Jordan Pearson writing in Bored Apes, BuzzFeed and the Battle for the Future of the Internet:

What is manifesting is not a world where middlemen are deprived of their share and data brokers are cut out of the action due to clever, privacy-protecting protocols, but rather a new online world in which seemingly anything can be financialized thanks to blockchain technology, which creates a digital infrastructure in which “every product is simultaneously an investment opportunity,” as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has put it.

This sums up the biggest reason I can't get behind all the talk around blockchain and web3. Every single application that is outlined (none of which work in practice) is to sell you something. Investment into any blockchain is purely for monetary gain, and there is nothing wrong with that, but there needs to be a major use case outside this.

I do admit, we need cryptocurrency adoption, perhaps for no other good reason than to allow people to send money to whomever they like without governments and companies getting involved. Yet, I haven’t seen anything serious behind web3 apart from monetising everything.

You can scream and shout about decentralisation and freedom all you like, but the amount of grifting going on — and the excuses that are made that this is something that just happens — puts it in the same league as the dark web.