zlacker

I was big into the concept of web3 around 2016 when the hype had barely started rolling. If you compare the vision then to now it's not hard to realize that the vision is dead.

"Ethereum" was going to be a suite of tools of which what we call Ethereum today was only one. There was supposed to be a swarm protocol to enable distributed transfer of files, a message transport protocol, a human readable naming system (ENS does exist but it is not quite what was defined early on) and all coming together in Mist browser.

So then we got IPFS, which replaced Swarm, and the EF decided to focus on the EVM and let the community develop other compoenets that could become web3. Ok, cool, why reinvent the wheel. They ditched Mist and stopped maintaining a reference implementation, again, letting the community build. Then Metamask came out, and the rest is history: "web3" is now just websites that pitch you NFTs.

Today, Ethereum is cool; it's a place to launch unregistered securities that cannot be stopped, to trade assets in a decentralized manner. It gives everyone censorship resistance for finance. Some cool things have been built in the process, liquidity pools are revolutionary. But web3? Where is it? I can't even see it being over the horizon no matter how hard I squint. It's a bunch of webdevs pitching tokens to get rich.