Tim O’Reilly has a very thoughtful piece on web3.
Since he is a guy who got many things right about web 2.0, I’m inclined to give his ideas some weight and I think he gets an essential truth about web3 right now: it’s too tied up in get-rich-quick thinking and not enough on the real value to be delivered.
There will be value delivered by some of the new thinking in web3, but it’s really not clear what. I don’t have a good picture of what the winners in the space will be but it’s probably not going to be in the form of an imposed scarcity on GIFs.
The ideas that seem very interesting to me are putting public records on the blockchain (e.g., property titles) and figuring out ways to get the invasions of privacy out of social media (e.g., sort of a crowd funded social media). There are probably others out there as well, but there is so much smoke and greed right now, it’s really tough to tell.