My first and last post on Web3

Nicholas Weaver, in a column called The Web3 Fraud, published on ;login: (defined as “an open access digital publication”):

The cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space.  The only “utility” for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers.

Also, earlier this year, Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, on his personal blog:

At the end of the stack, NFT artists are excited about this kind of progression because it means more speculation/investment in their art, but it also seems like if the point of web3 is to avoid the trappings of web2, we should be concerned that this is already the natural tendency for these new protocols that are supposed to offer a different future.

I think these market forces will likely continue, and in my mind the question of how long it continues is a question of whether the vast amounts of accumulated cryptocurrency are ultimately inside an engine or a leaky bucket. If the money flowing through NFTs ends up channeled back into crypto space, it could continue to accelerate forever (regardless of whether or not it’s just web2x2). If it churns out, then this will be a blip.

I found it curious — or should I say amusing, or odd — that Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote a response to Marlinspike’s piece on Reddit, a very centralised platform, to defend the promises of the decentralisation of Web3.

Like I said in a previous post, I am bored by this crypto topic, and the more I look into it, the more it looks like a environment-damaging self-encouraging scam, so, until I am convinced of the actual value of it all, and that I was wrong, and until a more diverse population surrounds it, I won’t write anything more on this nonsense.