Web 3 & me

I'll admit it, I'm one of those guys who talks too much about blockchains and cryptocurrency to his non-nerdy friends. More specifically I talk about Ethereum or Web 3. Sure it's annoying but I only bring it up when the convo starts drying up. As a programmer, the idea of programmable value is something that genuinely excites me so why not share. The problem I find is that If the listener shows any real interest it's usually because they've bought into some coin or worse some cartoon NFT and their just interested in "number go up". That's to be expected and understandable for sure but what I try to bring to these get rich conversations is the deeper crypto conversation that needs to start happening for wider adoption. I try to talk about how blockchains bypasses a lot of the big issues found in most centralized web 2 solutions and how it opens up the design space for human coordination games.

What can we build on a trusted, or Trustless connection of computers all over the world that can reach consensus on a shared state? For starters we could build a new type of digital scarcity token that people could use for a peer to peer payment system. This is what the annonymous Satoshi Nakamoto did with the Bitcoin project. A few years later a young, bright minded Vitalik Buterin expanded on bitcoin with the addition of trusted computation or smart contracts. It was this smart contract idea that struck me most. Once that idea was established then all these dualistic ideas of decentralization/democracy, trust/game theory, sovereignty/society and many more started flooded my mind. The rabbit hole analogy is a good one, the cryptocurrency, web 3 space is full of deep subjects to fill your time.

I still remember over hyped dreams of the web 1 days so I try not to be overly optimistic this time around but for me being a web developer has always felt a little like building the future, your making something new for someone at some time in the future to experience and since the future is shaped in part by our ideas of today then you're selling yourself short if you don't dream big and hope for the best. As John Perry Barlow once said,

"a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia"

The web 3 space may not be ready for prime time, industrial grade, global scale applications yet but that's fine. There is a lot more exploring to do in this new wild west. As more experiments happen the ones that best serve the core principles of the ecosystem should find support and grow, the ponzie's and scames will never go away but hopefully with more adoption will come more education and understanding which should make it harder for people to fall victim these bad actors. One step in this direction is the Optimism Collective that's looking to retroactivly fund public goods and help sustain the future of Ethereum. On second thought maybe I'll keep some of that optimism as it might well be the core principle of Ethereum.