> You could fairly easily prove that 90% of crypto projects fail, but so do > 90% of startups. Do startups suck altogether now?

90% of them fail, and you should be very cautious about investing into them or relying on them. You should be altering your behavior in a market where the majority of "products" fail. You should be approaching everyone who comes to you with their startup idea at least initially as if their startup idea is probably either bad or a grift -- and you should dismiss them unless they come up with evidence that makes them worth paying attention to. You should not accept complexity as an argument to invest in a company.

> My point was that anything of significant complexity tends to not have absolute binary answers.

I think my problem here is that it feels like you're equating "there's not an absolute binary answer" with "you can't dismiss it". And I don't think that's true. There are lots and lots of proposals and ideas people have that are not uniformly 100% bad that still should be dismissed out-of-hand absent some kind of tangible evidence that they're good.

This is a skill that people should practice because nuanced things often fall apart horribly. Remember that nuance is a continuum, the only two options aren't "binary good/bad" or "impossible to tell". Sometimes (often) things are mostly bad in obvious ways, and usually things that are worth paying attention to have at least a few obviously good qualities. Learning how to say, "okay sure, maybe there are one or two interesting things here, but it doesn't look like they matter" can save people from a lot of headaches -- particularly in the tech sector where people are inundated with frameworks, and products, and profit models, and "revolutions."

> As for the open web, in a way it's dead as it is.

Once again, I'm really glad we're being nuanced about things.

I don't agree that the open web is dead, and I do think that's a pretty un-nuanced take, but I do think that the open web has a lot of problems and that they are important to solve. The thing is though that the core ideas behind NFTs/crypto-gaming/identity-management/etc exasperate the same (real) problems you're looking at with the modern tech/web landscape. It's not just that they aren't good solutions, they are a more concentrated version of the web's current problems.

The biggest corporate proponents of Web3/metaverse products are envisioning a world that (despite being placed on the blockchain) is still effectively more centralized and more commoditized than the current world, and where the majority of funding, consumption, and creation happens under the supervision of people who bought in early to a set of scarce deprecating resources. That's bad for everyone if it does happen.

Luckily, it's probably not going to happen, because it turns out that NFTs are not really a great tool to build that dystopian world either, and a lot of the people trying to corporatize the Internet are (in my opinion) probably going to eventually figure out that there are easier ways to do that than with NFTs and smart contracts.

But that's kind of the optimistic take. If the articles and think-pieces from companies and investors with actual money and products in this space are indicative of their plans, then their plans are bad and shouldn't be realized. To say that no one will force you onto to Web3/NFT platforms if they do succeed is naive; these people are pretty straightforward about the fact that they want people to be forced onto the platforms and they want their platforms to be the dominant way that people interact with digital "assets". Scarce digital assets are a great way to encourage the exact same consolidation that we see today.

Many of the most interesting proposals in the Web3 space don't work unless they become dominant platforms in their respective industries. Certainly once we get to the societal applications that get proposed in these spaces, stuff like voting on a blockchain doesn't work unless it's the only way to vote. Thankfully, the optimistic take is that it's very likely never going to get there because the majority of the crypto market is about speculative investing, not changing the world.

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And just to restate one more time, if it bothers you to hear someone say that the majority of cryptocurrency right now is a speculative bubble and the majority of it isn't fulfilling any real purpose -- it should also make you really nervous that crytocurrency itself was built out of a belief that the dominant expert narratives about monetary policy and asset management were just straight-up wrong.

If I take your complexity theory at face value and if I really buy into that model for how to think about complexity, then there really isn't a lot of reason to believe that a bunch of VCs, Internet hackers, hobby investors, and Anarchists know more about monetary policy than the Fed. Monetary policy is enormously complicated and constantly moving. Part of the reason why it's hard to take "it's complex so don't dismiss it" seriously is that if I agreed with that take I still wouldn't really see that as a defense of cryptocurrency.

If a bunch of non-experts, even tens of thousands of them, get together and make hundreds and thousands of projects, but the vast majority of them are predicated on the idea that traditional ideas about finance are wrong and that a bunch of people who have never gotten an economics PHD know better, then all you really have is tens of thousands of people who are themselves ignoring complexity.

So the only thing that I think makes sense is to examine Web3 based on the actual claims it makes, and those claims seem pretty bogus to me as someone who has been involved in trying to make the web open for a pretty long time. And they seem bogus to a lot of other experts who care about free culture and free expression, experts that I have over time learned to somewhat trust. Which doesn't mean that there's literally nothing good about Web3, but it can be as nuanced as it wants on the edges while the majority of it still consists of bad ideas, grifts, scams, and pure speculation. And unless those edges get a lot more prominent really quickly, then it's probably a good idea to dismiss the whole thing and let the good ideas come back in another medium or form that doesn't have quite so many toxic attributes.