| This is my viewpoint after having been interested in the space for a few years, and working as a dev in the space for most of this year - 1. Blockchains can essentially serve as a decentralized database, and for some chains decentralized computations, such as Ethereum chains. It is possible to build web applications using data from the chain efficiently using a variety of technologies, and you can build some pretty slick applications effectively replacing a traditional backend with these kinds of technologies. Also it gets a lot of heat in general, because Ethereum is absurdly expensive and it's financially impossible to use, and the current scaling solution is quite complex and they have a lot of work to mask the complexities before it has any hope of achieving widescale longterm adoption. In short you literally cannot use Ethereum if you only have $20 because it's impossible to move due to fees, unless you are using one of their sidechains or layer 2 solutions. It's quite convoluted. However you can use other chains like Solana, which gets a lot of hate from people on HN because it's more centralized than ETH. However, if you use both it's quite clear which is working better right now as an end user - SOL costs a fraction of a cent to transact and finishes within seconds, ETH costs $50 to multiple hundreds of dollars for a transaction and takes like 45 seconds to even multiple hours if you paid just slightly too little gas. I strongly recommend checking out other chains than ETH, Solana has a growing ecosystem and a lot of exciting projects being worked on in the space. (disclaimer - I own almost no SOL, about $20, but am developing projects in the SOL ecosystem because of the above end user experiences I have had using both ETH chains and SOL) 2. I don't know if it's the future of money, but it is a cool emerging field. It gets a lot of heat because it is ripe for scamming as it's nearly impossible to regulate, and also for reasons mentioned above. I've seen a bunch of people upset because they tried out web3 apps and buying NFTs and the like, but on ETH only to realize it cost them hundreds of dollars in gas. There's a lot of value imo especially if you look past the get rich quick types and try out more financially practical chains. But back on whether it's the future of money - I think we'll have to see how countries that are adopting crypto play out by example. I wouldn't be surprised if we have more official government fiat tokenized on some of these platforms in the coming years. 3. From my viewpoint, Web3 focuses on technologies that allow for decentralization and verified ownership of content. It's possible right now to create apps that are hosted on decentralized permaweb hosting solutions such as Arweave. Whether or not this is going to be a successful model, it is a very interesting field to work in and there are some really slick things that you can do that may not be obvious at first glance. I think that there is a lot of value in a hybridized model myself of centralized services that leverage a decentralized database to verify identity / authorize access. There's quite a lot of possibilities that I can think of in such a model and think that some people get hung up on things like "how can we replace twitter/facebook/youtube/your favorite silicon valley company web site in a decentralized model" instead of trying to create completely different experiences (of who knows whether they will be successful). Web3 relates to the above 2 since the underlying idea is using a blockchain as a decentralized database, as well as having decentralized computation as well. Currently the computations allowed on chains like ETH are quite simple but there are projects that could allow for off-chain computations whose results get published back to the chain to allow for more complex applications. |