Web3 is always in the news for the wrong reasons!
Why is Web3 always in the news and never for a good reason?
I've talked before about how my parents see things like Bitcoin as being 'that thing that bad people use', I also noted that those same people didn't have the same opinion about Ethereum, though it wasn't much better, but for different reasons. So Bitcoin has marked cards and Ethereum is basically not really known at all beyond tech-crowds, what about NFT's?
NFT's are seen as silly monkey pictures that even sillier people paid stupid sums of money for, and that's mostly true, it's the one thing I agree with my parents on when we talk about these new technologies. I personally think the NFT was ruined by speculation, it could have been so much more, it might still be, but it was ruined by people paying lots of money for a digital picture that often doesn't look any better than what my 5yo and 2yo children churn out.
The Blockchain means nothing to my folks, what about Web3, again nothing. My mom guessed that Web3 was what the cool kids call the three W's at the start of a web address.
I'll throw some names into the conversation;
- Sam Bankman-Fried
- Changpeng Zhao
- Binance
- Coinbase
- FTX
They're all considered to be shady things or shady people. Even Coinbase, which as far as I know (at the time of writing) is not considered to be a shady place.
Essentially it comes down to this; there has been so much bad press regarding the things that fall under the Web3 umbrella that even the good companies are guilty by association. Further to this, my parents are never going to be willing to take a chance on a crypto-currency because to them either the technology is tainted and they don't want to be associated with it or the companies behind it can't be trusted. Granted, this is a small pool (2 people) but I actually don't know how so many others are scammed because if my parents were representative of their generation, this is a dirty place, stay away.
Again, I've written before that I personally get onboard with the idea of a distributed ledger, the currencies are interesting and I see the attraction, but for me, it is the blockchain that is the true tiger here. It doesn't need to be about speculation, it has so much more to offer.
The only thing that Web3 has going for it at the moment is that it isn't AI, which is getting all the press and I've noticed news, creeping in at the fringes, of people being suckered into investing in new LLM's, trying to ride the ChatGPT wave and being an early investor in the next big AI model. I've only seen it at the fringe so far, but it's out there, people are being sucked into these investor scams.
This could be a small window of opportunity for the big players in Web3 to clean-up and make it easier to spot and flag Web3 scams so that innocent people don't keep getting sucked in, and once we can get rid of those scam plays, maybe Web3 can start to be noticed for some of its innovations rather than it's scams, dirty money and vanishing companies.