We Probably Need Web2.75 First
Web3. We’re just not ready yet. Forget the jetpack metaphors. We need a way to pay for things on the web as easy as a real credit card. I’m talking about paying by tapping. No validation. No weird super long sequence of words. I’m talking about comfort, safety and speed. But more than anything, I’m saying we need to think about how we got to where we were, which is all about payments.
I was involved in the “scene,” if you want to call it that, for about three years on a professional basis and left largely because, besides the just gross and crass over-financialisation of everything, I saw less and less efforts towards mass adoption. If anything, it seemed the opposite was happening. The technology progresses amazingly (Ethereum is now Proof of Stake? Amazing.) and asset values go up and down, and there are no more usable things for regular people it seems1.
You know who is saying we need more crypto? The people who are holding most of it.
You know who is saying we need practical blockchain applications? No one. Not really anymore it seems.
I’m critical of the scene formerly known as blockchain in general because I see horrendous amounts of lost potential. It became, perhaps non-ironically, all about money and not about much else which is very sad and such a waste.
There were a couple of years ago, during regrettably the whole ICO boom and prior to its bust, tons of experimentation, promises of reworking everything and earnest and honest attempts at that. Putting land deeds on the/a blockchain, automating freight forwarding payments and approvals through smart contracts and even trying to make proper digital IDs. Most of these died and people, bless them, are still trying with the ID thing. Then the big money people realised there’s a whole section of technology largely without any real legal oversight or regulation and then waltzed in. All the projects trying to do anything that wasn’t shuffling and churning internet money into other forms of internet money and betting on every angle of it withered away and it is now all about financialising anything and everything.
Now, there seems to be this idea that if you keep on building, keep on inventing new protocols and chains and who knows what else, that somehow people and their needs will magically appear. But right now, and hopefully for not much longer, the users are people interested in moving around money and betting on the moving of that money around. Trading for trading’s sake and then building more and more chains and protocols to support that.
So while we as an internet species should have been advancing things and trying to make things better by getting more of humanity using a new and possibly fairer way of doing things electronically, things have just been made easier and better for people with money. We didn’t build bridges to web3 to web2 users, we built tankers for
I’m happy to be proven wrong on this if someone wants to show me some evidence showing this. Even using the word “regular” is loaded as all hell. The point is that even if you’re a well versed and consistent internet user, chances are you don’t have the time not patience to ever even use a crypto wallet which seems to be the only way of doing anything. ↩︎