Readers of my blog may already be familiar with my thoughts on crypto and NFTs. To reiterate, in short; I’m bullish on blockchain, so-so on Bitcoin, looking closely at Ethereum, and skeptical about the longterm benefits of NFTs (though I think they could be a useful technology). If I had to summarize my opinion on the space in general I would still classify myself as mildly, yet cautiously optimistic here in early 2022. My feelings have certainly cooled over the last few years, but I don’t like where a lot of the effort is going currently.
All of that being said, I also feel it is important to balance the information I take in to make sure that I get a dose of both the optimistic and pessimistic sides of this debate. And I try hard to make sure the optimistic perspectives aren’t only voiced by those that stand to win financially if the price of any specific token spikes.
Molly White has put together a website titled “Web3 is going just great” wherein she collects the not-so-optimistic views of what many are unfortunately calling “Web3” – that is, blockchain, tokens, NFTs, DeFi, etc. She has also been blogging a bit on the topic as well.
I’ve put her feeds into my RSS reader.
An aside, if I may, regarding the use of the term “Web3”:
I find the use of this term unfortunate. There are so many parts to all of this that, of course, someone wanted a more approachable term to use, but I’d hate to think that it could ever be said that an entire “version of the web” was ever a scam. The web and Web 2.0, two eras that I lived through and am intimately familiar with, sort of felt like versions of the internet that we know. But Web3, or what is being called Web3, is far more complicated than that.
If Web3 were only a layer of ownership ontop of the independent, already decentralized, open source, owned-by-no one internet we already love – I’d be all for it. But when you lump it together with pump and dump tokens, out-of-this world prices for digital art that clearly show a bubble, and the toxic crypto-bro movement, then I feel like we need a different term.
The issue is that ship has already sailed. We’re stuck with it now. Blah.