How is Web3 and it’s associated technologies positively making a difference in our world and is this worthwhile? Answers to this question is what I’m unpacking and boy, has it been a doozy!

If you haven’t read Part 1 yet please give it a read as it covers the major negative effects and sets up Part 2…thanks.

Part 2: View from the Summit

The place we left off in part 1 was the bottom of the well so I’m hoping the end to part 2 will be the mountain top off in the distance. Basically I just want to tell you about the things I like about Web3 and “elevate” your perspective.

My starting point for this post was thinking about my own personal “why” regarding working in Web3 and surprisingly most of it still rings fairly true - so let’s dive in!

Basically I believe that:

  • Cryptocurrency provides a lifeline for people being held financially hostage by government or large corporations.
  • Web3 startups are the new dot com gold rush.
  • As humanity shifts to primarily digital interactions, the intersection of new technologies like AI, Quantum computers and Web3 are going to provide incredible opportunity and cause rapid change to the way we live our daily lives.

So how do we get from where we are today to a bright & rosy future? I wish I knew but maybe writing down the areas of major positive impact will help…

Crypto Adoption by the People

The most powerful positive use case of cryptocurrency is still the original vision of “permission-less digital cash” that Satoshi highlighted in their whitepaper. Finding parts of the world where this is actually happening at a mainstream level is hard - not because there is a lack of examples but rather, too many.

Some examples of adoption are absolutely fluffed up to push a narrative (El Salvador’s President forcing Bitcoin on people comes to mind), but I came across this interesting report from Chainalysis that shows where actual grassroots adoption of cryptocurrency is occurring (grassroots meaning the “regular folks”).

I know massive Bitcoin adoption has been occurring in Nigeria as concerned citizen’s, tired with government corruption and deteriorating regional relationships during the election cycle have moved wealth into crypto, but I was surprised to see India leading the way at #1.

Regardless, the majority of countries where the most “regular” people are joining the Web3 ecosystem have economies that generally intake more foreign currency than their neighbors. While these aren’t the only factors at play, (government, economy, current events & culture are too much to cover here) the influence of outside fiat is inherently destabilizing as it exposes your economy to problems in other countries. Due to these and other factors combining to make a perfect storm, I don’t find it surprising that people in these areas have the highest organic adoption rates.

In general, the more volatile or uncertain economic success is for a given area the more likely the people living there are to use crypto, and coupling this with at least some economic freedom and mobility it seems like countries where people can work hard and earn but also have governments or regional situations negatively affecting the economy have high crypto adoption.

I believe this is due to the risk-to-reward ratio being less pronounced. Basically, if the government is likely to devalue my savings or enact policies making things more expensive, it starts to seem less risky to buy Bitcoin or other “bluechip” cryptocurrency to hopefully gain or preserve some of the wealth you’ve worked your butt off for.

The Ukraine is a totally different storybut still worth mentioning as the Russian invasion continues. Crypto adoption is happening here due to the speed and accessibility it offers that fiat is unable to compete with during times of war.

Fast settlement, digitally native, no clawbacks and most importantly no 3rd party interference are turning out to be the exact qualities wartime money needs in today’s world. I can’t help but be optimistic about cryptocurrency improving grassroots fundraising in even the most hostile of environments.

Start Your Engines!

Every day it seems like there is a new, likely over-hyped Web3 startup project that is desperately trying to get your attention. The “to-the-moon” (or get-rich-quick as I like to call it) mentality that many supporters of projects like these have has honestly gotten pretty tiresome at this point.

I do see value however in the wide variety of problems and solutions that projects like these are attempting to tackle.

Decentralized storage that utilizes your device’s free harddrive space? Let’s see if we can make it work!

Un-censorable domain names tied to cryptographic keys for your crypto wallet? Let’s see if we can make it work!

Password-less login that gives you account portability across platforms? Let’s see if we can make it work!

While these are some of the stronger use cases I’ve seen recently, for every exciting project there are likely 10 or more duds that are building something that sounds cool but in reality is a clone of something popular in Web2 and not very innovative.

This is OK though because I see a strong correlation with the invention of the internet and ensuing “dot com bubble era”. While there were absolutely negative events like the super dud pets.com losing people millions of dollars, we also got the entire open source software movement that has positively impacted a large chunk of humanity by creating projects like Linux, TOR, and generally promoting easily accessible, often free software to anyone who wants to use it.

While I am tired of the “next big thing in Web3” announcements, I believe the end result will see the truly innovative projects solving real problems rise to the top and the frequency of the duds decline over time as the crypto-sphere continues to mature and impact the daily lives of more people.

Intersectional Innovation is Inevitable

The Three I’s are coming and there’s not much any of us can do about it. Inevitable Intersectional Innovation is going to change the world and those of us who’re ready for it stand to gain the most.

Allow me to explain…

As software continues to “eat the world” I hope it’s not controversial to say much of our physical life is being spent managing affairs for our digital selves. If you don’t believe me, ask your grandmother or anyone over the age of 70 how much computers and the internet have changed things since they were in their twenties - but I digress.

Unfortunately I think the Three I’s will accelerate the trend where we increasingly spend more of our time in the virtual realm, making it critical our future digital selves have global rights to privacy, self-custody and communication (aka unrestricted access to the Web).

Technology is now an integral part of humanity and with quantum computing, fusion reactors, and artificial intelligence on the horizon it’s only a matter of time before we have more energy to use, more powerful computers to use this energy, and advanced “software” running on these computers that improves itself while automating tedious parts of our lives and hopefully giving us more freedom.

Web3 fits in to this digitally dominated future as two things:

  1. An economic system that we must ultimately switch to if we want actual freedom for our digital selves and a massive improvement to our current global economic situation. Additionally, this shift gives an opportunity to “port over” pillars and institutions that help govern and run our physical lives into this new, shared digital universe and update them to better serve society.
  2. A secure and trustworthy (aka trust-less) data pipeline so people and their devices can self-custody their important data and communicate efficiently between each other and the services that have yet to be invented, but will be provided to us from powerful AI run on supercomputers.

As things stand now there is incredible inefficiency when we drop into the Web and do literally anything. Copies of our physical selves are digitized thousands of times as we create accounts for email services, food delivery, ride share and the rest. And, with zero portability across most of these services, each digital copy of you is stored (multiple times by industry standard) in a data center somewhere, paid for by the company that offsets your clone’s storage cost by selling “their” copy of you to the personal data aggregators that manipulate your physical self into consuming more and more.

I personally hate this current model of digital serf-titude and have made it a point in my personal life to do all I can and prevent this surveillance consumerism from getting it’s sticky paws on me. While Web3 still has a long way to maturity, the people and protocols being built with it give me hope that my struggle is not in vain.

Wrap Up

Web3 enables everyone to hold their own data, login to the apps and services they use without a password, and permission access to the trove of personal information on an “as-needed” basis rather than by default. This ability is a huge deal and if adopted as the default method of digital operation would force incredible and humongous positive change on the entire world.

I am a fan of Web3 and this system it enables because it reduces data center storage, vastly improves personal and commercial cybersecurity by making data breaches nearly impossible, unlocks better global economic cooperation and gives anyone an opportunity to innovate and improve the human condition as we all build a shared, digital universe that our species’ technology requires.

~ FIN ~