This is the first enlightening article I have read about Web3. Maybe that says more about how little I have read than about how good the article is.
Anyway, Moxie seems very focused on the decentralization aspect - that Web3 doesn’t decentralize as much as we would like.
An alternative aspect is the “global ledger of ownership and transferrence” though. Yes, interacting with blockchains is hard so it is some through APIs… but there does still seem to be something important about the idea that my ownership of something on a blockchain is permanent, and exists outside of any corporate notion of ownership, in a deep mathematical way. That’s fundamentally appealing!
But is it appealing enough to overcome market forces? I think Moxie is right to spend a lot of time on the “nobody wants to run servers” thing because it shows that most users are powerfully motivated by convenience; if the mathematically-beautiful blockchain ownership records remain inconvenient then they are likely to be a niche attraction (like running your own mail server).
Anyway, Moxie seems very focused on the decentralization aspect - that Web3 doesn’t decentralize as much as we would like.
An alternative aspect is the “global ledger of ownership and transferrence” though. Yes, interacting with blockchains is hard so it is some through APIs… but there does still seem to be something important about the idea that my ownership of something on a blockchain is permanent, and exists outside of any corporate notion of ownership, in a deep mathematical way. That’s fundamentally appealing!
But is it appealing enough to overcome market forces? I think Moxie is right to spend a lot of time on the “nobody wants to run servers” thing because it shows that most users are powerfully motivated by convenience; if the mathematically-beautiful blockchain ownership records remain inconvenient then they are likely to be a niche attraction (like running your own mail server).