Web3 refers to the emerging shift in internet value chains from permissioned, centralized databases to permissionless, decentralized databases where users own their data. The driving force behind Web3 is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a permissionless, decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial). For an even more limited set of applications, we can also enforce invariants while preserving the confidentiality of transactions.
With hindsight, the two technological breakthroughs that proved decentralized databases possible were Bitcoin and Zerocash. Bitcoin showed that state-machine replication (SMR) is solvable in a distributed, permissionless, partially synchronous setting with Byzantine fault tolerance. Zerocash showed that zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge can be used to ensure the confidentiality of transactions in this SMR setting.
The tech is improving rapidly and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art blockchains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.
As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases in a completely permission-less manner like you can fork code. This is how web development would look like:
You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.
Web 3 has been defined as all kinds of nonsense for the last 15 years. The first time I heard this was the semantic web and almost immediately business tried to redefine that term to some conglomeration of social media and advertising. Crypto isn't even decentralized, its distributed, which is the source of the sham.
Web X.whatever is not about content. Its not even about technology. That is why term has failed to stick each and every time. Business people looking to drum up VC need something like this because a simple catch phrase is easier to sell than a concept they have no hope of understanding or explaining.
Do you remember what Web2.0 was? Yes, this was a real concept, and yes it did succeed and proliferate. In short, Web2.0 was use of asynchronous HTTP requests from pages. At that time the technology was just XMLHttpRequest (XHR), but it wasn't about the technology. It was about what you did with it. If you cannot remember back to writing code for the front end web back to 2005-2007 when this first became a thing I don't expect this to make any sense to you because you have no context.
Back then the web was a series of HTML forms and/or static pages. That's it. Content could not change and information could not be submitted without loading a new page. XHR radically changed the experience and how users interfaced with data and how data providers interfaced with users. That change to the business experience was Web2.0. Back then it was a massive improvement, but then you also didn't have the world's largest frameworks to make it so slow and unoriginal.
If people want the Web3.0 moniker to stick to something then apply to something that radically changes how the user perceives the web. Crypto is not and will never be that thing. If VCs lack so much empathy they are bound for losses by shams and cons.
One example of what a Web3.0 could be is a streaming experience where pages load in less than 0.5 seconds (with full state management) and transmit/receive updates in near real time such that you only need a delay spinner for the extreme edge cases.
I am sure people would like the permissionless, decentralized databases if they didn't come with microtransactions that promise early adopters large gains at the expense of later users, like... a glorified ponzi scheme.
I think what gets me is that nobody ends up actually doing this.
The biggest and most productive entities on web3 that have the most users are the ones that everyone has heard of: crypto exchanges, or in other words, permissioned, centralized databases. Everything else seems to be a sideshow as far as actual usage is concerned. How do proponents of web3 square this?
I'm not aware of a centralized exchanges "on web3". Can you point to? Companies like Coinbase, Kraken, Binance are not "on web3", if that's what you mean.
There are few crypto exchanges that are "on web3", like Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, etc. And they don't rely on a centralized database.
This is a great summary. Many of the critiques I've read here criticize the early users of the technology, which is like blaming cars when the blame should be on bad drivers.
The main problem with it is that "web3" is a technological answer to what is not a technological problem. Aside from IP assignments, the internet is inherently decentralized as it is. It's just that people don't choose to use it that way.
Web3 or whatever might not be the answer, but you have to ask yourself a question: what's the internet going to look like in 2030, when the majority of its traffic is non-western, and a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia?
Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax?
Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
In case you lose this bet, you have to ask: what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks? Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations?
It can go either way, but it's definitely not going to be business as usual.
None of this, though reasonably stated, is good reason why crypto should underpin what comes next. And 7 years goes by fast. I've been in the web business professionally for almost 25 years and I can promise you that the fundamentals of the platform are not going to be upended by the fantasies of crypto dreamers by 2030. Hopefully we'll see more decentralization, or at least decentralized solutions more effectively competing with the centralized systems, but we're absolutely not going to see HTML, CSS, and JS apps and sites served over HTTPS replaced by this Web3 nonsense. My prediction is that the web of 2030 will look pretty much like it does today with a bit more capability and a somewhat different set of dominant players. My wish is that some of those dominant players are building experiences that are more user empowering, with better privacy and even anonymity characteristics.
Indeed, this is a weird false dichotomy being presented by the parent.
The current centralized corporate oligopoly may be terrible, but a crypto-underpinned "web3" would be even worse. Decentralization is laudable, but "web3" (taken to mean: some kind of blockchain / cryptocurrency bolted onto the web) doesn't solve any real problems that actually exist, and even if it did it still requires centralization in the form of exchanges to make it easy enough for normal users to interact with these things.
> Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple?
It'll be Baidu and Tencent, but yes. This is already happening, and the internet is becoming more centralized, not less. Global traffic is balkanized, but it's split up among regional centralized controlling interesting, not no controlling interests.
> Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
This is a false dichotomy. One need not bet for or against "current centralized western oligopolies" to bet against crypto fever dreams. One could assume that western oligopolies will be supplanted by eastern oligopolies, for example, or that the two will divvy up the market and coexist.
I would definitely bet in favor of large countries having separate social networks, because that's what we have now.
You seem to have a very western focus, and little to no understanding of how things are working in, say, China. Perhaps that's where you've gone wrong.
It even has a Google definition, to divide countries and make them enemies of each other.
Yet another victim of US imperialism. I weep for what was once a free and friendly nation. The kids nowadays are taught to hate their neighbors instead of learning how their parents or grandparents were part of a resistance that fought faschist Germany.
That's just an aside. Nothing to do with the topic. I will never forget how my niece walked home from school on a road that was bombed by freedom bombs by the USA 30 minutes later. Not a single soldier has stood trial.
Sorry that just struck a nerve, balkanized... is a word.
It's not a problem yet because for much of the developing world, large scale internet adoption is a very recent phenomenon. And the leadership in most of these countries is still non tech savvy. There has simply not been enough time for the people or their leadership/bureaucracies to figure out what the long-term impact of this technoloy will be.
India, for instance, had 250M internet users in 2015. That number is now nearly a billion. In nearly 25 years of the commercial internet, India could only bring 250M people online. Then it brought another 750M online in the span of just 7 years.
For the bulk of India's online population, the internet is still a novelty. A prime minister elected in 2014 - who claimed to be "tech savvy" - was 58 when the iPhone was released - not exactly an age where you "get" new technology immediately.
Now fast forward to 2032. A 65 year old prime ministerial candidate would have spent 22 years of his/her life in the smartphone world. The bulk of the population would have a decade's worth of experience of the digital world. Their understanding of the problems, risks, security issues, etc. would be far better.
Already, the Indian government has announced plans to create its own mobile app store after protests by entrepreneurs against Google's app store fees.
The history of technology over hundreds of years is a history of convergence to centralization that can only be disrupted by new technologies that will also converge to centralization. You're probably right that the current incumbents will eventually be replaced (not by 2030 though, that's only in a little more than seven years!), but they will need to be replaced by something that is at least 10x better AND has an extremely low barrier to entry. Decentralized solutions (as we currently understand them) don't offer either of those, and it's unlikely that they ever will.
What makes internet commerce any different from any other commerce? I will absolutely make this bet. We already see it.
Countries who don't like to play by the rules of US trade -- those who resist signing trade agreements and using our currency develop or attempt to develop alternatives, and if they lack the capability to do so, they turn to other powers (basically: China). Economic activity gets silo'd into blocs, depending on which large power you want to depend on. Some countries are very cozy to the United States and participate in its trade agreements, joint ventures, currency, etc. Some countries do not.
Internet commerce is not any different at all, and cryptocurrency does not change this one bit. For example, China notably separates its internet traffic from the United States by giving heavy advantages to its own enterprises and internet infrastructure.
No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is. The exception, maybe, is North Korea. Cryptocurrency has allowed them to be sort of digital pirates through ransomware payments. And you can see why they do that (it's not because they're building a productive internet economy on cryptocurrency!) and what the result ends up being (nobody is collaborating on a crypto venture with North Koreans, despite the heavy flow of bitcoin in and out of that country!).
> No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is.
Yep. They won't. They will centralize control even more and things that are not as conducive for the ruling power will likely get delisted and deplatformed.
Which is precisely why building out the decentralized web matters. At the very least, there should be an alternative available to citizens. Even if its hard to access. The penalty for not building it out is walled gardens everywhere.
If it ends up being adopted by governments and companies, great. If it's just used by a bunch of nerds to send messages or money to friends outside the walled garden, then, too, it is worth building.
> a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia?
I don't know about Africa, but Asia already has a massive share of all purchasing power.
> Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax?
No, they're going to build things like Alibaba and Tencent and hold that control for themselves. Which they did do.
> Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
Crackdown on what? Speech or human rights or ...?
> what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks?
Well, they have largely done that, haven't they? The "X" in Musks's "X app" clearly stands for "Wish it was WeChat" with all of the social media, shopping, commerce, banking, and communication embedded in it.
> Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations?
This is also already happening, isn't it?
It seems like all of your hypothetical questions are already answered, and none of the answers are "Web 3."
I don't care much for the term. It's marketing hogwash. The anonymity of the space already attracts a lot of bullshit artists, but everything was ramped up to 11 because of the sheer insanity of the markets in 2020-21 across the board.
I hope that the terminology evolves, just as the space itself evolves as well.
More and more people realize the difference between cefi and defi. I have never seen a defi protocol wrecked during this bear market. Everybody is talking about Tether, but who knows DAI ?
Massive purchasing power of Africa, Asia? I don't believe so. USA is the major importer of illegal drugs, why? Because Americans have the purchasing power. Every country on the earth wants to export their stuff to the US. China doesn't want to depend on the West anymore--only way to do is to build their own domestic economy.
The critiques aren't short sighted. Cryptocurrency schemes are not the future of the web. Cryptocurrency is useful as a darknet currency, other than that it's all shell games, flitting around useless tokens without any productive work being done.
Yeah, having all transactions traceable on a public ledger is surely 'useful' for criminals, scammers, etc for everyone to see once it hits the exchange. /s
centralisation is human: it’s far more plausible that there’ll be multiple centralised systems separated by cultural boundaries — examples already exist, like China — than humans doing some sort radical cross-cultural shift from centralisation to decentralisation (which is itself a strange western-libertarian obsession).
This is precisely why I care about this "decentralized" web. I don't want to live in a China-like walled garden. In the absence of decentralized alternatives, enforcing such walled gardens just becomes easier.
The irony of this post criticizing DeFi and blockchain in the wake of FTX is that those decentralized applications are working just fine in this downturn. Aave and Uniswap aren’t failing, they are thriving.
Isn’t that the point? The protocols are built to resist changes by single entities and continue working as expected, handling user deposits non custodially, regardless of market activity. HN can declare a dozen crypto deaths with each new CEX and Uniswap will just keep filling orders for whoever is sending value through it.
That's the protocol working exactly as it's designed. Everything was transparently visible. Anyone could see where the funds were at any given point, what the liquidation price was, and what the total liabilities were.
If you ride a fast motorcycle and fall off because you were speeding, it's not really the fault of the motorcycle, is it?
If you want to charge people to do things on your website, you can do that today and it doesn't require the use of blockchain or the creation of new tokens for payment.
This is better. I always equated web 1.0 with “before web 2.0”, I did not know of Berner-lee’s description. There were lots of dynamic server apps between 1.0 and 2.0.
For SSO, the link does a good job presenting various pros and cons. I don’t think it backs up the articles dismissal.
>The real single reason for which I believe that all this will come tumbling down is cause of the fact that all this is falsely hyped as being something better than its predecessors but in reality it is not.
How so? If you're saying that this is the one single reason, then you have to support it with evidence.
> How so? If you're saying that this is the one single reason, then you have to support it with evidence.
This feels like asking someone to prove a negative by providing singular examples.
I’m still looking for an example of a web3 product that is more usable, more beneficial, and more attractive than the centralized equivalent. So far the only real benefits appear to be decentralized censorship resistance and, arguably, the unnecessary tokenization that allows early adopters to get wealthy based on speculation of future functionality.
They really don't. Not every document has to include all things relevant back to the big bang. That bit in particular has been discussed by lots of people for quite a while, including a ton of posts right here, so if you just fell off the turnip truck and are truly unaware of the web3 critiques, a little searching should set you straight. Heck, I'll even give you a place to start: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
Yeah, 'Days since a car did not crash into another car. hence why all cars are dangerous and will never take off over horse and carriages'. - Car skeptic.
By now there should have been a worldwide 100% complete total ban on crypto a long time ago, just like the usage of Tor. Why didn't this happen? It's simply due to the fact that it is close to impossible to ban all of it. Regulators and crypto skeptics already know this, and instead both crypto supporters and skeptics will compromise and enforce regulations on cryptocurrencies, exchanges, etc.
Hence, only some cryptocurrencies, exchanges will survive past regulations and will continue to be widely used. I'm afraid crypto is here to stay like it or not.
That's not a good enough critique of a new tech. Applicable once it has reached maturity, but Ethereum and EVM smart contracts are relatively very new. If they're still slow and expensive in 2025, Web3 will rightly deserve to be forgotten and abandoned.
Readit News
With hindsight, the two technological breakthroughs that proved decentralized databases possible were Bitcoin and Zerocash. Bitcoin showed that state-machine replication (SMR) is solvable in a distributed, permissionless, partially synchronous setting with Byzantine fault tolerance. Zerocash showed that zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge can be used to ensure the confidentiality of transactions in this SMR setting.
The tech is improving rapidly and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art blockchains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.
As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases in a completely permission-less manner like you can fork code. This is how web development would look like:
You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.
Web X.whatever is not about content. Its not even about technology. That is why term has failed to stick each and every time. Business people looking to drum up VC need something like this because a simple catch phrase is easier to sell than a concept they have no hope of understanding or explaining.
Do you remember what Web2.0 was? Yes, this was a real concept, and yes it did succeed and proliferate. In short, Web2.0 was use of asynchronous HTTP requests from pages. At that time the technology was just XMLHttpRequest (XHR), but it wasn't about the technology. It was about what you did with it. If you cannot remember back to writing code for the front end web back to 2005-2007 when this first became a thing I don't expect this to make any sense to you because you have no context.
Back then the web was a series of HTML forms and/or static pages. That's it. Content could not change and information could not be submitted without loading a new page. XHR radically changed the experience and how users interfaced with data and how data providers interfaced with users. That change to the business experience was Web2.0. Back then it was a massive improvement, but then you also didn't have the world's largest frameworks to make it so slow and unoriginal.
If people want the Web3.0 moniker to stick to something then apply to something that radically changes how the user perceives the web. Crypto is not and will never be that thing. If VCs lack so much empathy they are bound for losses by shams and cons.
One example of what a Web3.0 could be is a streaming experience where pages load in less than 0.5 seconds (with full state management) and transmit/receive updates in near real time such that you only need a delay spinner for the extreme edge cases.
The biggest and most productive entities on web3 that have the most users are the ones that everyone has heard of: crypto exchanges, or in other words, permissioned, centralized databases. Everything else seems to be a sideshow as far as actual usage is concerned. How do proponents of web3 square this?
There are few crypto exchanges that are "on web3", like Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, etc. And they don't rely on a centralized database.
Dead Comment
Web3 or whatever might not be the answer, but you have to ask yourself a question: what's the internet going to look like in 2030, when the majority of its traffic is non-western, and a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia?
Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax?
Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
In case you lose this bet, you have to ask: what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks? Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations?
It can go either way, but it's definitely not going to be business as usual.
The current centralized corporate oligopoly may be terrible, but a crypto-underpinned "web3" would be even worse. Decentralization is laudable, but "web3" (taken to mean: some kind of blockchain / cryptocurrency bolted onto the web) doesn't solve any real problems that actually exist, and even if it did it still requires centralization in the form of exchanges to make it easy enough for normal users to interact with these things.
It'll be Baidu and Tencent, but yes. This is already happening, and the internet is becoming more centralized, not less. Global traffic is balkanized, but it's split up among regional centralized controlling interesting, not no controlling interests.
> Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
This is a false dichotomy. One need not bet for or against "current centralized western oligopolies" to bet against crypto fever dreams. One could assume that western oligopolies will be supplanted by eastern oligopolies, for example, or that the two will divvy up the market and coexist.
I would definitely bet in favor of large countries having separate social networks, because that's what we have now.
You seem to have a very western focus, and little to no understanding of how things are working in, say, China. Perhaps that's where you've gone wrong.
It even has a Google definition, to divide countries and make them enemies of each other.
Yet another victim of US imperialism. I weep for what was once a free and friendly nation. The kids nowadays are taught to hate their neighbors instead of learning how their parents or grandparents were part of a resistance that fought faschist Germany.
That's just an aside. Nothing to do with the topic. I will never forget how my niece walked home from school on a road that was bombed by freedom bombs by the USA 30 minutes later. Not a single soldier has stood trial. Sorry that just struck a nerve, balkanized... is a word.
Centralization works. You may not like it and you hope that developing world won’t either, but WhatsApps success sort of invalidates all your points.
Countries are fine handing over nearly all their data to whatever platform works best, because who wants less than the best?
India, for instance, had 250M internet users in 2015. That number is now nearly a billion. In nearly 25 years of the commercial internet, India could only bring 250M people online. Then it brought another 750M online in the span of just 7 years.
For the bulk of India's online population, the internet is still a novelty. A prime minister elected in 2014 - who claimed to be "tech savvy" - was 58 when the iPhone was released - not exactly an age where you "get" new technology immediately.
Now fast forward to 2032. A 65 year old prime ministerial candidate would have spent 22 years of his/her life in the smartphone world. The bulk of the population would have a decade's worth of experience of the digital world. Their understanding of the problems, risks, security issues, etc. would be far better.
Already, the Indian government has announced plans to create its own mobile app store after protests by entrepreneurs against Google's app store fees.
This is only going to increase moving forward.
Countries who don't like to play by the rules of US trade -- those who resist signing trade agreements and using our currency develop or attempt to develop alternatives, and if they lack the capability to do so, they turn to other powers (basically: China). Economic activity gets silo'd into blocs, depending on which large power you want to depend on. Some countries are very cozy to the United States and participate in its trade agreements, joint ventures, currency, etc. Some countries do not.
Internet commerce is not any different at all, and cryptocurrency does not change this one bit. For example, China notably separates its internet traffic from the United States by giving heavy advantages to its own enterprises and internet infrastructure.
No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is. The exception, maybe, is North Korea. Cryptocurrency has allowed them to be sort of digital pirates through ransomware payments. And you can see why they do that (it's not because they're building a productive internet economy on cryptocurrency!) and what the result ends up being (nobody is collaborating on a crypto venture with North Koreans, despite the heavy flow of bitcoin in and out of that country!).
Yep. They won't. They will centralize control even more and things that are not as conducive for the ruling power will likely get delisted and deplatformed.
Which is precisely why building out the decentralized web matters. At the very least, there should be an alternative available to citizens. Even if its hard to access. The penalty for not building it out is walled gardens everywhere.
If it ends up being adopted by governments and companies, great. If it's just used by a bunch of nerds to send messages or money to friends outside the walled garden, then, too, it is worth building.
Surely, a reader of HackerNews would agree.
I don't know about Africa, but Asia already has a massive share of all purchasing power.
> Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax?
No, they're going to build things like Alibaba and Tencent and hold that control for themselves. Which they did do.
> Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
Crackdown on what? Speech or human rights or ...?
> what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks?
Well, they have largely done that, haven't they? The "X" in Musks's "X app" clearly stands for "Wish it was WeChat" with all of the social media, shopping, commerce, banking, and communication embedded in it.
> Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations?
This is also already happening, isn't it?
It seems like all of your hypothetical questions are already answered, and none of the answers are "Web 3."
I liked the term web3 somehow, but the more I read how people react to it, it might be already burned.
I hope that the terminology evolves, just as the space itself evolves as well.
Yeah, having all transactions traceable on a public ledger is surely 'useful' for criminals, scammers, etc for everyone to see once it hits the exchange. /s
"
There are many reasons contributing to the failure of Web3 but the most fundamental ones –
Sophisticated & Tedious Development
Self Governance & Lack of Compliance
Built upon Delusions & Lies
Not better than its predecessors in anyway
Prone to all kinds of Cybersecurity issues that can’t be eliminated
"
>The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her January 1999 article "Fragmented Future": [...]
Then Web 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, and 11.0 immediately followed in a quick succession over a few short years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0
My web goes to 11, so I stopped paying attention after that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE
Web 3.0 sounds antique!
If you ride a fast motorcycle and fall off because you were speeding, it's not really the fault of the motorcycle, is it?
> People who think a single-sign on is somehow a good thing.
I would love to see this expanded on… I stopped reading after that.
https://sis.binus.ac.id/2022/07/21/the-differences-between-w...
https://www.renovodata.com/blog/2019/01/17/single-sign-on
For SSO, the link does a good job presenting various pros and cons. I don’t think it backs up the articles dismissal.
How so? If you're saying that this is the one single reason, then you have to support it with evidence.
This feels like asking someone to prove a negative by providing singular examples.
I’m still looking for an example of a web3 product that is more usable, more beneficial, and more attractive than the centralized equivalent. So far the only real benefits appear to be decentralized censorship resistance and, arguably, the unnecessary tokenization that allows early adopters to get wealthy based on speculation of future functionality.
Yeah, 'Days since a car did not crash into another car. hence why all cars are dangerous and will never take off over horse and carriages'. - Car skeptic.
By now there should have been a worldwide 100% complete total ban on crypto a long time ago, just like the usage of Tor. Why didn't this happen? It's simply due to the fact that it is close to impossible to ban all of it. Regulators and crypto skeptics already know this, and instead both crypto supporters and skeptics will compromise and enforce regulations on cryptocurrencies, exchanges, etc.
Hence, only some cryptocurrencies, exchanges will survive past regulations and will continue to be widely used. I'm afraid crypto is here to stay like it or not.
If not, then why should a scam on a blockchain be evidence that that blockchain itself is a scam?