Decentralization ... yes, like the promise of blockchain, what is the end ?
My best guess so far: we'll have a chimerical blockchain layer of the internet (and by extension internet of things) comprised of permissionless and permissioned networks. Seems like the banks prefer the permissioned/private blockchains (Bank of America, I believe, is working with Paxos here).
A better way of smoothing out risk in the ever more dangerous cyberwar landscape. Asymptotically instant transaction time.
Perhaps a more secure systemic handling of personal data (IDs as NFTs; having a wallet associated with your personal data, accessible to you, the government, and whomever you grant access).
Perhaps a better global infrastructure for loans and insurance, especially for those to whom the major global financial entities do not cater (edit: or gouge, if they do cater). Smart contracts hooked up to satellite or drone surveillance, monitoring construction progress, crop growth, wildfire rates, other natural disasters etc.
All such data is to be fed into smart contracts, which is itself a decentralized and competitive process thanks to Chainlink (disclosure edit: which I invest in), bringing us closer and closer to an objective metahuman arbiter of human contracts. A premise at the intersection, perhaps, of the efficient market hypothesis and artificial intelligence.
Financial exploitation will be less and less at the discretion of private actors who can get away with it, unless there is some way to game smart contracts that I am not aware of yet.
I still would like to understand if Ethereum, once it gets to Ethereum 2.0 and beyond, could support permissioned "sidechains" (a sort of fractal blockchain I suppose) to cater to the legacy incumbents who are increasingly exhibiting a demand for it.
If Ethereum can do this, then it is all the more poised to become the Web3 incumbent, in an open source fashion, unless the likes of Amazon can crank out a proprietary competitor, which to me seems implausible.
(edit: what seems more likely, however, is that the likes of Paxos will continue to cater to legacy incumbents, and there will be "inter-blockchain" protocols such as Cosmos (which I invest in) or Polkadot (which I do not invest in) to connect different, otherwise siloed blockchains. That said, I could be misunderstanding something here.)
Cardano is taking care of Africa, which, as a set of states, is quite arguably better poised to adopt this new tech given the
apparent relative
absence lack of financial incumbency and regulatory framework there to begin with.
The Ethereum/Cardano race is one to watch, even if one doesn't have a stake in either (but I am invested in both, so there is my bias).