoption but it is moving fast. Coinbase had 10M hits on their app from a 30 second SuperBowl commercial. People are curious but they don't understand The who, what, when, where, and why of web3. They need to be educated. Just take the war in Ukraine for example where $10M in ETH was raised in a few minutes and delivered directly to those organizations on the ground in a day or so. That process would take weeks with our regular financial system that is built on the backbone of banks micro-investing funds as they are transferred. Which is why I needed to wait 5 days for my dollars to move over to eth from my bank to the exchange last week.
The Metaverse is the future of life
The metaverse is some weird buzzword right now. There is no metaverse because the true metaverse is the internet jus like today the internet and social media are synonymous. Second Life was an awesome attempt but the fact is that people don't want to leave their regular boring life to go live a regular boring second life. The metaverse (the universe of the internet) ideally will connect websites that we can call galaxies or planets which will let your data (your assets, yours avatars, your goods and services) to travel with you wherever you go. Until we break down the walled garden of the internet,we will have no metaverse. No major tech company will allow this so it will be up to the people to build truly decentralized platforms and the tech companies will follow as planets or galaxies. Facebook will NOT be the metaverse. I have seen in the past year that society is not ready for decentralization and most of the scams and attacks on individuals show that centralized products or companies still play a huge role like Coinbase and OpenSea.
“We have to decentralize the internet.”
Seeing as most billionaires already either own crypto like Bitcoin either publicly or privately or outright balk at the idea, I am no longer very concerned about billionaires. Buffet finally sold off millions of shares of Visa and MasterCard to invest in NuBank which has a major position in crypto to ease himself in. Saylor and Musk's companies both own thousands of bitcoin yet we know that millions of bitcoin are held by regular people like you and me who took a risk to spend $2-5,000 on Bitcoin in 2013 and now have thousands of them. Can oil companies like Exxon spend billions mining the last 2 million Bitcoin? They could? Will they? No. The largest non exchange (non tech company) wallet bought 3,241 BTC last week. Who is that? 🤔
Middlemen have a value but they take advantage of their mediation for unbalanced profit for service. We can literally map out Musk's tweets crashing crypto yet why are we so focused on this? Hedge fund managers have gone on TV for decades FUDing stocks that they are shorting which is totally legal and isn't considered a discredit to the stock market.
Crypto has no true value
Why is gold valuable? Because society said so. If you would say gold isn't valuable people would not take you seriously. Why though? Why is gold valuable? Crypto will be the same in the next 10 years. We will look back and laugh that we couldn't image a digital element being worth something. Some might be gold and diamonds while others will be cubic zirconia. Meanwhile we spend billions annually for our digital storefronts, digital social media growth, and other digital things that have established value 25 years later. It will take time but the above will have to stand with your thoughts on equal ground for now.
Web3 is full of buzz and you see it at conferences
I have attended 4 crypto conferences in the past few months since moving to Miami, which some call the (aspiring) Crypto capital of the world. If you don't have a CTO or engineer on stage who is building and everyone is just marketing and business than the conference is a joke. You need a balance of investors, creators, technical, and marketing professionals to cater to everyones needs but the L1 to L2 dribble is usually comical. How does L2 work? Why do we need L2? Can we just make L1 faster and bigger? If the response is buzz buzz then just move on.
Web3 but not yet
We are definitely not in web3 right now but we are building. We are in the midst of the 1999-2000 phase and you will see scams, hacks, moonshots, fails, and through the rubble you will see decentralized Amazons and Googles come out and build a foundation that's truly web3 paving the way for companies and projects to follow and thrive. I hope we don't live in the metaverse like Ready Player One. I think the social commentary on digital escapism is a depressing one but I do see value in the metaverse to connect society on a new level just like social media did.
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