If you've been in the tech industry recently, you've probably heard the good news about Web3. The Web 2.0 era was dominated by a few social media platforms. Web3 boosters say that instead of relying on Facebook, we will communicate using services that will make the current fears of censorship by tech monopolies pass.
Web3 applications are based on cryptocurrencies. These token can be bought and sold on exchanges. They will appreciate the app taking off. According to research company PitchBook, venture capitalists invested $30 billion in cryptocurrencies last year. Sky Mavis is the developer of Axie Infinity, a video game based on the ledger of transactions. BitClout is a social network that uses the ledger of transactions and OpenSea is a marketplace for non-fungible token.
Web3 offers the chance to participate in a utopian project while simultaneously getting in on a financial boom, which is what believers like to believe. The company that owns the businessweek has invested in the company. The movement is being seen as a branding exercise by tech investors to preserve the mania for cryptocurrencies. Many of the big Web3 investors are the same people who supported Web 2.0. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Block Inc., said that it was a centralized entity with a different label.
The person who blocked him on the social networking site was the one who responded to the critique. An engineer at the trading platform Coinbase replied to the principal engineer at the cloud computing division at Google that Web3 was just taking existing products and "rubbishing" some currency on it. We are here for you. It was tick tock.
He was taken aback. He says that it is new for someone to say that they are at war with their employer.
Silicon Valley's culture of arguing bitterly about web architecture is just as important as the Hackathon or the fleece vest. Li Jin, a co-founder of the Web3 investment firm Variant, says that people are very religious. Jin believes that a web economy in which artists and musicians sell NFTs directly to fans would allow them to regain power from companies like Facebook. She believes that social media and Web3 will eventually coexist, but the idea that a fully realized Web3 will simply replace it heightens emotions on both sides. We are reaching a boiling point in terms of popular sentiment against technology incumbents and social media platforms.
The irony is that today's incumbents mostly got their start trying to do exactly what Web3 promises now: to disrupt a previous generation of gatekeepers in tech and media. The early Web 2.0 era was described last fall by theentrepreneur and investor, who started the professional social network, LinkedIn. He wrote an essay for a Knight Foundation conference on internet history, in which he said the ethos was to minimize rules, institutional hierarchies and gatekeeping of any kind.
Web 2.0 created tools that made it easy for anyone to reach an enormous audience online. The companies that run the social networks collected huge amounts of personal data, which they used to make huge financial returns. Microsoft bought the professional networking site for $26 billion. Meta is worth more than a billion dollars.
This was the natural maturation phase after the revolution. He says that there is a pattern where you get a platform and then add features that work better in the future. He predicts the same thing will happen. Everyone says this will be free. Well, no.
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In certain areas, the shift is already happening. The New York art gallery owner complained that a collection of 16 NFTs, mostly cartoon images of bored primates, had been stolen in a hack. The NFTs were effectively worthless because OpenSea froze them. Some users complained that this was a violation of the promise of Web3 that no centralized entity should be able to restrict how individuals use their digital assets. By this logic, OpenSea can stop someone from selling a stolen NFT, just as Facebook can stop someone from spreading misinformation. The NFTs are on the platform to ensure the safety of the customers and the growth of the broader NFT space, according to a spokeswoman for OpenSea.
The reputation of the new financial arena as a crazy place where lots of random traders are getting rich may be overstated. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the top 1,000 holders of the digital currency had control over 15% of the currency. The traders who have access to so-called whitelists, which allow them to buy the new token before it is offered on the open market, are the most profitable traders, according to Chainalysis.
Tech investors are excited about the power of Web3 but regular people are not. Everyone was encouraged to go about their lives as if they were celebrities because of the currency of the social media era. Everyone is a day trader. Some video game players are against NFTs because they want to have fun, not manage a portfolio, and companies such as the crowdfunding service Kickstarter have gotten backlash for signaling interest in Web3.
In December, Tim O'Reilly wrote an essay titled "Why it's too early to get excited about Web3". The social networks of the future are still mostly hypothetical, and the main way to participate in Web3 is to bet on various token. The history of technology, according to O'Reilly, is a pattern where people get overly excited about something, creating a bubble that eventually pops, sometimes leaving something useful behind. He wrote that he loved the idea of the Web3 vision, but that they had been there before.
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