Web3

Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the encrypted communications app Signal, has a really interesting post on web3. Essentially, he points out that the current state of web3 is very much like the structure of web2 and is more centralized than it seems on the surface. He did an experiment by making an NFT on OpenSea that varied depending on who was viewing it. Since an NFT is basically just a URL, this isn’t complex to do.

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.