After reading a few articles about web3. I guess the idea is to eliminate the "middlemen". For example, trading stocks without a broker, direct collection of royalties for music, games, films, TV shows art, etc. without having to employ collection services. Getting rid of Paypal. Fiat currency exchange services and so on....
I have no idea is this all is feasible; it seems like a libertarian dream. And well, regulations are not usually created just for fun.
The libertarian viewpoint seems to be inordinately sensitive to the costs of these middlemen, but adopts a willful blindness to the value that middlemen can offer and the reasons why they are there.
One example. I've seen the proposal of a decentralised ledger being used to record transfers and ownership of real property as being an example of a use case for the blockchain. This is touted as superior to current systems, which is typically a centralised register administered by government. I can't see how such a system would be any more resistant to fraud than a centralised system (cryptographic keys may be secure, but they can be fraudulently obtained, which is how most fraud seems to work). However, one area where it would differ from a centralised system would be the lack of any kind of legal or regulatory oversight rail to address fraudulent transactions - which is a serious drawback to such a system.
The real world is messy, full of exceptions, unique edge cases, and the current legal and regulatory framework in many countries is a best attempt at order for this state of affairs, but crucially is open to evolve as society evolves. The laws we have devised and the regulatory framework that we have established are not perfect, and they come at a financial cost, and much transactional friction, but have been designed to address this complexity. To me the libertarian solutions sometimes seem to be predicated on a model of the world that is too dysfunctionally simplistic to be of much real world use.
Note, I'm not a luddite, blind supporter of the status quo, fan of rent seekers etc. If a particular middle man is extracting too much, creating too much friction, by all means reform it.
On a personal note, I come from a legal background and spent my professional life trying to order the mess or real life and commercial transactions into complex legal documents, but striving to make them no more complex than they needed to be. I've recently started teaching myself a bit of coding and my eyes have been opened to how elegant and powerful code can be in solving problems, quickly and at scale. What has struck me is there is a mindset that arises from the problem solving allure of code, that almost everything can be rendered into code, any problem solved. Certainly some of the achievements of machine learning and AI are very impressive, but they have very stark and basic limitations as well which often aren't properly acknowledged in the midst of all the hype (see here if this interests you:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50374022-artificial-intelligence). But the tendency for this tech based, utopian, optimistic world view that sometimes seems to gets a little ahead of itself is probably as old as tech itself.
