The two biggest critiques of web3, analyzed

The main use-case of web3 is speculation and money laundering. We’ve been promised much more, but at this point blockchain technology is over a decade old. It didn’t take web1 nearly this long to flourish after the browser and HTTP were invented. Shouldn’t more have happened by now?

Pretty much anything that can be done on a blockchain can be done in web2. Sure, you have to trust a centralized provider, but 99% of the time that’s fine. Society requires trust to function.

There isn’t much that blockchains enable that would be impossible to implement in a web2 way. It wouldn’t be trustless and decentralized—but the benefits of decentralization are way too abstract and vague to compel most people.

Ask any software developer—the web as it exists today would be impossible without open source. If I had to point to a single cause of the tech boom from 2010’s to today, it would be either open source or cheap cloud computing. Frankly it’s a tie.

Now imagine the impact open source could have if people weren’t just incentivized by status or high-paying jobs, but also by value creation via tokens.

Just as the computing industry moved from a totally integrated system controlled by IBM to a more open and modular one, web3 is a movement to rebuild the internet in a more open, modular way.

But though I think these critiques are both mostly true, the recent realization I had is that doesn’t necessarily mean web3 is doomed. In fact, many new technologies that have been hugely impactful and successful in the past have faced similar critiques—and overcome them. Turns out, web3 fits the pattern of a very specific type of innovation fairly... See more

And all this happened with surprisingly little at stake: in the case of open source the main incentive is just individual software engineers gaining prestige and high-paying jobs. Nadia Eghbal has written extensively about the incentive problems in the open source community holding back progress.