EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Well, there's actually three kinds of things here. Scams, pipe dreams, and real uses.I seems like a dumb scam, is anything web 3.0 not a scam?
Unfortunately, one person having a pipe dream can quickly become ten people running a scam, even if only some of them know that. And one person running a scam can easily attract nine people who see only the pipe dream. That's the real problem with a lot of this: there are a lot of well-meaning but foolish tech-sector types who get all starry-eyed about the enormous potential. In D&D terms, high Int, high Technology skill, low Wis, not trained in Insight.
Thankfully, this time around, the whole point of the technology is to jettison the "traditional" financial system entirely. This means that when things go south, they rarely affect 99% of people. Of course, you can't really get-rich-quick in the current world without connecting to the "traditional" financial system somewhere along the line, so a lot of the early adopters are scammers, grifters, or fakers.
Whether this ends up being like the dot-com bubble (that is, like the absolute explosion of usefulness from the Internet despite all the scams) or like the tulip mania remains to be seen.