Something interesting is happening in the technology world – many brilliant and accomplished technologists are outright dismissing Web3 in its current shape and form- criticisms range from ‘it’s a solution searching for a problem’ to ‘all of Web3 is one big Ponzi’.
There are certain points that need to be addressed in more detail by the Web3 community – for instance, the criticism that VCs with deep pockets and strong networks get in early on token sales, and use ‘bull markets’ to use retail money as their exit liquidity – but such criticisms mostly miss the big picture – Web3 promises to fill a critical missing piece in today’s world wide web – provable ownership of digital assets recorded on decentralized and immutable datastores.
Who owns your email address? If it is not you, how is this not the biggest problem that everyone should be trying to solve? How about other important pieces of your digital identity – let’s try this – can you name a single digital asset that you truly own?
Let’s define the term ‘ownership’ so we clearly understand the magnitude of the problem here. Here is an attempt – If you truly own a digital asset, you should be able to prove that you own it without relying on a trust hub and nobody should be able to take the asset away from you or control your access to the asset or limit your ability to do anything with it.
Now let’s try the same question we asked earlier – can you name a single digital asset that you truly own?
The fact that Web3 makes these digital assets programmable is really just icing on the cake. It is clear that there is a fundamental, multi-trillion dollar hole in the current iteration of the Internet that Web3 is attempting to fix – provable, decentralized, ‘true’ ownership. Our world has seen a lot of progress through capitalistic models, so it is only natural that Web3 would have such flavors and hence it its current shape might not appeal to all ideology sets – but it will definitely help if the critics really ask themselves what is it that they are missing that the Web3 folks seem to be so deeply convinced about. Let’s Not Miss the Forest for the Trees!
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