I hope not. Mozilla are having a hard time of it lately but I would really worry that they've lost their way if they touch the steaming pile of crypto scamware shit that is web3.
So-called "web3" is still early-stage and amorphously defined, born of the tensions between web1 (a user-sovereign Commons, but lacking identity and value transfer) and Web 2.0 (payments and identity, at the cost of surveillance, enclosure of social Commons, and Metcalfe-monopoly Platform Capitalism).
I understand the pushback against the "crypto grift", and as a critique of Actually Existing Crypto-Anarchist Political Economy, I completely agree. But the race for the future is happening with or without us. We can either cede the territory to the bad economics (and worse ethics) of Austrian-school neo-goldbugs; or, we can get involved and leverage the tools towards democratic principles, human values, regenerative ecology, and genuine disruption of unproductive rent-seeking.
I'd view anything pitching itself as an investment with extreme suspicion. (And by all means: carbon-tax or fully outlaw "Proof of Work" mining.) But there are countless projects that are truly decentralized, not profit-oriented, and community-first/tech-second: Panvala, Breadchain, CommonsStack, Green Pill Party, Basis Project, /r/CryptoLeftists, lots more. By all means, be skeptical, call out moral hazards and perverse incentives, that's all to the good. But let's not ignore the huge opportunity to disintermediate private Capital (old and new), and in the spirit of copyleft/FOSS, to "lock open" our digital and economic infrastructure.
Dunning-Kruger much? :P Lots of academic fields look like gibberish to a lay audience. (I suspect GPT could pass a Turing test, of showing real and fake academic papers to those outside the relevant disciplines.)
I think it's a fair criticism, which is why I don't have a high degree of confidence in Bitcoin itself, or the political-economy narrative of "crypto-anarchism". The fact that there's still not a crypto eBay is damning. (Though it's not clear where the right point of comparison is: do we measure from TBL's WWW, or ARPAnet? The earliest chains are more transport layer than application layer.)
That said, the kinds of innovation I'm talking about are still young: DAOs have only existed since 2016, and many of the non-speculative projects I mentioned (mutual aid, mutual credit) are only a couple years old.
Maybe the critics are right, and "crypto" is a flash in the pan unable to deliver on its promises, and destined to be a cautionary tale, like tulips or Beanie Babies. But it might be an expensive question to get wrong: if cryptographic mechanisms for distributed coordination are able to outcompete firms (per Coase), or states (the Global South moreso than the West), that "basin of attraction" could be non-trivial to disrupt, just as it's now non-trivial to defeat the chicken-and-egg problem of making a new eBay. If any aspect of the future is to be based on cryptographic coordination, I'd rather the tech (and culture) be truly democratic and open, not reliant upon the neo-oligarchs of BTC. Refusing to engage in the space at all is ceding the territory.
When you say unproductive rent-seeking? Who are you calling out here and what makes it unproductive? rent collecting is a perfectly reasonable way to capture value.
Rent-seeking is not exactly uncontroversial amongst economists (though some claim it only occurs through state intervention, which is a view I don't share). The most egregious examples are fee-simple ground rents (Adam Smith called a landlord's right to rents a "monopoly price... apportioned to what the farmer can afford to pay"); and many forms of patents (eg, "discovering" a certain curvature of rounded corners, or a "one-click buy button").
There's certainly an argument that some forms of rent are net-productive ways to create markets for labor exchange, which would be difficult to capture otherwise, so I'm not arguing against rent as a broad category: only that some rents are unearned, and therefore a net drag on real wealth creation.
Why would web3 not have mobile sites like web[?] does? The source lives in decentralized version control. This is as web3 as it could get without tacking some kind of pointless blockchain grift onto it.
