We've all heard a lot about crypto and NFTs, but they aren't the founding principle of Web3, decentralization is. Decentralized architectures respect privacy and freedom, like the older days of the internet. A large amount of projects/startups coming up are moving towards Web3, I've seen this happening firsthand. Around 60%-70% of the time, the idea is amazing and the technological side is a perfect fit for Web3. The remaining ~30%, is moving to Web3 for no reason except the large amount of people moving to it, kind of like a tech version of FOMO.

Decentralization does still have a huge amount of potential, in almost every industry. Taking an example from WIRED, Google Docs has a decentralized alternative called Graphite Docs. Graphite Docs has almost all the features of Google Docs, with collaboration and real time updates, with two major differences, your data isn't sent to google's ad services, and secondly all data backed up, is encrypted. With secret keys only on certain devices. Blockstack, the software Graphite Docs is built on, allows dApps(a short form for decentralized apps) to be accessed from a browser, Blockstack creates IDs and stores the encryptions keys which dApps built on it require. Downloading an app is a one time struggle, but definitely one worth going through.

Adoptions of Web3, might be slow since not everyone wants to protect their data(the fairly common "I have nothing to hide" reasoning). Changing basically every website everyone uses for a decentralized alternative isn't exactly easy, especially since people like comfort zones. Blockstack has it's own servers, but only because early adopters sacrificed their laptops to run servers for it. This isn't scalable, and the alternatives for scale aren't too affordable for the developers. This brings me to my biggest problem with the new era of the web, crypto everywhere. Most hello pages built with Web3 in mind, ask you to send a small amount of eth to send a message to the owner of the page, in return for a minute chance of earning some eth, basically gambling with crypto.

Web3 and decentralization seems like our future, but keeping it on it’s intended track is a must, a track not fuelled by money, but by a want of a more private and free internet.