I'll start by describing how I see Web3, so really, your last question first, then dive into the other two.

You have a monthly membership at your local gym, and you go there 5 times a week to build up your fitness. You've gotten really strong, and fit, you're happy with your life, you've even made some friends at the gym. You decide with xmas coming up, that you and some of your friends at the gym would like to go on a ski holiday.

But you built your fitness at the gym. The gym owns your fitness, not you. So you have to ask them permission to use the fitness to go on a ski holiday. But they don't have a commercial arrangement, with the resort you want to go to, and the resort hasn't built a connection to the gym's API. The gym also doesn't want you to be able to socialize with the friends you made at the gym in locations that aren't owned by the gym, where they can be a part of the "experience". They basically want to own it all.

That's the world we currently live in. You put your thoughts, photos, videos, etc onto social media, and they then own it.

In Web3, you own your data. It is in your wallet, and you decide who gets access to it. Even if you build your fitness at the gym, the fitness is in your wallet. When you go to the ski resort, you just use it there, because there is a distributed standard understanding of how the protocol of using muscles works.

So, to me, that's Web3, and blockchain is like the SQL which makes this distributed environment work. Just like SQL vs Mongo, etc etc. I'm not saying it's the only way it could work, but so far, it seems like a good general solution (ignoring that atm, it isn't ideal storing actual data on the blockchain, but it's good for managing "transactions").

So, is blockchain revolutionary technology? Sure, it does a very good job of managing consensus in a robust way.

Is crypto the future of money? I think this is possibly the wrong question. Does crypto have a future in facilitating transactions may be a better question. I believe it does. Maybe something takes the place of "money" for day to day transactions, maybe not. But there are a lot of use cases where it makes sense to use cryptocurrency instead of other systems.

For example, moving money internationally (and no you don't have to be a drug dealer to want to do that, regular people do it every day). If you live in the US, and you are sending money to your family in Peru (as an example), you likely are sending USD via Western Union. The family member you are sending the money to might not have a bank account (57% of Peruvians do not have bank accounts). They have to go to the Western Union office to collect the money. That could be a day travel or more away. When they get to the Western Union office, they wait in line, and Western Union charges them a fee and it can take days to make the transfer.

With crypto, when I was sending money internationally, the cost was less than 1% and the transaction was completed in minutes. So yes, there are real world applications.

Why is crypto hated on HN? I'm not sure it is, but there are probably some vocal haters. In a conversation with my co-founder yesterday, after years of having occasional discussions regarding crypto, we got to the bottom of why he hates it. He sees the hype-cycle, the garbage and scams, and doesn't want to have anything to do with it. I completely agree. We're in the crap stage. The internet went through the same phase, where people wondered what it was good for, it was all nigerian scams, you would never use your credit card on the internet, or trust a person you met, VCs were pumping money into pet stores, and grocery stores that nobody ever used, etc etc etc.

But it was also during this phase of the internet that Amazon, Yahoo, and Netscape started. So it isn't all bad, but the majority of it is pretty bad. The people who are taking a long-term view and building something they think is good for society are the ones who will be here after the storm comes through and blows out all the scammers, and people just looking to make fast money.