These arguments aren't very good. While I'm not interested in Web3 outside a couple of use cases, the arguments against in the article make it more appealing be

These arguments aren't very good. While I'm not interested in Web3 outside a couple of use cases, the arguments against in the article make it more appealing because now I want to find how to take a bet that the author is wrong. The argument that blockchains and the associated protocols aren't decentralized reduces to anything happening between more than one counterparty is now defined as centralized, and that the correlation from co-ordinating their activities via a blockchain protocol means it's centralized. These are circular definitions. The climate argument against proof of work using electricity ignores how demand for electricity creates the economics for green tech innovation that actually solve the carbon problem. The article is another example of rhetorically exploiting basic human energy needs as a crisis narrative in support of levering in more centralized governance. As soon as we have viable geothermal and nuclear solutions, I'm pretty sure the climate people are going to move on from carbon and start militating against heat and entropy next. They don't want solutions, they just need an infinite conflict that they can be the managers of and gatekeepers to. Conflict is energy in politics, and so permanent revolution against some basic unresolvable conflict is a source of political justification to organize people against something. The nebulous, unsolvable crisis is the perpetual motion machine of political organizing, and it is as much of a fraud as a purported physical one. If you think cryptocurrency people are cynical grifters, may I introduce you to political activists. Their "narrative" is just a fancy euphemism for conspiring to lie. Whether it's useful to point this out or not, the quiet part of Web3 is it is clearly an "exit" from the hegemonic internet (hegemonet?), and they're inventing peaceful technological alternatives to what was essentially a managerialist putsch, co-opting, and occupation of the internet. The criticism in the article seems like just another vehicle for standard complaints and ingroup concern signalling. >Blockchains don’t solve the problems they’re supposed to solve. They do cause new problems though. There’s a huge negative climate impact associated with it. The miners buy so much hardware that it’s been affecting the availability of graphics cards for years now. It makes grifters rich. Just to name a few. The real objection to web3 reduces to the same old tropes about the wrong kind of people becoming financially independent and not having to be accountable to the narratives of political hucksters. Web3 is at the peak of it's hype cycle, so there isn't much to defend about it, but arguments like these against it seem like a straw man for the same old tropes.