Notes on Web3

Sloan shares his notes on web3 for the MIT Media Lab, of which he is not a fan, with the public. One of his points resonated strongly with me.

• A large fraction of Web3’s magnetism comes from the value of the underlying cryptocurrencies. Therefore, a good diagnostic question to ask might be: would you still be curious about Web3 if those currencies were worthless, in dollar terms? For some people, the answer is “yes, absolutely”, because they find the foundational puzzles so compelling. For others, if they’re honest, the answer is “nnnot reallyyy”.

I’m even older than Sloan, which he acknowledges is perhaps part of his perspective, but I would say this same line was true for Web 2.0 back in the day. People were learning about AJAX requests because they were going to write the next Web 2.0 app and be rich beyond their dreams. The web has had "gold rush" periods multiple times. Sometimes it is a mirage, but not always.

I find it surprising that many digitally forward thinkers struggle with web3 stack because of the financial aspects of it. These same people are often extremely supportive of decentralization and dislike the huge influence that a couple of platforms have over the web today. There is almost a "hippie" version of decentralization that is preferred. But perhaps we can have decentralization with multiple economic models, which web3 is already doing. Look at the non-economic model of POAP tokens.