Bitcoin is still above where it was prior to late December 2020, so at least the most popular coins aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

It seems the crypto bros are pretending web3 is still a thing and an exciting one at that, but I suppose they have to since that’s where they hope to exploit others. From where I’m standing, it’s pretty dead in the water though, the only hype seems to be from people already heavily invested trying to stop their things from losing more “value”, but then I haven’t been paying so much attention lately so who knows. Definitely most non-crypto people seem to have lost interest.

I know some crypto bros so I tried hard to see the value of web3 and NFT’s, I even learned to write smart contracts a few months back, but the more I learned about it all, the less I liked it and the more bullshit it seemed to me, especially crypto games and (vomit) play2earn (really just pyramid schemes).

For pay2earn games: the blockchain aspect is too thin to add any actual value — you still need to do a lot off chain to do anything substantial, which defeats the purpose and claims of being blockchain based — and the “earning” aspect tends to 1) rely on a constant influx of new money (ie its a pyramid scheme); 2) requires pointless busy work (which doesn’t add any value to the people paying) to rate limit payouts; and 3) in order to support both of those tends to be designed around the most exploitative monetisation tactics usually gambling-based. The games themselves tend to be the trashiest gameplay-less unfun soulless garbage you’ve ever seen, nowhere near the calibre of even mobile games, nevermind mainstream console or PC games.

Web3 seems to just be a buzzword for connecting your wallet with a smart contract to interact with the contract from javascript and outside of games, has quite limited application: most people use it to mint NFT’s, occasionally it’s used for a DeFi marketplace or exchange. Often the smart contracts aren’t developed in the open so the “decentralized” part of DeFi is essentially meaningless since you still need to trust the authors. Using web3 to interact with smart contracts also has the issue that every single operation has a cost, and every computation needs to be triggered by something willing to pay that cost, so it’s very difficult to actually build meaningful logic on smart contracts. Eg if you have a game, for anything to happen on-chain, you must trigger a transaction and pay the fee, there’s no “background processing” unless you have something triggering those transactions. That makes it very hard (and expensive, depending on which blockchain you’re on) to implement anything outside of transactional ledger-based things (ie leaderboards, account abalances, etc you can build, but actual business or game logic is probably out of scope).

NFT’s… I explored them and their potential a lot as part of my look into smart contracts, even created my own based on custom smart contract code and my opinion is even lower now than it was before. As long as they rely on any off-chain data, they’re pointless. They don’t convey any ownership over anything but the small number of bits stored on the blockchain. Owning some data that claims you own an image (for which you often don’t own the copyright) or claiming you own something you can’t own, like a tweet or a chunk of Mars, is absolutely useless and pointless. Additionally, ethereum smart contracts are too limited to really do anything interesting with outside of creating coins and receipts. Other newer blockchains have a little more potential but still seem too limited, or they give up the promise of decentralisation, which defeats the purpose. Additionally, in the real world, we need more than just a receipt of ownership: it turns out we do actually need to be able to reverse transactions and such, which has been proven by the number of times that blockchains have been reverted to undo fraud. So NFT’s don’t really do a good job at solving the thing they claim to solve.

And finally, for every half reasonable project, there’s a hundred scams and rug pulls. The amount of money stolen on blockchain is insane and the scams and thefts just keep coming and coming.

PS: owning a receipt that says you own a badly drawn picture of a monkey is fucking stupid.

So, in my opinion, crypto is not dead and isn’t going anywhere any time soon. However: web3, NFT’s and pay2earn haven’t added much of real value, have stagnated, are mostly useless garbage and overwhelmingly are scams and fraud.