"Infra comes before user adoption" sounds like a textbook case of a solution looking for a problem. Google didn't invent DFS -which became HDFS and Hadoop, the foundation on which today's big data ecosystem is built - before it had a need for it. Ditto for Amazon and its Dynamo database - they needed a horizontally scaling system without the constraints of an RDBMS. TPU came out of Google's need to run inference at scale across their numerous billion-plus user apps. I've been in software my entire career - 25+ years now - and the "Field of Dreams" approach, i.e. "if you build it they will come" rarely works. And web3 is arguably one of the worst tech stacks for this approach, as even simple things like user onboarding are technically tricky compared to web2, not too mention the massive security risks if you fail to properly secure your wallet. And even if a new user gets all that right the first time, the whole web3 ecosystem is rife with fraud and scammers. So once users have been onboarded they have to constantly be looking over their shoulder, asking themselves "is this dApp something I can trust?" I admire the passion that web3 developers have shown, but I just don't see how building more and more layers and protocols on top of an expensive, low TPS blockchain database is ever going to have the same impact as the HTTP protocol did for computer networking. HTTP enabled the "killer app" required to spark mass web1 adoption - the Netscape web browser. No such technology exists today in the web3 ecosystem. If we're being honest about it, the blockchain was *supposed* to be the tech that drove a sea-change level event in the way HTTP did decades ago. This hasn't happened because the blockchain, despite applying cryptography in an interesting way - is a fundamentally flawed and constrained data store. Building more infra on top of it is not going to be what drives billions of users to transact on chain.
"Infra comes before user adoption" sounds like a textbook case of a solution looking for a problem. Google didn't invent DFS -which became HDFS and Hadoop, the foundation on which today's big data ecosystem is built - before it had a need for it. Ditto for Amazon and its Dynamo database - they needed a horizontally scaling system without the constraints of an RDBMS. TPU came out of Google's need to run inference at scale across their numerous billion-plus user apps. I've been in software my entire career - 25+ years now - and the "Field of Dreams" approach, i.e. "if you build it they will come" rarely works. And web3 is arguably one of the worst tech stacks for this approach, as even simple things like user onboarding are technically tricky compared to web2, not too mention the massive security risks if you fail to properly secure your wallet. And even if a new user gets all that right the first time, the whole web3 ecosystem is rife with fraud and scammers. So once users have been onboarded they have to constantly be looking over their shoulder, asking themselves "is this dApp something I can trust?" I admire the passion that web3 developers have shown, but I just don't see how building more and more layers and protocols on top of an expensive, low TPS blockchain database is ever going to have the same impact as the HTTP protocol did for computer networking. HTTP enabled the "killer app" required to spark mass web1 adoption - the Netscape web browser. No such technology exists today in the web3 ecosystem. If we're being honest about it, the blockchain was *supposed* to be the tech that drove a sea-change level event in the way HTTP did decades ago. This hasn't happened because the blockchain, despite applying cryptography in an interesting way - is a fundamentally flawed and constrained data store. Building more infra on top of it is not going to be what drives billions of users to transact on chain.