| Well yes, what you say has some basis in truth. Blockchain's early applications have been derailed by greed and stupid applications like meme coins and rug-pulls. Instead of leveraging the power of smart contract factories using the Factory Pattern, teams started releasing one-off contracts, and others gambling with them. This led to zero-sum games at best, and negative-sum at worse (for contracts with bugs or rugpulls). Compare something like UniSwap (which is a factory) to a random contract based on "SafeMoon" or "EverRise". The UniSwap pools all have the same trusted, audited, battle-tested code. It's the kind of stuff I am a fan of. I've written about it here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-smart-contract-s... Going further, many COMPLETELY NON-BLOCKCHAIN enterprises, like FTX and Celsius, ruined the good name of Web3 even further, which is around Smart Contracts. Think of it like the Web2 tech bros and VCs trying to make a buck around Web3. YC-funded companies like OpenSea have been better actors, but many wallets etc. ended up using them and gateways like Infura as the source of truth, almost obviating the need for Web3. Having said all that... I've been discussing this more on the applications and UX level. Users always have the power to switch away to a fork of something, and migrate away from an ecosystem. But a good ecosystem can "earn" its lock-in by giving them stuff they want. That's what happened with all the centralized Web2 platforms undergoing "enshittification" due to the profit motive. So yeah, capitalism and greed have derailed a lot of Web3, but in a different way than Web2. It's why I built https://intercoin.org/applications . Look at https://intercoin.org/deck.pdf for what Web3 COULD be like. We call it Web5 to get away from the morass which is Web3. Now, back in 2018 when I started it, I was planning to build a post-blockchain network, and I still do. It's going to be called Intercloud (a portmanteau of two words like BlockChain). But besides blockchain, there are HashGraph, IOTA DAG and others. So yes, blockchains have a head start mostly due to the profit motive. Same with centralized Web2 social networks. You don't see HN being against those very much, but they are vehemently against Web3. I consider Web2 to have been completely ruined by megalomaniacal tech bros and VCs out for profit, and society at large has been harmed by it. Here is the diagnosis and the solution: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ (Over the last decade, I have spent the majority of my own resources, without VC, building an alternative open system. I've been sort of marvelling at how actively some HN users are against it, and often knee-jerk trying to downvote it because it contains words like "decentralization" and it can interoperate with Web3... but I am confident that once it goes mainstream, suddenly some people will look back on all my posts and finally get it). |