There was a time, earlier this year, when everyone I knew was talking about NFTs and the decentralized internet. Companies, conferences and even VC firms specializing in the future of internet sprung everywhere, even here in my small north african country.
Cryptocurrencies are, at least from what I can see, are losing steam. The collapse of FTX, and apparently other exchanges to follow, has proven to be shocking enough for some people to have second thoughts.
In the midst of all of this, where does the web3 stand? I admit that I know so little about this new tech/paradigm that I have to google it whenever I have to speak about it, so maybe all of this has no impact? Does it even matter?
It's a cool marketing phrase that probably won't come to anything. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though as web evolution will always be interesting.
Not the first time that's happened. This is like the fourth or fifth crypto winter in the past ten years or so. It will probably start coming back in a year or two.
As for Web3, there are people still quietly building out there. I think it's still pretty early, much like there wasn't much infrastructure around bitcoin three crypto winters ago. People just kept building around it, and some of those things eventually became a big deal as people slowly started accumulating coins again.
I could be wrong about the latter. Web3 might have just been a flash in the pan, although I suspect smart contracts are here to stay in some form (if not under the term 'Web3').
But I'm pretty sure crypto is going to have another bull run in the next couple of years. Maybe bitcoin won't get back up to it's current ATH of $68k, but I suspect it will at least 2x or 3x where it's at now again.
Unless something like WWIII kicks off in the next couple of years, then none of this will matter anymore.
[^1]: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...
My view is that decentralization is not the panacea it's being claimed to be. Humanity is not inherently trustless and we naturally want to hold something or someone accountable when things go wrong, and if we think this is solvable by complex technical transparency, we've missed the whole field of UX and why Apple is so successful. Do you really think the average person cares about a decentralized version of Instagram? Even in networks that seem decentralized, a lot of times scalability issues can only be solved through centralization.
Beyond that decentralization is naturally against the establishment, and the establishment won't go down with a fight. The only future decentralization has is if the establishment keeps getting weaker.
If you mean anything else by Web3, I'm not 100% sure. I have no idea what the term means tbh. It's being used to peddle a whole host of things.
I also think Web3 assumes that we've finished being in "Web2" whatever that even means. I guess Web2 is really the emergence of cloud computing, SaaS and mobile computing networks. I'm not sure that's quite over. I'm not really sure we need to evolve this. Or does Web2 mean big web companies who sell ads? If that's what it means, we can deem these companies (e.g. Google) as necessary infrastructure and regulate the crap out of them. The problem with these terms is they're just meaningless mumbo jumbo mostly created by people who have no depth.
Anything that people come up with will surely be met with "you could already do that with X" types of arguments. We have so many examples of pre-existing ways to solve problems, like the plethora of JS frameworks. Blockchain and/or smart contracts might provide new ways to solve existing problems in a way that provides more value to people or an improvement on existing solutions.
Speculating on price has never been super exciting to me (no judgement, just not my thing) but building apps out of it is pretty appealing. That's still perfectly possible today.
Sometimes it's during the down cycles like this that the cool stuff gets founded / built.