My personal Web 3 prediction

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Having studied the space over the past year and seeing how bitter Bitcoin maximalists tend to be toward anyone with anything to do with altcoins or how much Web 2 is invading web 3 by way of altcoins, here's my own prediction (for what little its worth):

Web 3, at least for the foreseeable future (this decade) will just be Web 2.1 as web 2 rushes in and makes the whole thing taste, smell, and feel like Web 2 with slightly different dynamics. It'll have the underlying tools and rails of Web 3 but raw Web 3 isn't consumer-ready and there isn't enough Web 3 innovation of its own right yet to really prevent Web 2 economic and centralization dynamics in its total body politic or infrastructure. I think this is inevitable because the world runs on money, the model for success right now is centralization and traditional finance, and people successful in centralization will be the fastest to run to and try to integrate rather than be beaten by Web 3 as the whole world would really have to ban it and that's a lot easier said than done (let alone how many multinational companies and powerful players see its utility). The centralized venture capitalist coins, like Solana, were that dynamic picking up speed.

The best name then for this period might be Web 2.1, Web 2 running on Web 3 data structures but still very much being Web 2 in design.

The only thing that will perhaps happen, gradually, is people will be able to keep working with the Web 3 aspects, finding Web 3 solutions to Web 2 problems that meet individual and even group needs, and thus Web 2.1 slowly moves toward Web 2.2, which slowly becomes Web 2.3, so really Web 2.1 would probably be from now until some time in the 2030's, Web 2.2 might be for five or ten years after that. Who knows if full Web 3 will ever fully materialize as it's own thing with no Web 2 dynamics, but it will be like a fader that just keeps increasing the number of DeFi (decentralized finance), DAO (distributed autonomous organizations), Dapps (decentralized apps), etc. that are functional, useful, and over that time developers will - by trial and error - become increasingly aware of what models work successfully with Web 3 and which don't.

To me the way Web 3 loaded up with altcoins just seems obvious - if there's money in a sector people will run there, with varying levels of scruples and varying ideas. If the Bitcoin maximalists took Darwinian game theory seriously - they knew this was inevitable, ie. it couldn't have been Bitcoin, by itself, forever. A gold rush is a gold rush, and Darwinian game theory made it clear - IMHO - from the beginning, that this would happen. I'd add, I disagree with the Bitcoin maximalists when it comes to coins like Cardano, Chainlink, VeChain, Internet Computer, XY Oracle, and other stuff like that because they do deliver demonstrable value... just that they're different kinds of animals than Bitcoin is, ie. they're straining against the 'digital securities' category, or need some excuse as to how the coins aren't digital securities when they are issued by software companies, the software companies are engaging in a commercial endeavor (building oracle networks and the like), but this is at the same time how capitalism and building new infrastructure generally works. That especially tastes / smells like TradFi building DeFi.


Obviously legislation like the Warren bill could throttle timelines on some of this but it's highly unlikely to stop it. Similarly I think each generation that comes along will have a better grasp on what this stuff is and what it means to their future, the future of finance, the future of accounting and governance, possibly even to having much more data regarding our economies in such a way that it will get much harder to externalized costs in other places and not leave a paper trail (something the environmentalist and global equity types will like).