Once a phrase gains mainstream adoption and starts to rapidly lose meaning, I find that people who care dearly about that thing start calling it something else.
That said -- I really struggle to find the people who are really all in on crypto in a technical sense. Where are the people building cool things and trying to push the boundaries with crypto? Surely it's still happening but just hard to find it in all the debris/trash.
I appreciate the candor -- I still hold out hope, thinking maybe PoS (with equally bought-in parties) could work, but at that point you might as well have regular old paper and pencil coordination/contracts...
The tech is novel, but the applications just don't seem to be falling into place at all... I even consider the ability for it to function as cool points (not NFTs but just a way to make and check exclusive tokens) is OK because it gives community builders a way to pull forward revenue. If I think of it like a self-hosted app for managing exclusive tokens then I can kind of see a use -- if before people didn't have an on-ramp to enforcing their own manufactured exclusivity then maybe it has some positive effects...
Unfortunately right now it looks like the ecosystem is just a backdoor to unregulated securities. Some of the automated exchange stuff (uniswap and co) seemed cool too though I haven't looked too deeply at them.
In 2022, is there any money to be made there, other than:
1. Money that comes from 'less lucky' entrants in the various zero sum schemes?
2. Money that comes from selling shovels to the con artists running #1?
As a bystander, I'm not seeing any other ways that 'web3' is making money - and I'd argue that if it's just those two, then that's a pretty bad use case. I mean, it's good for the participants who are making money, but all that money comes from impoverishing others.
Which is precisely why you see dApp usage numbers crater. Check out OpenSea's daily volume on Dune.xyz as an example - down to $30M/day from consistent $150M/day even a month ago.
Like buying a monthly subscription for a tool like, say, Icy.tools, is so much faster when you can pay directly with metamask. No accounts, no logins, no credit card screens.
The catch, of course, is that for the tech to get adopted by the mainstream, you will need way more regulations and safeguards. Maybe KYC on wallets (which means creating accounts/logins), maybe the ability to reverse transactions to reduce fraud.
All of these regulations might introduce enough friction that the final experience doesn't differ much from current legacy systems.
But a built-in browser wallet that makes payments (including micropayments) easier is really needed. It's the only antidote to our current advertising dependent model of the web.
And by "making money", we really mean transferring money from gullible and/or desperate fools to unscrupulous insiders.
The number of developers became a key metric for coins to project legitimacy and there are certainly SWEs who are bad actors and/or knowingly contributing
Scaling also doesn’t seem to be in the interest of miners who essentially provide the network security…
No sign-up flow, no emails, no commitment. You just tap login and you have an account. One more tap and you've paid.
Plus other benefits like effectively free micro-transactions as small as thousands of a penny at a transaction rate in tens of milliseconds, for some chains (e.g. Solana w/Phantom or SolFlare browser extension).
All this adds up to being able to try, pay, assess, and "logout" of any completely novel (to you) service/site faster than a WSJ article page can load.
The effortless of the user experience doesn't translate well to words. Getting use to this frictionless use of compatable web apps is an experience qualitatively similar to browsing the web with an ad blocker. You can't go back. Going back feels broken, messy, slow, and outright aggravating.
What this says about the original purpose of Bitcoin is left to the reader.
Which is why I said that the tech really needs a lot of improvements. But the core idea of a browser wallet that takes care of logins and payments is really powerful and might just be crypto’s killer app
Whether it comes back or not will depend, imo, on Bitcoin adhering to the 4 year cycle. So far, Bitcoin has gone up after every halving. Bitcoin leads and the market follows on the “inevitability” of Bitcoin going up after a halving.
But Bitcoin has also only existed in a relaxed regulatory regime and a monetary policy of low rates and cheap money. Now cheap money is off the table and the market has become too big to go unregulated.
If Bitcoin doesn’t go up in the next cycle, it might just break faith in the market and then who knows?
I’d check back in mid-late 2023 if I were you. You might also want to learn some solidity development. All the decent devs I know who were active from 2019 onwards made 8 figures this run