It's remarkable to me how "Web3 is a grift" has seemingly become tribal consensus here, without any real basis in reality. I think the last administration's explicit efforts to block crypto legitimization played a big part in this. It's clear that if you tried to follow the law and operate as a legitimate player, you risked being debanked or legally targeted by the SEC—and they made little to no effort to answer questions or help you work within the law's constraints. They wanted to sue first. As a result, those who ignored the law ended up dominating the space. This reflects policy failures, not issues with the tech or its legitimacy. I'm hoping the Trump administration shifts this dynamic, but now there's a reputation problem that needs correcting as well.
To quote Patio11, "It's not a conspiracy if they really are out to get you."
Crypto in general and Web3 as well, all have mostly delivered scams. To the tune of billions stolen from everyday folks. Everything (to within a rounding error) that hasn't been a scam has delivered nothing else but being a speculative asset at best. Everything else has been a barely working toy that's better served by non-distributed implementations of the same thing.
People shit on crypto. government, regulators, and the public, all dislike crypto because the only thing that ever happens to us with it and the only thing we ever hear about happening, is folks losing money to scams.
There's no mystery here. Crypto doesn't need a policy shift. Crypto needs to stop fucking over folks. Yes it's cool technology, yes it also seems to just be a way to part folks from their money.
That's like saying the only thing that ever happens with AI is people losing their jobs to AI. And unlike Crypto, they didn't opt in and literally buy digital assets and send them voluntarily somewhere. They get negatively affected regardless of any choice they have made. "Get on board, or get rolled." People worldwide would lose a lot more money to AI growing than crypto growing, regardless of never opting in. It will just be a giant wealth transfer to the already-wealthy and corporations. What about that? Oh, crickets. Dismissal from the HN crowd.
If I am going to put my money at risk, I expect it to be at risk. I'm happy to have a regulatory framework around that from the SEC, for instance, and there are. For example, since the JOBS Act, the SEC has greatly expanded the opportunities to raise money in a regulated way. I even interviewed the actual authors of Regulation S at the SEC, where I go into depth for an hour about how to raise money legally:
And frankly, most true adherents of crypto have been yelling from the rooftops that Celsius and FTX and Binance are not actual DeFi. They are not decentralized, they simply tell you to do the very thing crypto was designed to avoid -- i.e. send them money and "trust them". This is the very thing Bitcoin and Blockchain were designed to avoid -- the middleman.
FileCoin and UniSwap and Aave Marketplace and so on are real crypto, and they have never had any scandals and billions of dollars, bits, etc. are entrusted to them every day. Ditto for most altcoins and networks, including Hedera Hashgraph, Polygon, COSMOS, Polkadot, etc.
Any shade thrown at, e.g. Telegram's TON or Ripple's XRP, is due to regulators. I can understand why Facebook's Libra was shut down. But it has to do with them becoming "too powerful" and "not subject to national oversight". Kind of like Facebook and Twitter and Google themselves.
Everything that you just mentioned, as far as "what it's actually doing" is either speculation/speculation accessories or is a not-as-good-version of existing offerings. Where is the value?
UniSwap: a marketplace for speculation on arguably scam crypto products.
Aave Marketplace: a marketplace for speculation on arguably scam crypto products.
FileCoin: file storage at rates 50% higher than e.g. BackBlaze/DigitalOcean.
There's no actual value here other than as scam, speculation (nearly a scam), or products that are flimsy pretenses at not being scams (but which don't deliver a lot of value). Why should anybody care (other than transparent greed)?
