my bets on web3

I’ve been involved with crypto and the web3 world since I bought my first dogecoin in 2013, but like so many others I made the huge mistake of not taking it seriously. I was young and easily influenced at the time. The doubters were louder than the supporters and I listened to the voice that was the loudest. But now after much more intentional thought and research I have created my own vision for the future for web3 and I thought it would be fun to document that here. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get some of it right.

• The future is multi-chain.

There is no blockchain that will fit every use case for the future. A blockchain accommodating more use cases inherently makes it worse at each individual one by adding complexities and possible points of failure. Bitcoin will never be the best smart contract platform, and Ethereum will never be the best cryptocurrency. There will be a blockchain for DeFi, a blockchain for NFTs, a blockchain for DAOs, etc.

• The hype cycles will continue.

The web3 infrastructure is not at a place to allow steady and constant growth, and it is certainly not at a place to sustain the exponential growth that would come with mass adoption/hyperbitcoinization. High value use cases will emerge over time and bring hype cycles with them.

• Bitcoin will be a digital store of value and likely the best one as well.

Bitcoin currently does not behave as a store of value because it is so volatile and so influenced by the state of the economy. Over time with further adoption Bitcoin will begin to behave as a store of value. Additionally thanks to its strong fundamentals it will behave as a stronger store of value than any of the other cryptocurrencies.

• There will be some form of decomposition/slimming mechanism in the most successful layer 1 blockchains.

Think mycelium layer beneath the forest floor. It’s obviously unsustainable to keep growing a blockchain. This is exactly why Ethereum is implementing sharding and taking on all of the downsides that come with it. A better mechanism will be invented that can decompose old blocks with some cryptographic magic and the blockchains that implement it will be golden.

• There will be a revolution in how the energy that powers a proof of work system is stored and spent.

Currently it’s bad. A lot of energy is allocated specifically to power the PoW system, which is good for security and the token but bad for the environment. An obvious area for improvement is funneling excess energy into a PoW system, like excess hydroelectric energy during rainy season. There will be more novel ideas too. PoW will stick around and it will be the most secure consensus mechanism.

Thank you for reading my first article! These are my highest conviction predictions in the web3 space and I’m excited to see how my predictions hold up. I’m sure this will be very fun to reflect back on in the years to come.