Web3? I have my DAOts
I find both the evangelism of and the hostility towards “Web 3” kind of silly. Obviously there’s <i>some</i> amount of interesting stuff and obviously there’s <i>some</i> amount of tech bro assholes getting rich who “shouldn’t”.<p>Just like ~2008-2012, ~1999-2002, ~1994-1996, ~1982-1986, etc.<p>On the technology side: distributed Byzantine consensus is an open problem with some promising prototypes. It <i>would</i> have very cool use cases: remittance is <i>huge</i>, ENS is fucking cool, Brave&#x2F;BAT is cool, NFTs for e.g. concert tickets or restaurant reservations or whatever would be cool, IPFS is cool.<p>The technology isn’t there yet. POW doesn’t scale. Ouroboros Praus&#x2F;Genesis needs a clock oracle (see: Spanner), Tendermint&#x2F;Algorand&#x2F;PBFT are too slow (global 3-phase. commit, right). Solana&#x2F;ICON&#x2F;etc. are expensive cloud databases. L2 rollups&#x2F;Lightning&#x2F;sharding are “kick-the-can” exercises. But it took time to go from the Paxos paper to Chubby as well, maybe someone solves it.<p>Yeah, it’s mostly scams today. But it’s always been mostly scams. Microsoft bundling IE was a scam. Pets.com was a scam. Path was a scam. Uber and AirBnB were (are?) illegal as hell. Third-party cookies powering Google and FB is a scam.<p>When the dust settles some amount of this stuff will have been worked out technically, legally, and financially, and the rest will be “lol do you remember when…”.<p>This time some people will be rich who neither had rich parents nor knew Bay Area royalty, but YC wasn’t always part of the machine either. I’m sure Goldman and YC will eventually embrace those people with open arms.<p>I for one look forward to us collectively getting our knickers untwisted about it so we can go back to rewriting every calculator app on earth in Rust (I kid! Don’t hit me! Doofy Haskell is better than no Haskell!).<p>;)