For those who haven’t been following blockchain and are unclear on what Web 3.0 is, Web 1.0 was the original web with personal homepages and such. Web 2.0 is the transition to gatekeepers like Facebook, Twitter, and Google that own us, all our data, and control all our content. Web 3.0 is the name blockchain developers invented for web-based blockchain applications. The promise of Web 3.0 is that the Internet will once again become egalitarian and decentralized without gatekeepers and together using blockchain we can achieve great things.
Given the enormous upside, Bloomberg crytp-maxi Sidhartha Shukla wonders why Web 3.0 hasn’t taken off yet.
It turns out, the reason is because blockchain applications suck.
Most articles discussing blockchain apps–including this one–mention the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz or a16z. As a bonus, you can hear the Web 3.0 bull case in this interview with Chris Dixon of a16z discussing blockchain and his new book on Rick Rubin’s podcast.
In it, he gives a number of hypothetical use cases for blockchain. I’ll leave it an exercise for the listener to decide if any of his examples sound useful or something you should invest in (e.g. using blockchain to crowd source movie scripts).