The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

What goals does today's crypto-token-powered "web 3" vision share with the old Internet? It's not enough to say "well it's decentralized" and do a handwave.

Consider the NFT exploration Moxie Marlinspike did recently:

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

This is essentially a system that lets you buy DRM'd metadata that points to servers owned by a corporation funded by billions of VC dollars, and transactions are recorded on a ledger that spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets.

None of these things have anything to with the old Internet: cargo cult DRM, billion-dollar VC funding, enormous energy waste, artificial scarcity where none is needed.

That website on dial-up was slow because of real physical constraints, not artificial constraints erected to make VCs richer at the expense of the planet's ecosystem.

So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning:

> (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on the internet. If this image is not yours, this is ILLEGAL AND A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAW, and may result in your NFT being removed from the marketplace.

How on earth is this decentralized? Like yeah, I get wanting to protect your "asset" from "theft," but what central authority gets to decide what copyright law we abide by- further, what happens when an NFT marketplace removes your NFT? Does it get removed from the blockchain? I legitimately don't know how this works.

The user experience is also TERRIBLE. I am rather technical (hell, I used to do Bitcoin back in like 2015, or whenever it was about $4k/coin) and still don't really know how the hell MetaMask works. I imported the wallet on my phone... maybe? The randomart image it showed initially was different, but apparently the iOS app just defaults to a different kind of randomart.

You also have to use the MetaMask browser on iOS. It sucks.

Also the MetaMask connect buttons barely work across different sites. It had a _really_ hard time telling if I had a wallet. Not sure if this is an implementation issue on the dev end but as a user it was super confusing.

Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.