On the subway this morning, I looked up and saw an ad for a new cryptocurrency. More specifically, I looked up at a bright-red rectangle behind large white font reading: It’s never too late to be early.
We’re in the midst of a speculation boom that has been variously compared to the Beanie Babies craze, the dot-com bubble, and tulip mania. A year ago, the average person might never have heard the term Web3. Now we all have to watch as Paris Hilton beholds a cartoon-monkey NFT (non-fungible token) that Jimmy Fallon spent $216,000 on, then remarks, “I love the captain hat.” Stories about this new vision for the internet appear in the tech and business sections of national newspapers more or less every single day, generally with the caveat that a lot of people sincerely believe Web3 to be a Ponzi scheme, a grift, a multilevel-marketing arrangement, and a scam.
This assessment has its own, swiftly growing army of adherents. “Web3 is a Ponzi scheme” has circulated as a meme, in widely cited manifestos, and in viral blog posts. Maybe soon it will be a political slogan. (Those who have a specific disdain for NFTs have already taken up the nickname “right-clickers.”) Likening Web3 to a Ponzi scheme is useful because, unlike Web3 itself, a Ponzi scheme is easy to grasp: We all know what’s wrong with scams, and we understand that Ponzi schemes are bad. We may not get what people mean when they talk about the blockchain, but we do get the sense that we’re supposed…
