While web3 is a pretty all-encompassing term to deal with crypto, blockchain, and honestly things that may not even be properly labelled, there are so many things that are appealing around this space.

Spending some time in this space and the rabbithole, there are also a variety of people - the maximilists, the dabblers, and those who believe web3 can coexist with the current society. I roughly classify as the latter. I think there are major benefits that this space is bringing, especially in the online realm, but has its own limitations and shortcoming.

Compared to what I wrote in my musing around AI, I think Crypto and Web3 have not hit its moment of mass adoption, and the reason for this are a few things: 1) user experience and 2) lack of necessity.

Expanding on the first point, there are close to no applications and use cases that are valuable for actual non-technical users. And where we are today, the majority of people around the world are not technical. I envision web3 being an ideal way to navigate around the web, and not be tethered to large walled gardens like big tech and current social landscapes. The most exciting piece I find in this space is the usage of what we currently call “wallets” as ID’s, and allow for each website to greet us personally when we get on their site.

As for the second piece, it is crucial to own our data and be able to user our social graph wherever we go, but the mass majority still doesn’t have this need. Typically, people are reactive rather than proactive (look at climate change!) and until many major companies are outright bad actors, it may be hard to justify the switch. This doesn’t mean this attitude won’t change, but the use case needs to be driven home to be much more relevant to people in their daily lives.