So .. TL;Dr web3 is nothing to do with the web, and is just the same old smart contract crypto hype we've all seen before?
No mention of the actual distributed web protocols like IPFS or Dat as far as I could tell.
Have I massively missed something or has the crypto community just co-opted the name web3 for their own non-web related stuff? How does the web factor in to crypto?
So I attended a year end function last month and there was an independent financial advisor present (CFP straight-arrow-type-guy that was reluctant about crypto's a few years ago). During a conversation he expressed regret that he didn't get onto the crypto train 3 years ago and that he is going alllll in on web3 and threw the word nft's around a bit and that he has some more web3/nft webinars lined up for the coming week. Mind you, this guy manages about $50M for his clients (it's true, I saw his dashboards on a third party website - he knows his shit). He told a whole bunch of people at the event about nft and how it will put spotify and youtube out of business.
But the thing is, he is not tech-inclined at all and spends most of his time on excel and on third party platforms (as in, fund manager platforms, insurance platform, medical aid, taxation etc). So what I took away from his talking about this stuff is that financial advisors are being "educated" to think that web3 = crypto = new 4th industrial revolution etc and everyone will get rich as hell very quickly so we all have to do it NOW. It was a huge wtf moment for me because I was mostly ignoring this stuff and the whole web3 umbrella and here I have a legit CFP guy talking about this stuff. All while I'm standing there not knowing wtf he is going on about, most of it sounding extremely dodgy from a software developers perspective.
Make of this what you will but I think a lot of people will get hurt, esp non-tech people. I feel like these people live in an alternate universe and they've built a whole ecosystem of webinars, trading platforms that they are trying to sell onto normal people that doesn't know better; that doesn't seem to be used for the greater good (most of it scammy or used for crime etc).
I think the web part is now "log in with your wallet, fetch account state from the blockchain". It all happens on the normal web and the blockchain access is facilitated by "normal" web API gateways like Infura or Cloudflare. This is my view from the outside so it might be off on the details.
It seems pretty reasonable, as far as crypto stuff goes, except that there is a massive, expensive machine behind all the HTTP APIs that is solving very specific problems you probably don‘t have while making someone rich.
No mention of the actual distributed web protocols like IPFS or Dat as far as I could tell.
Have I massively missed something or has the crypto community just co-opted the name web3 for their own non-web related stuff? How does the web factor in to crypto?