Web3 is going just great
All the Web3 criticisms remind me of my experiences with Star Trek.<p>For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art.<p>But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men.<p>This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions).<p>I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed?<p>Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions.<p>But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software.<p>So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become.<p>I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.