A lot more of the world will make sense to you if you stop assuming people are playing 4D chess.

Blockchain has had a staggering amount of time, money, and brainpower invested into finding any meaningful usecases for it, and nothing meaningful has materialized. People will claim an endless list of use cases but once you get downt o specifics of things blockchain can do that can't be done better or cheaper without it, they all shrivel up or are based on empty air. I've spoken to endless blockchain-pumpers, a bunch have tried to recruit me to their companies.

It's not a secret they have no use cases, that's why the new wave after the crypto crashes has been to say "hey customers care about utility now, we should... find some?"

Blockchain was just a digital snakeoil, and I mean that nearly literally - as it was sold as a cure-all that would mysteriously disrupt every industry. It was a classic Ponzi scheme mixed with a speculator boom/bust cycle - incredibly predictable.

The concept of a "metaverse" is almost impossible to debunk because it's an ooze - it shifts to endless definitions because when you nail them down outside the VR or AR component they sound like like World of Warcraft and Second Life, and that's not "new" so it's not cool enough to get them excited.

Will VR and AR have some future applications? Sure, of course. But people pitching a "metaverse" as a new version of the internet are talking about experiencing the internet as a VR experience and that's just really, really bad as a user experience.

The genuinely "disrupt everything" tech is going to happen due to LLM work like ChatGPT because all of software is trying to tell a computer what to do. Computers can display infinite possible digital experiences, but they need to know what to display. LLMs allow people to instruct a computer through natural language rather than fine-tuned tools to get to the basics, and if a computer can export other things into natural language the tools can talk to eachother... Which has inane potential.

That is the most likely thing that leads to a real "web 3.0".