Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike on web3, NFTs, and everything old is new again

[Qie Niangao]

NFTs come up occasionally in the SL context, which is my strained rationale for posting this tweet, of which the underlying blog post is generating considerable buzz in the past few days:

Tying back to SL a bit, something I've complained about in every "SL needs NFT" thread:

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People are excited about NFT royalties for the way that they can benefit creators, but royalties aren’t specified in ERC-721, and it’s too late to change it, so OpenSea has its own way of configuring royalties that exists in web2 space.

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When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. For example, to accept a bid on my NFT, I would have had to pay over $80-$150+ just in ethereum transaction fees. That puts an artificial floor on all bids, since otherwise you’d lose money by accepting a bid for less than the gas fees. Payment fees by credit card, which typically feel extortionary, look cheap compared to that. 

It's darkly amusing that all the DeFi hype completely relies on a couple centralized services, begging for regulation.

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Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again.

The web1—web2—web3 progression reminds me of this year old response to a Quora question: