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Because most people can tell a scammers market when they see one. When people run around and say things like "you're guaranteed to 100x", the rest of us know i

Because most people can tell a scammers market when they see one. When people run around and say things like "you're guaranteed to 100x", the rest of us know it's either a lie or self-delusion. We also know that past 100x examples were only possible because use growth was rapid enough to enable ponzi schemes I want to be clear: there's value in the ideas underlying web3/crypto/dweb. But nobody has been able to articulate that value clearly to ring out above all the snake oil. The market will go through a major shake out the next few years, and then we'll start seeing value emerge. It's currently were the web1 was 1999 - lots of completely overlooked promises that clearly cannot be kept, collapse about to happen. This will clean out the market. What remains will likely be staid, boring applications. And people will take what they learned and build more interesting stuff on the side. (in the best case.)

syntheweave 4y ago
One of the things that made Web1 exciting was the feeling of getting access where you didn't have access before - if you wanted to know "what was happening in the world" you could do it in wholly online spaces, instead of through intermediary publishing or calls and snail mail. But like you say, it took until the second generation for the market to find the formula to scale adoption, and often it came from strange niches. Web2 business models were in part borne of cheap "dark fiber" in the aftermath of the broadband infrastructure boom - Youtube went from impossible in 1995 to barely feasible in 2004. Web3 to date has been great fun from a financier's POV. In the same way that Web1 folks were convinced of the future being "more free information" Web3 tends to host the sentiment of the future being "more liquidity". But as with information going onto web pages turning attention into the value, liquidity is the commodity here; anyone can just issue their own token if they need a trade object, with roughly the same amount of tech savvy that it took to put up a web site in 1999. That's the essence of "be your own bank" - but it's still above the level of skill needed to have a Facebook page or a Tiktok. The differentiation that builds a business model has to come from something else: "tokens with X"(market-making), not "tokens for X"(securitization).

syntheweave 4y ago

One of the things that made Web1 exciting was the feeling of getting access where you didn't have access before - if you wanted to know "what was happening in the world" you could do it in wholly online spaces, instead of through intermediary publishing or calls and snail mail. But like you say, it took until the second generation for the market to find the formula to scale adoption, and often it came from strange niches. Web2 business models were in part borne of cheap "dark fiber" in the aftermath of the broadband infrastructure boom - Youtube went from impossible in 1995 to barely feasible in 2004. Web3 to date has been great fun from a financier's POV. In the same way that Web1 folks were convinced of the future being "more free information" Web3 tends to host the sentiment of the future being "more liquidity". But as with information going onto web pages turning attention into the value, liquidity is the commodity here; anyone can just issue their own token if they need a trade object, with roughly the same amount of tech savvy that it took to put up a web site in 1999. That's the essence of "be your own bank" - but it's still above the level of skill needed to have a Facebook page or a Tiktok. The differentiation that builds a business model has to come from something else: "tokens with X"(market-making), not "tokens for X"(securitization).