There's no wheat. The entirety of web3 is a series of ponzi-like schemes to pump up the price of some token and dump it on unsuspecting users. When someone is trying to sell you a currency, they're not trying to sell you a product. They're trying to get you to inflate the value of it so the miners can realize their profits, while you get stuck holding the tokens that will then change value randomly. And even if there were any merit to any of the claims made by web3 companies (there isn't), by definition most of these web3 projects/startups would fail and collapse to nothing anyway, making the token worthless, and losing everything the holders have.
Payments for IPFS storage isn't a horrible idea, but it needs to be done in a normal way using real money, without the speculative tokens.
> There's no wheat. The entirety of web3 is a series of ponzi-like schemes to pump up the price of some token and dump it on unsuspecting users.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
> Payments for IPFS storage isn't a horrible idea, but it needs to be done in a normal way using real money, without the speculative tokens.
That's what Filecoin is attempting to do. That's the wheat that you declared to be nonexistent, on the basis of arbitrarily deeming speculation on cryptocurrencies to be bad while ignoring the rampant speculation on "real money" (see also: the very existence of forex markets).
Fundamentally, Web3 is a suite of technologies to solve problems that are irrelevant to most people. But the technology is cool, interesting and new.
And so in order to make the business successful for them and their investors they do whatever is legally okay. Which is right now: anything. Hence why we see rug pulling, insider trading, money laundering, ponzi schemes, fraud and ultimately gambling.
Fundamentally, Web3 can't actually solve any of those problems because the technology doesn't actually do anything, besides money laundering, and siphoning money away to miners and whales. The technology also isn't new, distributed databases are several decades old, proof of work was originally developed for email spam filtering, etc. I've found it only "cool and interesting" from a purely entertainment perspective, like if the money was fake video game money and you didn't actually care what happened to it. But even then it gets boring real quick because you'll easily find that the trading patterns are all either completely random or are heavily manipulated.
In the real world, all those things you described are illegal in most places. So the only way they've gotten around that is by setting up this fake system, lying to people and telling them it's real and charging them real money to use it, and then when they get pressed by regulators they admit it's fake again.
Web3 provides distributed consensus that enforces the immutability of a virtual machine protocol.
This is a new feature set that was not available before. In practice it has enabled the emergence of a core set of highly reputable DeFi apps - MakerDAO, Compound, Aave and Uniswap - that have managed billions of dollars worth of digital assets and not malfunctioned in the recent market crash, while several centralized lenders and investment funds did.
>>and then when they get pressed by regulators they admit it's fake again.
This has never happened AFAIK. The opposite - of projects taking the credible position that they don't control the protocol because it is autonomous and immutable - has happened, as in the case of Uniswap Labs vis-a-vis the Uniswap protocol.
For decentralized/genuine DeFi apps, like MakerDAO, Compound, Aave and Uniswap, as opposed to centralized ones like Ripple, I don't expect this position to ever be challenged by regulatory agencies, because in reality, these protocols cannot be shut down or changed by any party.
Payments for IPFS storage isn't a horrible idea, but it needs to be done in a normal way using real money, without the speculative tokens.