Between cryptocurrencies and something called web3, the unexpected consequences may be enormously expensive. Noah Smith first explains web3 on noahopinion:
In recent months, there has been a lot of excitement around the idea of a new World Wide Web based on blockchains. It’s commonly referred to as “web3”, to be contrasted with “web1” (websites) and “web2” (social media platforms). The creators of Ethereum have been pushing this idea for a while, but the recent success of NFTs as an asset market has gotten lots of people excited that web3 is really happening.
There’s still the question of what web3 will actually do. This isn’t actually as important a question as you might think; when people started building websites in the 90s, no one really knew what the Web might ultimately be useful for. Sometimes humanity gets a cool new toy, and playing around and seeing what it’s useful for is more important than sitting around and theorizing about it.
And then he opines on where it might lead:
Imagine if everything you do online required you to decide whether to make a tiny payment. Send an email? Pay a few cents. Read one more paragraph of an article? Pay a few cents. And so on.
It would be an utter nightmare. The psychic cost of having to decide whether to pay a tiny amount for a tiny piece of product, dozens or hundreds of times a day, would be enormous. Some people would just choose not to deal with the hassle, and instead to simply use a ton of paid services and see their bill at the end of the month, like they do when using electricity in their house; but this carefree attitude would naturally lead them to buy far more than they really wanted, and when they saw a few of those monthly bills, they would reconsider.
In the end, most of these users would likely migrate back to either free ad-supported services or to subscription services that only make you think about payments once in a while.
Followed by
This is why the people trying to build web3 should probably steer away from making it just “micropayments, but in crypto”. I know this might sound crazy, but having to pay for stuff is not a feature. I am going to go ahead and predict that the added allure of being able to pay for things in a form of money that (nominally) isn’t controlled by the Federal Reserve will not be enough to make micropayments succeed where before they have failed.
My initial response is that It depends on whether you’re a producer or a consumer, now doesn’t it? But soon enough, the introduction of payment for every last little thing may even rebound negatively on the producers.
Let’s take the topic of opinion writing. While folks involved in the practice of opinion writing must, oddly enough, eat just like everyone else, and maybe have some expensive dreams in mind, this is not a transactional occupation. Opinion writers don’t just write pieces without regard to their past nor their future; rather, a producer of opinion writing who is an honest part of American society is trying to influence society to what they perceive to be its betterment. This is served by conveying an extended story to the audience, and neither is particularly well served by charging for it, because if the audience can’t afford it, or doesn’t want to pay for it, the author has failed.
And if the entire future is centered around micropayments?
There will be certain cases in which micropayments via crypto may make sense – but it’ll be interesting to see if they outweigh the disadvantages that come with crypto.
And the saga continues. Read Smith’s piece, I had not heard of web3 before and it may point to the future. A future that we may not want.
