If we build it, will they come?
Web3 is so named because it purports to be "the third iteration of the internet" — a definition that is both grand enough to attract VC money and amorphous enough to never be disproven.
A more intuitive explanation of Web3 is "Twitter, but you own your data."
And that sounds great: If you've built an audience on YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram, it's an unfortunate fact that it can be taken away from you at any moment.
The basic idea with Web3 is that your list of Twitter followers should belong to you in the same way that your list of email contacts does.
But what value does a list of Twitter followers have outside of Twitter?
Approximately none: Twitter can mix your likes, follows, and retweets with everyone else's and create a feed that it monetizes with the occasional ad (which no one ever clicks on).
You won't be able to sell any ads by messaging your list of Twitter followers outside of Twitter — chances are, they won't even want you to message them!
It's Twitter's algorithm that gives that data value. The data on its own has none.
Consider this newsletter: The 900 or so words I write every day have value to Blockworks because they can get a few ads in (all of which you should definitely click on), plug Permissionless, and draw your attention to some great podcasts and news coverage.
You might appreciate it if I just emailed you the same 900 words myself, but I'd have to write them during my lunch break at Home Depot because I doubt you'd pay me much for them.
My 900 words have far greater value within the context of Blockworks than they would do on their own because some things are greater than the sum of their parts — which is why we have companies.
Companies exist not to exploit our labor, but to give our labor value by creatively combining it with the labor of our co-workers.
Not every intermediary is extracting rent, so not everything needs to be disintermediated.
Web3 will only have value if the things it disintermediates can be reconfigured in novel ways.
Getting started
Web3 undoubtedly holds that promise of reconfiguring economic activity in novel ways.
But it has a cold start problem.
When the iPhone launched in 2007, it did everything a regular mobile phone could do, plus a Web browser and an app store.
The browser was comically slow, and the App Store had hardly anything in it, but it didn't matter — the iPhone made calls and sent texts at least as well as your flip phone, so everything else it could do was a bonus.
Web3 Twitter, by contrast, starts out much, much worse than regular Twitter: It has neither the users nor the data that the social media algorithms use to suck us in.
To get our attention then, it will have to do something new, as the iPhone did with mobile browsing and the App Store — simply disintermediating Web2 won't be enough.
If Web3 catches on it won't be because some combination of blockchain technology and, say, on-chain identity and zk proofs will enable new things.
What could those new things be?
The cynical take is that it'll just be yet more ways to confer status on people.
The more hopeful take is something like encrypted messaging enabled by public/private keys (better than Signal because there's no phone number associated) … or free speech enabled by zk proofs (demonstrate your credentials to comment on things without revealing your identity).
But all of that tech is still in the process of being built, so predicting what Web3 will be like now is akin to predicting what Web2 would be like while TCP/IP and HTTP were still in development.
The only way to predict that future is to create it.
Creating the future
Compare Web3's cold start problem to the hot start of AI.
AI has been a topic for decades, but the seemingly overnight success of ChatGPT happened only when all of the requisite infrastructure was finally in place: unlimited data from the internet, ultra-fast Nvidia chips, cloud service providers, etc.
The result is that ChatGPT has seen the fastest-ever rate of adoption, getting to a million users in just one month and 100 million users in two months.
(By comparison, it took TikTok about nine months to reach 100 million users and Instagram about 30 months.)
The internet, Nvidia chips, web services — none of these were developed with AI in mind, but they were all in place when AI needed them.
Crypto benefits from those things, too, but to get to Web3 Twitter, there's a lot more to be done.
And with things like zk proofs, crypto will have to do much of it itself.
Then, when it does, we'll still have to find out if anyone wants to come use it.
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