I’m much less interested in crypto criticism that takes the form of things everyone says about every new tech (it doesn’t scale, it’s not useful, that already exists) than in questions like whether self-custody can be viable for consumer, or smart contacts could become safe.

The obvious paths to solving most crypto problems involve abstraction layers that would seem to remove at least some of the point of being crypto. ‘If you fix crypto it’s not crypto any more’

Generally when something is extremely technical and complex, that becomes very useful plumbing the user doesn’t need to know about. But if the user doesn’t know that this social app is build on ownership and portability (and arguably securitisation), then what’s the point?

Open source became a much more efficient way of writing and managing software, but didn’t result in software that operated in fundamentally different ways, as far as the user was concerned. But the innovation in web3 is in software that actually does different things.

If something is very technical, confusing and hard to use, and easy to break, you solve that for the mass market by abstracting away the complexity. But abstraction layers are control and centralisation. UX is a gatekeeper. So if you do that with web3, is it still web3?

Hence another open source parallel - tech runs on open source, but it's not open - it runs inside Amazon, or your iPhone, and you can't change it. It fails the purity test. So what are paths for crypto to be more useful if it fails the purity test yet keeps some key aspect?

I think one can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that consumers will not care about any of the principles, ideology or moral judgements of crypto or Web3 any more than they cared about those things for open source...

So either consumers don't need to know (you don't need to know Amazon or your iPhone are full of OSS),
Or it enables features they care about. But you have to get that the right way round.
If crypto enables X and we like X we will use X. But we won't use X *because* it's crypto

This is why phrases like 'giving people an on-ramp to crypto' make absolutely no sense to me. People didn't buy iPhones because it was an on-ramp to ARM and WCDMA. You have to start from the user www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8n5hCLvuzc