The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Skepticism is healthy, but criticism without being constructive is not.
There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Most of them will fail and be forgotten, but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products. Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?
One of the criticisms against web3 and crypto is that it’s ultimately a high tech pyramid scheme, solving few problems that it didn’t create on it’s own. If that’s the case, then we should want and expect to see rising criticism and pushback. Crypto doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and if unscrutinized, can have unintended harms across technology and society in general
> is that it’s ultimately a high tech pyramid scheme, solving few problems that it didn’t create on it’s own
While you are correct in that most things borne of the blockchain space are scams, it's important to understand that it's not much different from the "technology" of the FAANGs, in terms of the harm principle.
We like to denigrate NFTs and Tether, and slag on the enormous climate and social costs of BTC speculation, while we turn a blind eye to the fact that social media and adtech are fundamentally parasitic and socially destructive technologies that are far worse for the climate, our mental health, and our privacy than an exit scam or an overpriced NFT could ever be
It's fine to criticize this space, but it's particularly funny when this criticism comes from people fully invested in GOOG, FB, NFLX, and SNAP, or who are actively writing code to enable our modern Panopticon.
one thing that's been a good development in my view is central banks taking more seriously retailer and digital concerns, even if the impetus is one of regulation. Trying to stay neutral on the inherent politics of it all...but the Fed's recently released paper [1] for comment on developing a centrally backed digital currency recognizes some very real challenges and opportunities that the current US banking system has not well solved for.
As long as it's centered around the value of BTC, this is false. BTC has totally failed as a currency and is completely dependent on speculators pushing its valuation up to keep the miners profitable. I'll be willing to concede this point to you if eventually all proof-of-work coins disappear and the BTC maxis go away, and the incentives change to move away from mining and towards providing real services, but I doubt this will ever happen given this was the whole reason the crypto bubble happened in the first place.
Perhaps you want to define web3 in a more vague way like "any web business that uses a merkle tree publicly in some fashion". You can do that but either you're still left with BTC maxis leading the charge on that, or you have to expand it in such a way that the term becomes meaningless because it applies to a lot of unrelated things. Was google a web3 business before anyone knew what that was because they used a merkle tree in google drive, and google drive was public? How about github with their public git repositories? See what I mean here?
I'm sorry but you don't know me, I've seen lots of BTC/ETH maxis who adopted the term early and continue to use the term to describe their efforts (and it's really not hard to find them doing this on HN and Twitter either) so if you disagree with their assertions and think they're misinformed I suggest you take that up with them and not me.
Why do you choose to use this term in its definition by some “btc maxis” instead of what an actual and huge community of developers mean by it? Some cognitive bias at play here my friend?
Upon observation, that huge community of developers appears to still be mostly building apps and altcoins on top of ETH and cashing out on BTC exchanges because that's what everyone uses and it's how you make the most money. These coins have not diminished in popularity, the huge community has only increased their popularity. If you take issue with cognitive bias then take it up with them. Like I said, I will concede this point when that changes and all the proof-of-work coins are gone, and the BTC maxis go away and stop having so much influence, but that has not happened and I am very skeptical that it ever will without also taking everything else you'd describe as "web3" with it.
I used to be very interested in defi but I can't anymore when it's evident that the same market forces and consolidation and network effects keeping traditional banking afloat are also keeping BTC afloat because too many people are invested in keeping it the dominant coin. I really hope I'm wrong and BTC is not "too big to fail" but if I am then I expect you'll see these fancy web3 startups pivot back to making "boring" web 2.0 banking systems because there is no big money in defi anymore.
I have read countless research papers and press releases and blogs and open source code relating to web3 over the past few years, so if I'm ill informed then it sounds like you're suggesting that pretty much everyone else is also. If there is some secret I'm missing, now is your chance to say it. Please try to make more substantial comments. Thanks.
> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring.
It's not really cryptocurrency that is fueling it. It is the absolute silliness around NFTs and the rush to import some "blockchain" to otherwise uninteresting products and companies to make them somehow relevant. This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI.
> Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs).
Skepticism is what happens when the thousands of failures start failing. There are sure to be some winners, but the space is overheated, and the silliness that has ensued over NFTs is the kind of thing that happens when a space gets overheated.
> Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?
Yes, but part of that is realizing that maybe your time is served better by hacking on something else where there are not thousands of failures happening. I don't see this as unhealthy community, it feels like maybe the market is maturing and you are going to get that signal earlier here than you will in the general market. Why? Because a lot of technology elites are here.
Alternate take: How are NFTs not a more decentralized version of digital goods that already exist?
Game companies (Epic, Activision-Blizzard-Microsoft, etc.) have been (a) creating (b) limited number (c) digital goods that (d) can only be acquired / traded on their platforms and according to their terms.
How are NFTs not (a)+(b)+(c), except without the post-sale, first party control of (d)?
Personally, I think NFTs are the least interesting part of the space. But I think it's odd to say "This is unlike anything legitimate that has come before!", when there are billion dollar gaming companies doing exactly that, in a more restrictive way, every day.
>How are NFTs not a more decentralized version of digital goods that already exist?
I don't think they are. In practice they also suffer from (d) because the large majority of NFTs appear to be traded exclusively on Opensea. I don't expect this to change at all because any system like this requires some kind of centralized authority to enforce initial ownership of the art before it's placed on the chain, otherwise you get people selling stolen art. Put another way: there is no value to anyone in having alternate trading platforms for these goods, all value is derived from being verified by a particular platform and baked into that platform. It's the same for video game goods, e.g. there is no value in trading a Fortnite dance outside of Fortnite.
Ownership attestation is a pretty common service. Law companies do the same thing for home titles during real estate purchases, and there's definitely more than one provider of that service!
> there is no value to anyone in having alternate trading platforms for these goods, all value is derived from being verified by a particular platform and baked into that platform
Some value is derived from being verified. People sell stolen merchandise and art all the time, albeit at a discount to actual price. And there's nothing intrinsic to that verification that requires Opensea.
If there were an equally trustworthy provider, or even a provider that offered better title insurance, why would people still use Opensea?
> there is no value in trading a Fortnite dance outside of Fortnite
And here's where I think the slightly interesting component is. Isn't there?
If Epic says "ownership of this digital thing gives you this other thing in game", imagine there are two ways to trade that digital thing: (1) within Epic's internal platform, or (2) on an open Blockchain.
Doesn't it stand to reason that (2) is a clearer ownership claim, with less control, and therefore more valuable? And if it's more valuable, then isn't Epic incentivized to sell their digital goods on Blockchain (and get better prices for them) than their internal platform?
>Ownership attestation is a pretty common service. Law companies do the same thing for home titles during real estate purchases, and there's definitely more than one provider of that service!
Sure, but now we're back to talking about properties of the good old common law legal system, which in some ways is already decentralized. It's not benefiting from anything provided by blockchains and crypto.
>If there were an equally trustworthy provider, or even a provider that offered better title insurance, why would people still use Opensea?
To me, it's the same reason everyone still uses Amazon. Blockchains don't change this dynamic.
>If Epic says "ownership of this digital thing gives you this other thing in game", imagine there are two ways to trade that digital thing: (1) within Epic's internal platform, or (2) on an open Blockchain.
Public blockchains do not provide any additional value here. The only important part is if there is consensus between the two parties to agree that the digital thing should mean something in both places. A public "trustless" blockchain is just noise as far as this goes. The whole thing doesn't work if there is no trust between the two parties to agree that token A should correspond to both item B and item C.
>Doesn't it stand to reason that (2) is a clearer ownership claim, with less control, and therefore more valuable? And if it's more valuable, then isn't Epic incentivized to sell their digital goods on Blockchain (and get better prices for them) than their internal platform?
I don't see how this is the case. If I'm not mistaken, you're talking about transferring an item from an Epic game to another game. That means Epic gets the initial payout for the item and the company making the other game gets nothing but still has to expend time and money supporting items that Epic got paid for. I can't see why they would agree to that.
The ownership claim also isn't clearer, both companies could still just decide to shut down their games simultaneously or retire those items and now you're left with nothing.
"This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI." This is the industry pattern and has been the case going back many decades; the only real change is since the dotcom era, it's spread to consumers playing along, whereas prior to that it was largely just the 'investor class' in the sandbox.
The difference is that all of those had real products early on. The web was changing how people and businesses interacted by the mid-90s, despite computers costing far more and network access being limited and both being terribly slow. Search was a huge deal shortly afterwards, changing how people shopped, researched, etc. ML/AI has had ups and downs but we also live in a world where machines reading text, organizing your photos, responding to natural language queries, etc. are routine.
In contrast, the blockchain world has consistently failed to produce anything which many people want to buy. The lure of high returns on speculation has attracted more people than any of the products, but there's no durable business hook the way there was for, say, going back to buying plane tickets over the phone.
Maybe if the fees are low enough but that’s shaving a percentage point or two off of Western Union, not changing the world. To be clear, I would be quite happy if someone nuked PayPal or Western Union but that needs scalability and cost wins which have not yet been demonstrated.
First we saw a lot of anti-BTC posts: PoW criticism, usefulness criticism, transactionality criticism and energy use criticism.
Then, we got new technology as ETH, that improved on usefulness, now the criticism was about transactionality, "silliness" of use cases, etc.
Then, we got uses like Compound, Aave, Golem, etc. And the criticism about energy use and transactionality.
Then we got PoS and L2s like Polygon, Lightning, etc... and additional criticism came in
Then we got low-fee or no-fee solutions (XLM, NANO), and Web3 is the next criticism.
I've learned to ignore the destructive criticism in HackerNews. I understand that it has "grown" to be what SlashDot was in my hayday (late 1990s and early 2000): Suddenly all those "young and innovative" dudes that grew up using Walkmans, DiscMans, Commodores, BSDs, Linux PCs, Usenet and HTTP, became too old to understand iPods, Web2, and SaaS. The same thing is happening to people in this news.ycombinator forum: Blockchain technology is disrupting a lot of our preconceived notions (I'm 40... i've gone 3 times through this), and a lot of people are just finding it hard to understand.
Not calling you out directly as you're not responding to me, but it's really condescending to always get told how I don't understand because I levied some criticism. I first read the bitcoin paper in 2009. I've seen all the twists and turns the whole space has gone through. It didn't impress me back then and it doesn't impress me now. If I had received one good faith explanation for every time someone said "you just don't understand" then we'd all be a whole lot smarter for it and maybe I wouldn't have had to spend so much time reading these papers and getting disappointed.
I'm 42 and I have the same feeling. It seems this community is filled with conservative people that can't or won't see potential. Critics, not dreamers.
Lately I'm enjoying the indiehackers community, which is way more constructive.
If you ignore the lucrativeness of holding crypto and exchanging labor for fiat currency in crypto companies, what is the use-case that is best served by crypto today?
BTC is not web3. It has no role to play beyond being a slightly upscale dog coin for day traders to lose money on. in fact, it can't play a role as it is technically not possible and its core constituency refuses to make any changes.
Not sure why people downvote this comment. Web3 is essentially a bunch of tech related to decentralized apps and bitcoin is not a protocol to do that, at that point it’s just sometimes an intermediary step to move your capital into the systems that support it (like eth and others).
I have no skin in the game, I don’t hold much crypto and wasn’t building related stuff in years. So it saddens me to see people here who are generally very smart, being ruled by their prejudices,
I just did a catch-up research after missing out for 3 years and there’s literally a ton of super exciting stuff happening. DAOs blowing up, social products starting to pop up, blockchains themselves becoming much more scalable.
It saddens me to see my fellow folks here having such a biased and outdated perspective and aggressively evangelizing it.
Not just advocates. Investors! a16z is practically building up a media agency around crypto because they've sunk such a heavy amount of capital into the space.
Except most of the large properties moved to online-only, loot-box infested monetization scheme. So yes, you aren't being "forced", but comparable alternatives don't really exist anymore.
> Plenty of its advocates very clearly WANT to force people to partake though
Advocates evangelize heavily, sure, but will you provide some examples of this? I keep track of the headlines in this space, but I'm not familiar with / haven't experienced what you're describing.
I mean, it's in the name itself - web3 makes it sound like it's the next evolution of the web that we'll all be using in a few years.
I think that's part of why there's so much backlash from the tech community -- it feels like a small group of people (who largely haven't built much on the web besides React apps) have decided that they get to call what they're working on the new web, even though it's currently mostly vaporware and bad art.
There’s a pretty big difference between “this project is named poorly and isn’t ready for prime time” and “advocates want to force people to use it”.
Don’t get me wrong - I share plenty of the same concerns others have shared throughout this thread, and tend to think “web3” is not a good thing to call this, but don’t see the “by force” claim as valid at this point.
Plenty of apps/projects brand themselves as the next coming/generation/evolution/whatever. Only adoption will tell us if they’re right.
Fair, but I think the name is reflective of a greater attitude. I've never been told I'm NGMI (“not going to make it”) for not adopting Serverless, or that I should “have fun staying poor” if I ignore Kubernetes.
No they don't want to force anyone and there's no evidence of this. Just because there are a lot of evangelists doesn't mean anyone is forced to do anything
There's plenty of evidence of this; there are proposals to move house deeds, drivers' licenses, elections, etc. onto the blockchain. These wouldn't be "oh, you can just not participate" sorts of scenarios.
Do you understand how a venn diagram works? I can give you plenty of examples of blockchains that are unrelated to cryptocurrency, any corporate run block chain. And examples of blockchains unrelated to web3, bitcoin is a well known example of this.
I'm not asking about that. I'm asking about the converse. If corporations want to waste their money on an internal blockchain, that's fine; it doesn't affect me. But we're talking about people evangelizing this technology to precipitate large-scale societal change, which is focused on the intersection of cryptocurrencies, blockchain and "web3".
Well, until there's a better way to have some kind of token or currency, blockchains will be part of web3. Lack of incentives is why the first wave of open protocol design fizzled out, which is why they're so important this time around.
The way it's shaping up, improper or overzealous incentives will be the undoing of the second wave, but that movie has yet to play out.
"no evidence of this" is too strong of a claim. The folks who argue that fiat currency is dead, or should be dead, are implying they want a world where fiat currency disappears and then cryptocurrency emerges as the replacement. In that scenario, it is correct to say that some people are trying to force crypto on the rest of the world.
Your comment only makes sense if the telegram was run by a government monopoly, since fiat currency is a government monopoly, and then if people were advocating for the government to close its telegram monopoly, then yes, those people could be said to be forcing telephones on people.
Crypto people aren't neutral observers simply predicting it will replace fiat, though. They are actively working to make that true. This is not an inevitable future for our society; if it happens, it will be because of activism from powerful people who stand to benefit.
It's possible that crypto/web3 are a lot of diverting attention, resources and energy toward ideas that are fundamentally impractical. The fact that so many people have a financial interest in promoting these ideas makes the whole thing suspicious.
I'm really waiting for these novel and interesting products based on blockchain. like, waiting every day to see one break into the daily workflow of the average consumer. Until then I'm going to treat this technology trend with the great skepticism that it deserves.
To be fair, if the attention, resources, and energy employed in the crypto/web3 space weren't... a lot of them would be coming up with new financial derivative products.
So, from that perspective, crypto/web3 is bloodletting some of the crazies from the legacy financial system, which probably isn't the worst thing.
It's disingenuous to describe it as just a new technology, though. Adherents promote crypto and web3 as a specific set of transformations to our society. That is what people are so stridently against.
The very explicit goal of NFT folks, for example, is to commodify everything. I can't just not use the technology, because if they get their way it will greatly affect me. So I'm forced to stake out a position.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology.
And yet we're all being impacted by the externalities such as higher energy costs in some jurisdictions, poor GPU availability, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. There's also a growing risk that when the music stops parts of crypto will be deemed "too big to fail" and the public will be stuck bailing out large crypto speculators.
The criticism isn’t unconstructive just because it’s inconvenient for sales and marketing purposes. Most of it is detailed point by point lists of problems the community would need to address to be successful — but trying to pretend it’s ignorable all but ensures that those advances won’t happen. If someone is working on a novel idea, the grifters using them as a blind not only aren’t helping but in fact will be competing for resources and attention.
It’s true that nobody is being forced to use cryptocurrency but we have to live on the planet blockchain proponents are polluting, and we know that many people will lose money speculating on systems which do not work. Even if you don’t care about them, that causes economic disruption and diverts resources away from better business ideas.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology
Absolutely, completely wrong.
Bitcoin is using HALF A PERCENT of the electricity on the ENTIRE PLANET. That affects every single person living on this planet. It will affect people living here into the future. It is an absolute catastrophe that is hurting everyone. We don't get to "not partake" in that.
Bitcoin is the one single thing that has enabled the ransomware epidemic by making it possible for ransomware to be massively profitable. Critical infrastructure and hospitals get shut down by this. This affects millions of people, putting some at deadly risk. We don't get to "not partake" in that.
And once we get to smaller, less dramatic negative effects of cryptocurrency, the list just goes on and on. We are affected by this. We don't get to opt out.
Ban cryptocurrencies NOW, before they do any more harm to us and our planet. They are worthless and damaging.
By that logic, we're all participating in the remaining 99% of electricity usage. But this isn't even close to being the case. Are northeastern American states being forced to participate in air conditioning because the southwestern states use so much of it? I don't see the reason in that.
No one's being forced, but it seems many people are being tricked. It's important to inject a considerable amount of skepticism into a conversation that is often dominated by proponents in it only to make money off of speculation.
Those people are probably going to be tricked anyway. Many things in society are tricks. Google is a trick. Self-help is a trick. Fast food is a trick. MLM is a trick. Political ideologies are tricks. Everyone wants to be lied to, or rather everyone wants to believe in something, and they'll throw away their money just to maintain that belief. While aspects of the world of cryptocurrency are tricks, it's hardly unique to it or the responsibility of others to prevent people from being tricked.
This is what I mean... if I were in a thread of horse enthusiasts I would not get a response like this. This is a fairly typical example of crypto gaslighting.
There are massive amounts of time and money spent on getting people to eat less fast food and avoid multi-level marketing scams because they're predatory industries (some more than others). Crypto is a predatory industry too, and defending people from it is completely reasonable.
I don't know what you're trying to say here. Fast food is a trick? Does it not prevent me from starving?
It seems like you're saying something like "stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons." What are those reasons? If I see someone trying to scam others, why shouldn't I warn those people?
Fast food is a trick because it is highly marked up and designed to be addictive moreso than most healthful meals. Yes, there is trickery in fast food and snack foods in general, and if you don't believe that, there's plenty of material on how the food industry and really the system in general have used the institution of fast food to keep people poor and sick. This isn't to say that everyone in fast food, even those in its upper echelons, are acutely aware of this, but discounting the involvement of conscious thought, it is a manifestation of modernity that developed to trick minds.
> stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons
No, that's not what I'm saying, at least in your brutal interpretation.
Should society allow anyone to be scammed? My answer to that question is a clear no, especially when it comes to fraud. Society functions orders of magnitude better with a level of self-control than it would otherwise.
Does this mean that society should protect people from themselves? Or rather, if someone believes they are going to get rich putting their life savings into cryptocurrencies because they lack foresight or technical aptitude, should we do what we can to prevent people from being this foolish despite the existing level of trickery that we are willing to tolerate? If people need to be saved from cryptocurrency, then why aren't we saving them from payday loans, or guzzling HFCs in sodas, or wasting time smoking weed, or gambling at casinos? All of those are examples of tricks (yes, they are tricks) designed to extract wealth and lifeforce. Hell, our monetary system itself is a trick. At times we may point them out as evils, but we don't take them so seriously because life can't be so safe. Unless something radically changes in our societies, for all intents and purposes, we are allowing some of us to hang ourselves by our own rope.
Yet somehow crypto bears more fault for some? To me, that doesn't follow. If I create an NFT for my soul, put it up for sale for $1000, and someone actually buys it, are they being scammed? If I fork Bitcoin into a new cryptocurrency, publish a bunch of poppycock about how it will be the next big thing because I got rid of its limits, and I sell those coins and run off with the money, is it of no fault of the customer that they believed such a specious lie?
No and no, in my opinion, because it's not reasonable for society to protect people to such an extent as it would neither be sustainable nor good for every business to be scrutinized to the degree necessary to provide said protection.
Well put. Not everything is bad about crypto, some ideas may turn into the "next thing". One use I find interesting and look forward to see if it grows into something truly useful is DAOs. I know is a naive thought but I do see decentralized governance as a way of fixing the broken democracy we currently have. I also believe crypto has the potential to fix banking and insurance. We'll see.
There are indeed and they are probably not even technological but conceptual. In practice blockchains/DLTs etc. might not solve many real world issues (any?) but the associated experimentation has surfaced some interesting ideas, e.g.,:
(i) ability to split governance layers more, i.e., what was once thought of as one monolith could be run along many dimensions
(ii) things like AMMs in DeFi might point the way towards making market making more investable in general
(iii) The possibility for creation of new asset classes/creation of new volatility. This might not be crypto/not only crypto, but (also) markets in entirely different things
Its easy for me to forget that the majority of people working in tech are employed by companies offering centralized services. The majority of these companies have little to gain from traction of cryptocurrency and many have no plan in place to benefit from web3. Not surprising to me that people shun the hand that does not feed them.
It continues to appear to be a fad designed to make a select few extraordinarily rich for being first in, to further facilitate criminals, all while layering approximately zero for standard users, all chuffing away atop a technology that has literally recommissioned coal power stations. This, off the back of the collective insanity that is NFTs.
This is a low point for humanity, for tech. Thanks for your concern but we're going to keep going on about it.
What’s a single idea in the crypto space that requires no centralized entity involved and can sustain indefinite price drops of the underlying cryptocurrency?
I find it amusing how most of the interesting things in crypto are centralized.
Uniswap, a decentralized exchange. The smart contracts have no centralized administration at all, anyone can set up a GUI for them, and it doesn't break just because the price of ETH falls. This is one of the most successful projects on Ethereum, with trading volume comparable to Coinbase.
Uniswap itself is centralized, using GitHub for centralized repository code storage and the app itself is also centralized. The organization is centralized, with employees reporting into a centralized structure as well.
I suppose there's a spectrum of centralization between "totally controlled by one person" and "magically appears out of the collective intelligence of the entire internet." So I can't say that Uniswap is completely decentralized.
But the code on chain can't be changed by anyone, has no admin functions, and doesn't rely on external data feeds. UI for it can be developed and hosted by anyone or skipped entirely by anyone willing to deal directly with the contract using standard tools. So I'd say Uniswap meets your request above for something that doesn't require a centralized entity. The entities you mention could disappear and Uniswap would keep going.
Unfortunately Michael Saylor is the rule rather than the exception. Crypto marketing is extremely coercive, with slogans like "have fun staying poor!", intended to maximize shame and peer pressure to encourage the vulnerable and ignorant to become "believers". This is explicitly bullying behaviour.
I really hated Web2 when it started, and when the term started to get coined. I hated these "javascript heavy" pages that prevented accessibility. I hated the huge increase in load times and the concentration of everything in HTTP. I was happy using FTP/SFTP, NNTP, SMTP, IRC, among other protocols.
The fundamental problem of something like web3 is that is totally unrealistic. Imagine someone "posting" something that should be kept private. Can you go back and delete it? No, because the blockchain is immutable, you can try to hide it but it will still be there. Think of porn revenge videos, it would be a nightmare.
Another example: I recall a videogame on blockchain that had tons of issues patching it self, again because blockchain is immutable.
Also, web3 would really bring democracy to authoritarian states? A country like China with 1.3 billions of people 100% would not improve its democracy situation. That's a lot of people.
Last but not least, almost nobody really cares how web is implemented as far they can browse to their favourite porn site or facebook page or blog or something else.
Imo the crypto is an overemphasized implementation detail. If a genuinely novel product is going to happen, it's a product that would do just fine without the crypto.
If the selling point of your product isn't the product, it seems like you're focusing on the wrong thing
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology.
For now. That won’t remain the case if we don’t continue to push back. And we all breathe the air that the crypto miners pollute, we all suffer from the GPU shortages, whether we participate or not.
And that is a stupid argument anyway. Nobody is forcing anybody to smoke, use heroin, gamble, drink excessive amounts of alcohol, etc, that does not mean you can criticize the practice without having to "offer constructive criticism", sometimes, "Just dont do it" is enough.
Imagine if nicotine, which may or may not have beneficial effects on your mental & physical health, was hyped up as much as web3. why not simply discuss the studies of these effects instead of opinions thereof?
Why is criticism without being constructive unhealthy? Isn't it possible to know that something is bad without having a clear answer of what to do instead other than simply stop?
>There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space
Depending on what you mean here, I don't agree. Every novel idea I've seen coming out of cryptocurrency/defi can be generally applied to distributed computing and is useful in other fields or with other forms of finance. The ideas that are explicitly dependent on cryptocurrency appear almost exclusively to be the really terrible ideas. (NFTs, smart contracts, DAOs, etc)
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology.
Today. Advocates insist that cryptocurrencies will replace state currencies, that NFTs will replace other forms of ownership like deeds and manage your participation in all communities, and that DAOs will replace corporations and other governance systems.
Many of us think that this world is a worse world, with more opportunities for capitalists and corporations to exert control over our lives and buy and sell every component of our being.
People buying and selling bored apes doesn't affect me. But the reason people buy and sell bored apes is because they believe and advocate for a world where everything functions like bored apes.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology.
Nobody is forcing anyone to burn fossil fuels, either, but we all breathe and thus can't opt out of its negative externalities. This argument only works when externalities are acceptable or nonexistent.
It’s not just HN. It’s all over the web. There are some novel and interesting products being developed (reading about the theory behind Uniswap liquidity pools blew my mind) that people totally ignore because it’s easier to hate on the latest meme coin.
If (hypothetically) I’m anti-crypto, why should I care about defi, which, as I understand it, is all about trading crypto for crypto?
e: This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question. Ever since Mark Cuban tweeted something about some loans that defi enables I’ve been wondering why I should care.
Web3 is not above criticism. Advocates want it to dominate the internet, monetary systems and ultimately our lives. It should be criticised within an inch of its life, and if it's all that you say it is then it should rise above it.
However much these various blogs and such are right, which they seem to be, the continuing, constant, vitriol that at this point can only be for the chorus already singing it, starts to look like something in itself, something beyond just trying to "warn" people.
I can't help but feel it is, at least in part, coming from (perhaps unconscious) shame. We are at the sunset of a Californian Ideology where VC could save the world, Twitter could facilitate democracy, YouTube could democratize entertainment, culture. We are in a situation where any possible tech-minded business models can only promise to become so monolothic that they become de facto libertarian states, or be so fractured and specific that they inevitably prey on specific mental ticks of their users, or otherwise contrive value through subscriptions.
Everything has led to this, whether you all can accept that or not, whether you should feel "responsible" or not (you shouldn't). This almost comically absurd force of computers and money and energy now comes forward, with an army of infrastructure and knowledge and VC funding ready to greet it. You can see all our sins wrapped up into it, along with some newer things as well.
I think people are so angry because they see that, they see a likeness, even if distorted, in the macro structures of crypto, and in that they feel shame. It's as if there was quick a shortcut taken to the worst possible evolution of everything everyone was already working on in this space, big or small. And there is shame in realizing that this is what we were working towards, a secretly terrible teleology realized.
And so, to attempt to atone, you write a blog post about how evil it all is, as if it was something that literally came ex nihilo to threaten all our good work from before, denying that, in fact, it is merely a secret, forbidden wish granted. The logical culmination of this wild ride of capitalism and technology we have been riding. We are all guilty.
That's what really bums me out. Both pro-crypto and anti-crypto have become such cults that even as a curious person it's hard to make sense of anything anymore. No matter what side you're on, there's little room for reason or middle-ground.
Yeah, there's problems with cryptocurrency remaining to be solved. Yes, there's shenanigans and scams. Yes, it's not great for the environment (and I cannot wait for a smartass to reply with the word "understatement").
But the technologies surrounding cryptocurrencies can solve problems. It's just that crypto primarily solves trust issues. If you can trust your currency, trust your banks, and trust your payment processors, cryptocurrencies don't do that much for you. Mainline digital banking does a better job than cryptocurrencies currently do. Yet I'm glad that Bitcoin and other coins exist; in an increasingly authoritarian world, such things can be a last resort for those who become "depersoned", and I suspect that one day I'll be depersoned. And if there comes a point where cryptocurrency becomes so perfect that the banks can't compete, then what's there to complain about?
Unfortunately, countless hordes looking to get rich quick have latched on to these things because they're so accessible to anyone with too much time on their hands. The tired word "blockchain" is so abused that upon hearing it I have sadness in me. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about blockchains. A blockchain without a consensus algorithm won't amount to much, but you can have consensus algorithms without necessarily having a blockchain. But blockchain sounds more mysterious to the average person, thus it's the buzzword of favor. You don't even need to know what a blockchain actually is. Just say the word blockchain and you'll be one of the cool people!
A lot of people on the other side of the coin (yuk yuk) don't even have the faintest clue of how cryptocurrencies work or how even traditional fiat currencies work. One guy I was talking to recently said that "if people didn't think they could make money off of Bitcoin, it would be worth absolutely nothing." Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception. He didn't understand that there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, and that it wouldn't be easy to change that number without a majority of the nodes agreeing, and that there are practical reasons why some would want to use Bitcoin over fiat. If anything, fiat currency better fits his mental model. This is not uncommon, in my experience. Very few people actually read anything.
Oh my f---- ----... is every USB power bank a f---- piece of s---??? ARGGG. Sorry, side tangent.
"if people didn't think they could make money off of Bitcoin, it would be worth absolutely nothing." Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception.
The value of pretty much everything is defined by how much people are willing to pay for it. Bitcoin is just some numbers in a database that a lot of people have convinced each other are worth something. US$ is some pieces of paper and some numbers in a database that a much larger number of people have convinced each other are worth something. Your labor is worth some amount because that is what you have been able to get people to pay for it. So is mine. A sandwich is worth some amount, so is the labor of the people who made it.
>That's what really bums me out. Both pro-crypto and anti-crypto have become such cults that even as a curious person it's hard to make sense of anything anymore. No matter what side you're on, there's little room for reason or middle-ground.
Not every topic has middle-ground though. Things can be overwhelmingly negative or positive. I've been following BTC passively since 2011 and I've seen the messaging change from "It's going to revolutionize transactions" to "Its a great store of value!". It's no closer to reaching widespread adoption as a currency than it was in 2011 because it doesn't function well as a currency. If its not a currency then what is it and why should people want it?
>Yet I'm glad that Bitcoin and other coins exist; in an increasingly authoritarian world, such things can be a last resort for those who become "depersoned", and I suspect that one day I'll be depersoned. And if there comes a point where cryptocurrency becomes so perfect that the banks can't compete, then what's there to complain about?
It would be very very very bad for your average person for the government to not have control of the monetary supply. The actual risk of the government "deperson"-ing someone is nearly zero, why would they? I feel like this is a classic crypto argument though. Crypto is good because it might solve some abstract problem that doesn't actually exist.
>Unfortunately, countless hordes looking to get rich quick have latched on to these things because they're so accessible to anyone with too much time on their hands. The tired word "blockchain" is so abused that upon hearing it I have sadness in me. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about blockchains. A blockchain without a consensus algorithm won't amount to much, but you can have consensus algorithms without necessarily having a blockchain. But blockchain sounds more mysterious to the average person, thus it's the buzzword of favor. You don't even need to know what a blockchain actually is. Just say the word blockchain and you'll be one of the cool people!
This has been crypto since I started watching it. I'm not sure when you started counting but crypto has always had 'get-rich-quick' boosters pumping it up and selling wild fantasies about how crypto is going to change the world with blockchain/trust/decentralization. This pumping is the core of any other pyramid scheme.
>A lot of people on the other side of the coin (yuk yuk) don't even have the faintest clue of how cryptocurrencies work or how even traditional fiat currencies work.
Lots of people into crypto also don't understand how it works or how fiat currencies work.
>Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception. He didn't understand that there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, and that it wouldn't be easy to change that number without a majority of the nodes agreeing, and that there are practical reasons why some would want to use Bitcoin over fiat. If anything, fiat currency better fits his mental model. This is not uncommon, in my experience. Very few people actually read anything.
It IS entirely in peoples perception. Something being scarce doesn't give it inherent value. There is only a finite amount of my dirty underwear but I somehow don't see my used underwear becoming valuable.
I don't support robocall spammers, even if their tech stacks might contain interesting nuggets.
At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud. I don't care that it might contain cool tech.
The same goes for e.g. ransomware. It might be innovative. It's still a huge blight on humanity.
Please don't post shallow-indignant flamewar comments, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It makes for dumbed-down, tedious internet threads, and we'd prefer to avoid those.
I think if you're going to support anything - crypto or otherwise, you should start with some level of skepticism, if it can overcome that initial skepticism then maybe it is worth believing in, otherwise remain skeptical imo.
It's not mean, it's just very skewed in one way without acknowledging different perspectives. Take this sentence:
> At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud
Obviously the "at best" part is still a negative, just like the "at worst". That's no way of starting a curious conversation and frankly, it makes for boring reading no matter if you're for/against cryptocurrencies as a whole.
Unfortunately, I kinda feel the same way. I'm a blockchain apologist for the most part, whenever I hear people complaining about how the blockchain is some kind of automated discrimination process I cringe a little bit and try my hardest to explain to them that the technology itself is neither good nor evil, just implemented pretty poorly. With that being said, I generally cannot stand cryptocurrency. I have yet to meet a single starry-eyed crypto fanatic who wasn't either woefully uninformed or completely jaded by their investment. I'm not sure if I'd go as far as calling it a "huge blight on humanity" (any more than I'd call Denmark a huge blight on humanity for existing and consuming electricity/food), but digital money is indeed a sucker's game these days.
There is crypto ecosystems that do not use PoW (proof-of-work, ala Bitcoin) but other consensus schemes (most notably proof-of-stake, e.g. Cosmos) that do not destroy the planet.
Unregulated casino with eco-friendly tech is quite nice actually. No government should be able to forbid me to gamble imho.
Bitcoin and crypto might seem unnecessary in a democracy with a stable currency and it's easy to focus on the scams. But in countries with deeply unstable economies and authoritarian politics, it is a lifeline. Bitcoin has been used by dissidents and activists in places like Cuba, Nigeria, and Belarus. In Russia, the country’s most prominent opposition politician and Putin critic, Alexei Navaly, has raised millions in Bitcoin. Putin can do a lot of things, but he can't freeze a bitcoin account. If you want to understand what crypto is really about, ask Venezuelans if they’d rather own bolívar or Bitcoin. And with creeping authoritarianism in the West, and the USD inflating and at risk of losing global reserve currency status (petrodollar), I wouldn't be so confident it'll never happen here.
I still don't understand this argument. You have to convert bitcoin into some kind of national fiat currency to actually buy things with it. At that point the government that controls that currency can impose whatever restrictions they want.
ie, in the US, I can't sell bitcoin and withdraw US dollars using coinbase without providing identification documents. The US government will have a record of the transaction that enables them to tax or seize the funds. This seems like it's the case with any government and coin wallet.
Unless Navaly can buy ads or pay staff in bitcoin, what good does the money do him? Given the current volatility of the BTC price at the moment, it seems even less valuable for doing anything practical. He'll have lost 20% of his millions raised just this week.
Can the average Venezuelan buy groceries or pay rent with bitcoin? Don't they need to convert to bolivars at some point to take part in the normal economy? Maybe I just don't understand this and someone can explain it.
BTW they're about to impose (almost) total ban on crypto in Russia exactly b/c of FSB complaints that it's being used to fund the opposition, such as Navalny's followers
>> But in countries with deeply unstable economies and authoritarian politics, it is a lifeline.
Or a crutch. It may be allowing some countries to stagger along with support of a grey/black market rather than collapse, wipe out debts, and install new leadership. And it may be the worst type of crutch: one that you trust to hold you up but will one day snap and injure you worse than before.
Don’t forget to ask them again after they learn how helpful Bitcoin is to the police. Once it’s big enough to care about, leaving a signed confession is not a good idea.
Yeah but under an authoritarian regime they can just squeeze you until you run out of operating cash since it would likely be a long game. I recognize that there are benefits to having some assets - I still don't believe this to be a strong enough argument.
Also - in that case you are just talking about hiding assets from the government. While the use case for dissidents is good - to me I would wager the amount of people who are using it for fraud is far greater.
I don't think it is moral to outlaw a new technology just because some criminals are using it. There is nothing inherently criminal with the technology. Similar to nuclear, guns, computers, cars, anything. Someone is always going to sharpen a stick and use it for murder. Should we assume that everyone who collects sticks is a murderer, and therefore we should outlaw stick collecting (enforced by "good" stick wielders)?
If you object became more criminals are using it, then we simply need to promote its use among B2B and B2C. A trustless and decentralised electronic currency is surely a freedom-enabling idea and should be promoted. It has long been the dream of cryptopunks and cryptographers.
Lots of crime is facilited by, and done in the name of fiat currency too. BTC can limit that. It's just a currency and one consciously designed to avoid the inherent flaws of fait.
I'm not saying that -- I am saying that isn't a sufficient reason to support crypto. The costs are greater than the gains if that was the sole function.
I agree it wouldn't be a sufficient reason, but I think it is a step in the right direction and an illustration of how it enables freedom.
Your wallet is a ten word phrase/a private key. This is something we haven't seen before, money can move just like that. All one needs is internet access.
So yes, totalitarians will have a stranglehold under the current system, but it certainly loosens their grip when we wrest the money supply from their hands.
Even if he can't freeze it, he has access to the public ledger and with some effort can figure out who sent money to whom. Either of those two parties could then get a visit and politely invited to reveal the other.
If you want (more?) anonymous you need Monero or Zerocoin.
... and Putin has lots of thugs happy to wield USD$5 (RUB 388) wrenches to obtain those private keys, and the globally known precedent of the year-long torture & murder of Sergi Magnitsky to let the key-holders know that there's no way out.
I am Venezuelan, I will tell you what 99% of Venezuelans would tell you. They will prefer.... USD. Bitcoin had its heyday when the country was in that horrible time of hyperinflation and strict foreign currency control, and, since stupidity seems to have a limit the government relaxed a bit the controls and people also got smarter regarding the use of USD. Now, people pay using USD bills, you can have USD accounts in Venezuela (risky but possible) and a sizable part of the population have an US bank account so they pay within Venezuela with Zelle transfers. Bitcoin is still used but by far people will default to the convenience and security of the green beast.
Crypto has only existed during the greatest and longest bull market of all time. Jury is still out on whether it can survive a prolonged bear market.
Web3 consequently is also bound by this. If people are still interested in Web3 when crypto goes down 10% YoY forever then maybe there’s some inherent value there.
in theory, web3 has nothing to do with cryptocurrency per se, and only relies on some blockchain technology, which is itself not bound to the value of the currency it is used by.
however, the fact that too many people seem to think that there is in fact a connection between web3 and cryptocurrency just adds to the smell.
How do you reconcile the fact that most of Web3 is built on Ethereum which only works because miners ("soon to be" stakers) are rewarded for running the blockchain?
There's more and more being built outside of Ethereum and the dominance has been shrinking. As to how I explain the dominance - shrinking first mover advantage.
According to what? According to the global charts on Coinmarketcap, Ethereum is still around 20% of the total marketcap of cryptocurrencies (BTC being at ~40%) today, coming from growth since January 2020 (where Ethereum started at ~7.5%). By that metric, Ethereum seems to be growing, but you might have a better source/metric to share?
even for the other DVM-eqsue networks (solana, avalanche, et al), they still have the same constraint. the incentive to secure the network (either through PoW or PoS) is inherently tied to the underlying tokenomics, the currency has to have some value for the consensus mechanism to be successful.
Why are you assuming that just because something doesn't involve money, people wouldn't be interested in it?
Music creation is for most people just a hobby, with zero financial incentives to engage in, yet countless amount of people make music as a hobby and release it for free via various channels. Same goes for software with free/open source software.
Not to talk about BitTorrent (or it's predecessors in the P2P space) where people had the opinion of "sharing is caring" and shared data with each other, again with zero financial incentives.
How do you reconcile these facts with your outlook?
> Why are you assuming that just because something doesn't involve money, people wouldn't be interested in it?
Because random hashes are not inherently interesting to most people and the core concept is built around an opinionated finance model. The only value to the blockchain network is in the ability to make transactions, and that's why all of the push around it is very heavy-handed FOMO “buy now or you'll have to pay more later” which is a sharp contrast to previous new technologies which focused on what new things you could do.
I'm sure that some people would continue to run crypto nodes if it was not profitable, but the number of people doing so would drop precipitously. There's a huge portion of the crypto community (90%? 95%?) that are in it for the ROI and speculative gambling, not for running a decentralized web.
As an example, I suspect no one would buy old power plants and turn them into Bitcoin miners if there was no return on investment. The operating costs of this kind of infrastructure are too high to justify as a "hobby".
Currency is actually a core part of it. The point of web3 is software that can natively move money around. That "money" does not need to be ETH or BTC though, can be tokens pegged to the dollar or gold or oil etc.
Because the security underpinning blockchain is either "spend a bunch of expensive electricity and get extra tokens" (proof of work) or "lock up some tokens for a chance to get more" (proof of stake)
These tokens have to be worth something in order for the security to functionally exist. You can't separate the monetary side from the security, because the monetary side incentives the security. And security is the only thing blockchain adds.
I don't completely agree with that. Yes the network must be secured that way, and the native token must be worth real money, but that's not something applications built on top necessarily need to worry about or interface with. You can build applications that do not use the native token (outside of transaction fees) and that doesn't affect the app's security.
I do not want my health record to be both public and immutable.
Not wanting it to be public should be obvious. Immutable though, what if I need to change my name/gender to match reality?
It's not enough to just update the value, because the old value still exists on the blockchain. That's just another method to find my deadname and use it for harassment.
So I am not an expert in blockchain or web3, I've only completed a few courses implementing a blockchain in golang and I work in the digital health industry.
But the points you raise, are exactly the issues I've been thinking could be solved with web3. I am imagining using it to give control to the patient of who has read access(to what and when), who can add data, etc.
I.e. give full transparency and control to the patient. Instead of the current situation where a patients data is on different systems, you don't know what it actually says, besides what a doctor tells you.
I can try, but to be totally clear this is only an idea that I have in my head, and is far from fully formed.
But as far as I understand, it should be possible for a user on a blockchain, to have their set of data encrypted in the ledger. It should also be possible to implement a sort of permission scheme.
So I am imagining, instead of relying on things like Epic Systems and other EHR systems, that control your data and might have incentives to not share them with other systems. One could imagine a EHR system based on a blockchain. The patient can then grant permission to, say a hospital, to read certain data from the ledger. This could be scoped to what is necessary in the context of their visit or procedure.
After the visit to the hospital, the patient has full transparency to read what data has been added to their own records.
Anyway, I am not capable to give a full technical solution, since I have not thought it fully through, and not nearly knowledgable enough to actually know. So I might be very wrong in my assumptions, and would gladly be told otherwise if that is the case.
Then there's the whole issues of how do you get existing systems as Epic to integrate with said "blockchain EHR".
The question is not just how do you get existing systems to integrate, it's how do you ensure that everyone uses the same blockchain? Technological solutions don't magically force anyone to agree on things and interoperate.
I think that's the killer feature personally (I work in the space). It has uses for censorship resistant communication and things like identity. Not sure if I see the use case in health data though.
AFAIK all transactions on a blockchain require spending some associated currency (e.g. "gas fees"). For investors, I think the killer feature is being able to make money off of every transaction involving identity and health data.
Yes, the gas fees would be very expensive in the current state (think hundreds to thousands of dollars for a regular appointment, tens of thousands for an x-ray). There would have to be some benefit for healthcare providers to pay that and I don't see what that is..
Maybe not the healthcare provider, but a service that allows the patient to be in control of their health records. Control who can read and write to their own data.
And is it not up to the implementor of the blockchain, to specify how difficult it is to calculate a new block? So lowering the "gas price"?
I think a system like that is a great idea, I'm just not sure how a blockchain helps. The things that make a blockchain interesting (uncensorable, immutable etc) aren't that important here, and with a public blockchain you still need a whole separate system that's doing access checking (maybe your doctor has a key that decrypts the onchain data). To me that system of sharing data with providers, and giving them credentials to access the data is the difficult part, and blockchain doesn't help.
Well, I do think that that is exactly things that are important.
You'd want uncensorable, to give transparency to the patient. E.g. a hospital can't add a record without you knowing, that you might not want an insurance company to have access to later.
Immutable, as a patient you would want to know exactly what your data looks like at any given time. Again insurance is a good example.
If the blockchain is private, could it not be part of the implementation that does the access checking? Can't part of the ledger be unencrypted while other parts are not?
It might be wishful thinking. It's just an idea I have floating in my head, as an actually useful real world implementation for a blockchain.
Fortunately crypto has no fundamentals, so it can't really fail financially. There's absolutely no business whatsoever, so there is no worry of the business running out of funds and thus forcing crypto into chapter 11.
The stock price can drop to 0, and it would be ok. There's no stores to close due to unpaid rents, no workers to furlough, etc. In a weird way it's immortal.
It is definitely not immortal. If the price goes to 0, then miners have 0 incentive to keep the blockchain going. More realistically, once the price is sufficiently low and 51% attacks become viable, it has effectively died.
But then jury is out on whether there will ever be a bear market (or in other words will the central banks ever allow one). Also whether anything else (real estate, stocks or other assets) can survive it.
It's not a given that real estate has intrinsic value. Sure properties which are in high demand today will continue to do so tomorrow. But not all properties are like that. You can look at several foreclosed properties in 2008 bubble. Many continue to be in rundown state (both commercial and residential). Because the costs of renovation, taxes, utilities, insurances when included makes the property a losing proposition.
I'm trying to tell you that that you can't just look at cryptocurrency and claim a bear market. Same way it's not a bull market if one individual sector is down. Cryptocurrency, because it's also seen as an investment, must also take into mind other investment options. Particularly another common option: stocks.
One may claim that cryptocurrency has survived many bear markets if you only look at cryptocurrency. Someone else may claim that the only reason cryptocurrency hasn't died out is because it's standing on the shoulders of the longest running bull market in history when looking at stocks. There is so much money and confidence about that people are just looking for places to park it. The question is: Does cryptocurrency remain when the fun and games end, or was it just tulips?
The thing that bugs me is that 25 years in the tech industry and I never heard a single person, engineer or business person, ever use the term "web 3." Then one day a few months ago it seemed like a ton of news outlets dropped articles on the exact same day which started using the term.
It smells like a made up buzz word that did not originate organically. Someone coined this termed and released a bunch of press releases to get it to catch on. I don't even know why people are giving it the time of day. It's someone's marketing speak and it smells awful.
And furthermore, decentralization is not new nor is it unique to the web, nor does this "web 3" garbage have anything to do with the web either. Web 2.0 was also buzzwordish but at least it was referring to a genuine paradigm shift in the way that websites work. The inclusion of the XHR request API in browsers and the birth of publicly available RESTful APIs that web-sites could consume which helped lead to the split between frontend and backend development as specialties that we see today (whether that's a good thing or not is another discussion).
"web 3" is just marketing PR garbage for "crypto is the next big thing ... somehow."
You might want to consider sampling a broader source of news or discussion. HN is prone to insulation and echo chambers like any other social media. I can tell you that there is a large contingent of Twitter, for example, fully on board with "Web 3" -- generally in the context of NFTs and the latest coin offering.
What's even more hilarious is that "Web 3.0" has already been used for another (failed) evolution of the Internet -- the much-hyped switch to the "Semantic Web" of the 2010s.
I'm familiar with the term, having worked in the decentralized space for a few years. However, yes there was definitely some astroturfing going on in the past few weeks. I don't think the web3 mentioners I see on CNBC and suchlike have any clue what it is.
It first appeared in 2014 but it never gained traction.
Someone of course marketed the term into public discourse last year, maybe it was a51z. It's not like web 2.0 just organically appeared either.
Nothing. The entire infrastructure this system runs on is... the Internet. It doesn't work without TCP/IP, TLS/SSL, HTTP, etc.
It's not fixing anything.
It's only adding a way to force people to pay ETH gas fees to like posts and add comments. It's probably most useful for early crypto adopters to keep growing their pyramid with a captive audience and for criminals who want to hide more identities, launder money, and obscure illegal transactions from law enforcement.
"But it can run without crypto," sure and why would anyone want that? You still need the Internet. Now you want to make it slower and burn more of the worlds energy so that we can independently audit who "liked" which post? So that you can "hypothetically" own your profile pic? Give me a break. I'm tired of the centralized services as anyone but there are ways we can solve this without the foregone conclusion that blockchains are the only viable way. They're not technologically sufficient, they're terrible for privacy, etc, etc.
If you want to fundamentally improve the Internet you're going to have a better time improving things that already exist. Find more energy efficient transport layer protocols for modern usage patterns. Make it more secure. Improve privacy. There's a huge demand for this really unsexy, unhyped work that needs to be done.
Heck, if you're interested in improving payment systems in the US there's a fair bit of catching up to do to reach par with some of the international systems.
I think the steelman arg I've found for crypto as a general social media replacement is based on three pillars.
1. Ownership by default. NFTs are kinda a silly example, but since your wallet ("You") own your the token that represent your assets being able to transfer them around with you whenever you go somewhere new is cool.
2. Authentication with your wallet makes things much better. SSO for the whole web.
3. Alignment of incentives for users + service providers. (DAOs, traditional corps, etc.).
So with a concrete example.
In Web2 social network, the social graph is closed off along with all your account info. If you want to move to a different social media website, you have to reenter all your info and re-friend everyone etc. The corporation chose to ban people, and the only way you can in theory get a vote is through owning a share.
In (the ideal) Web3 social network, the social graph is open b/c all your friends are attached to your wallet. If you want to move websites you can take them with you, or even have you be on multiple front ends. Even better you might get tokens to vote for certain proposals in the DAO, for example such as banning people off the site etc.
Decentralization is valuable b/c it allows the above to happen, not because it's valuable in it of itself. Without a decentralized network there wouldn't be enough trust in the network for anyone to use it (long term).
After all blockchains are basically one giant shared database, if someone thought you can modify it, it loses all value (Similar to fiat money in a way ;) )
You already own any assets that you create by default. If you type a message into a text editor, you own the copyright on it. Under Facebook's Terms of Use, you more-or-less give up that ownership when you paste it into a form on their website. There is no intrinsic limitation in Web 2.0 technology that robs us of ownership, it is business incentives that do it.
Please explain how adding a crypto wallet or blockchain into this mix changes anything meaningful.
Sure, I don't disagree with you. I'd ask what's the likelihood that we create new regulation that says that Facebook has to let you own your own content, or even export that content.
I wouldn't say it's very high, where crypto is here now, and the default design is with ownership in mind. Plus with crypto's money side you can find different business models than traditional web companies. (As a matter of fact with a public blockchain data probably becomes a lot cheaper on a mass scale.)
Crypto maximalism IMO is a "doomer" position, the idea of burning down more efficient and established systems for a new one.
I personally don't know if it's a functional idea, but I can see a case.
One of the biggest issues I have with this is, I don't want you to see my friend list. I don't want you to see my wall, I don't want you to glean my interests by reading the public ledger. If you say, well, all of that is stored locally, or can be imported and exported to any 'front end' such as facebook/twitter.
There's another big issue, what if your friends don't want to exist on that front end? Either events/posts are private, or they're on the public ledger and distributed. There's no way to keep interactions private.
In the end, if we think of having these messages sent to clients directly and stored locally, have the clients being able to subscribe to groups, have the clients maintain the friend list, and people being able to post to sets within that list. We have this already. Its called email.
Hmmm I feel like this is technically in the weeds, but I'll try and come up with an answer.
I'd assume a social network's storage layer would be distributed as well, on IPFS or something similar with an encrypted blob that includes all your content.
Paired with a privacy focused scheme like Monero's where you can't see the contents of wallets you could keep the contents of social graph hidden, and do some transactions around.
I'd also say that privacy wise it's not like our current systems are perfect. You had reddit admins deleting and modifying people comments for example.
Not as bad as the general public being able to see your interactions, but not great if employees at these companies can see all your things you'd rather keep private. (And the design of these services makes it so that from a business perspective they want to see that data for targeting, and from a customer service perspective you want to be able to debug issues unlike crypto which rn has no CS expectations.)
Sure, but that's effectively that happens already with our centralized gatekeepers.
See what happened to Alex Jones, regardless of if you think it was justified or not.
With a crypto wallet, you don't have to start from scratch with a new account on a service that doesn't ban you because you own that data, in theory you could even port your social graph over.
I don't think this is inherent to crypto, but it is inherent to decentrazlied open standards like Mastedon for example. The advantage that crypto "wallets" have here is that it's not just for social media, it can be for payments etc.
So far the biggest "feature" of crypto seems to be the lack of regulation that more easily enables scams. This appears to be more appealing than any other feature, to the point where well-natured crypto projects spend a considerable amount of time educating people on how to avoid scams.
Your data being locked up by companies and not to be able to be used by others.
Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon.
For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]
This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract)
This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve.
In contrast, in traditional web2, companies gatekeep this information so hard that there are 10B+ companies such as plaid that mostly just scrape user bank account data. Just recently AA is suing The Points Guy for scraping their website. [3] I recall there's even a comment in this thread about someone getting their own scraper banned because they were trying to scrape their own data.
If everyone rents a server and we make these servers talk to each other, that is what I would call decentralization. If you rely on a server operated and rented by someone else, you are subject to their whims: arbitrary bans, censorship, bait & switch, security issues, downtime, etcetra.
I don't believe web3 fixes this but in I don't think decentralization is in principle a useless concept.. It's just hard to do right and harder than that to get enough people on board. And now with cryptocurrency, it's harder than ever to get people on board who aren't just looking to profit off of their buttcoin investment.
I'm no expert, but to me it feels like if it weren't for all the hype which promised they'd be the second coming, they could have had their genuine use cases. In many cases they'd be small and you probably wouldnt have even noticed they were in use, and maybe a few larger issues could've been solved as well. But right now, we're at a point where a use case seemingly isn't required for there to be hype around it.
Maybe all these things will fade into obscurity and come back one day and "fulfill their true purpose". If all goes well, barely any of us will care about the underlying technology of the problems they solve.
The core of it is moving money around without a payment processor. Sending money person-to-person is part of this, the other part is software than can move money natively (and more importantly, atomically with state updates in the software which isn't possible with eg Stripe API calls).
I don't think the point is to fix anything; it's to have remixes/alternatives to what's already out there.
However, using AWS for some things and pinning stuff to IPFS and blockchain for others does prove convenient (I don't have to worry about egress costs w/ IPFS for example)
It's only free for a small amount of content or when you're ad supported. If you get significant traffic or care about performance, someone needs to pay for it.
No one pays for bits moving around on the internet, for the most part. See “peering internet.” Big companies just charge you for it to prevent it from being abused.
You might want to learn a bit more about how peering works. It's definitely not free even if the major players have reciprocal agreements — just ask Netflix how free that was when Comcast wanted to double-charge them.
In some cases you can align incentives differently than with traditional solutions. For example with DEXs you can spread the profit and work (such as providing liquidity) to participants rather than a central operator.
It's also easier to prove what mechanism of the operation can and cannot be changed as the code is right there and if you are trading you only have to trust them for just the one function call rather than for holding your funds in their hands longer like with traditional exchanges.
> This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand.
Saying it is this way because this is the way people want it strikes me as a bit fatalist. Is it this way because it's what "people" want or because there is no viable alternative?
Nothing is being "fixed" per se, an alternative vision of how things could be is being experimented with. Key tenets of this are trying to better align user and creator / provider incentives.
I believe crypto is a great way to decentralize fundraising for startups/growing companies. Removes the middleman's cut from the equation, and you have no terms to agree to.
The problem with this approach is that the founders can inadvertently start a pump and dump scheme that crypto comes with.
You want to organize the worlds information and build a search engine.
Okay, you create a google coin. You issue 21 Million coins.
As soon as you announce it people are going to buy in and you will in a period of a few months become a billionaire. With no product. Just an idea.
And then you get to dump your shares on the "investors" and you get to be a billionaire.
There is no incentive to further develop your idea.
Look at what happened to ICP. The VCs got in at 3 cents a coin. Each coin shot up to $750 per coin. Then the VCs dumped it on the retail noobs making a lot of money with absolutely no working product.
I understand the argument there, but this happens in the stock market as well, which is heavily regulated already. There will never be a perfect system, but at least crypto levels the playing field a bit more for less fortunate who want to make something and need capital, and don't have the social connections/wealth most founders today have.
People already own their content if they buy it physically. And everyone else prefers the convenience of streaming.
Also there is already multiple platforms with little to no regulation/'censorship' (namely onion service, telegram, kiwi farms, the chan boards, gab, parler...) and we all know how that worked out
The evidence to support the claim is pretty weak, basically there's some more anti-crypto blogposts and documentaries out. I could easily make an article with the reverse claim and point out the pro-crypto blogposts and documentaries.
Personally, I watched all of it twice. Not only was I an existing fan of the creator but this video does a very good, holistic job of criticizing crypto from multiple angles: technology, economics, and ideology. There's a lot to digest.
People can want something without wanting it as "currency". GP is indeed correct that nobody wants a currency whose value fluctuates by 50% over a few days; what the people who want bitcoin want is a high-risk speculative investment that has so far dodged the gatekeeping and restrictions that the developed world tends to place on other high-risk speculative investments.
Microsoft has declined 20% since the new year. Should we abandon that company entirely as well?
Or what about the VTI (total u.s. stock market index) which has also declined 15%?
The truth is crypto currencies such as BTC and ETH are maturing with institutional investment. Their value relative to USD tends to correlate more with the markets and especially tech now.
> Microsoft has declined 20% since the new year. Should we abandon that company entirely as well?
No one is claiming that MSFT stock should be used as a currency for transactions. If the US dollar lost 20% of its spending power in a few months, many people would be baying for blood. It's bad enough when gas prices rise 20% in a short time.
Well, inflation is reporting in at 7-9% across the country and getting worse. So that is exactly what is happening and is kind of why the market is in decline right now (and all the things that come with it)...
As I understand, the market is in decline because "The Fed" is trying to tamp down inflation by increasing the price of borrowing money. The fact that this kind of market correction is deemed an acceptable byproduct of countering inflation tells you how seriously the "fiat" economic system treats loss of purchasing power.
AFAIK, Bitcoin does not have a mechanism for doing something like this to stabilize the currency.
Yeah, that kind of glosses over all of the action taking over the past 2 years which heavily contributed to the current situation. But even if we ignore that they have a problem on their hands - the two main goals of the fed are currently at fundamental odds with each other. They have been injecting money to achieve maximum employment which is at fundamental odds with price stability. If they raise rates to stabilize prices (which they are definitely doing, potentially more than anticipated), that is going to affect employment. So it's going to be a tough balancing act. There is also no guarantee that raising rates will have the effect they desire. It could stagnate the entire economy.
There is a ton of uncertainty and that is really what is driving the craziness in the markets. Over 97% of my portfolio is in fiat and trust me this makes me very uneasy.
The fact that Bitcoin does not have levers is the appeal to a lot of people.
You might draw comparisons to the stock market. The Dow Jones lost 90% of its value in the Great Depression, but we didn't do away with the stock market altogether. We fixed the structural problems because there is clear utility to the trading of corporate securities.
Currencies that lose 90% of their purchasing power tend to get replaced. Equities/securities? Not so much. I think the point is that Bitcoin is either a terrible currency, or not a currency at all but an equity.
Do they? I more often see a mere slashing of a few zeroes and maybe a slightly different name, but with the old one being convertible and keeping the same monetary policy.
The best argument against cryptocurrencies is their impact on the environment, which is becoming huge and is based on solid numbers.
Thousands of thousands of hardware miners in pretty much every country, and growing every damn day, each one drawing no less than 3 Kilowatts 24/7 and pumping heat into the atmosphere don't come without a cost. Which for those who don't care about the environment is also represented by the unprecedented raise of energy prices.
Energy has become the raw material used to build money; its costs follow the demand and will continue to soar as long as prices continue to be dictated by the demand for continuously growing crypto farms. There's no going back until some form of strong regulation, or a global catastrophe, will end this for good.
My personal (admittedly Don Quixotesque) stance on the matter is that I will never ever accept to be paid in crypto currency for products, services or whatever: their value over here is less than zero.
Sentiment in online chatter correlates with price movement. It becomes a feedback loop. Maybe the criticism is finally overwhelming people's risk functions.
It's also correlated with fed talks of rising interest rates which tends to coincide with capital moving from risk-on assets to risk-off assets. Growth tech stocks are taking quite a hit too.
My point is there's not even evidence to support online chatter turning negative. Any topic that is polarizing and growing in terms of chatter will produce more positive/negative blogposts and youtube videos. I could write this blogpost substituting in anti-vax sentiment for example pretty easily.
I didn't assert whether sentiment was changing or not, just sharing the pattern in case someone reading hadn't thought of it. Sentiment is easy enough to check. I'm not doing crypto homework though.
Web3 may turn out to be a good application. What's special is only that we may see if in fact something interesting comes of it over the next year. Or another way I'll say it is that if nothing of value emerges over next year then it likely never will.
Though there's been an uptick in its usage recently, people have been talking about "web3" for several years as well, and so far as I can tell, it basically just means "blockchain and cryptocurrency, but we try to build them into a new kind of WWW".
It’s pretty cool that I can send $1M to someone without a bank intervening, not to mention that nobody can stop the transaction from happening. And then they can print that out onto a sheet a paper and put it into a vault.
Crypto is really great if you’re a drug dealer or some other kind of criminal.
Most definitely! I miss the pre-crypto days where criminals didn't have any means of having assets and the banks were just stopping any kind of illicit financial activity.
> Insiders who spoke to journalists as part of a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have suggested that HSBC may not have appropriately shared the information with the monitoring team installed by US regulators in 2012 after HSBC allowed drug cartels in Latin America to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through its accounts.
Maybe someday all these anti-crypto activists will rail against the banks and their fiat financial system too. We gotta stop the druggies! ;)
It’s pretty cool that I can send a text message to someone without an authority intervening, not to mention that nobody can stop the transaction from happening. And then they can print that out onto a sheet a paper or share it with all their friends.
Encryption is really great if you’re a terrorist or some kind of pervert.
You can create a new email address if your previous one is blacklisted.
The idea is that no one needs permission in both cases, and the message can be sent only to the intended recipient without a middleman reading its contents. BTC is the same with money.
The same FUD was ignited against encryption back in the day, and "save the children" hysteria still is ablaze if you live in the UK.
Cryptocurrency does nothing, nada, zilch, zero to address corruption in any shape. In many ways, it helps corruption, by providing a way to secretly transfer funds.
> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non- reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.
Satoshi mentions later in the paper that BTC is impossible to inflate by design. Inflation enables much of the corruption in our current financial system. "Just print more money bro! ;)"
Also, designing a means of transaction that is independent of governments and banks - two of the most corrupt institutions in every society - is surely a deliberate move against them?
Finally, the genesis block of Bitcoin specifically mentions bailouts of banks. The arrival of Bitcoim amid the 2008 financial crisis is no coincidence.
I welcome anything that weakens their hold and means my money doesn't lose half its value over my lifetime.
> Inflation enables much of the corruption in our current financial system. "Just print more money bro! ;)"
Sorry, but this is just plain ignorant libertarian nonsense. If you want to be taken seriously you need to do at least the bare minimum of understanding an issue before making big claims.
I'd strongly disagree there, inflation is terrible for anyone with savings or bills to pay. Libertarianism is based upon Austrian economics, an entire economic school of thought. It isn't "ignorant" even if you don't agree with it.
> If you want to be taken seriously you need to do at least the bare minimum of understanding an issue before making big claims.
OK, so since this is your principle, will you retract your claim that bitcoin wasn't invented to combat corruption? Even if you don't agree with the method or ideology, there is good evidence this was their intention.
And please explain how inflation benefits me, a saver with ever rising bills to pay. I'd be very curious to hear it. Relieve me of my ignorance.
1) None of what you just said addresses the claim that inflation "enables much of the corruption in our current financial system".
2) If you have debt, like a lot of people do, inflation means you now have less debt.
3) You have provided zero justification for why "bitcoin was invented to combat corruption", except through your unjustified claim that inflation and corruption are somehow connected.
That's a very disgusting generalization of the average crypto user. So since I've been using cryptocurrency for 11 years now, I am definitely a criminal or drug dealer...
First: Blockchain transactions are only accepted when they’re added to the blockchain, so participating in the blockchain necessarily directly enables the drug (etc.) transactions in a way which isn’t true for fiat or commodity currencies.
(I happen to have the opinion that almost all drugs should be legally available in some form for personal use, but that’s a different argument; partly but not solely because I think legalisation will help to stop criminals getting the money).
Second: inverting group membership like that is poor logic.
Consider for example, that the fruit of atropa belladonna is poisonous. The fact that most poison isn’t derived from belladonna does not change this.
Even if you believe that all drugs should be legal for informed personal use, that doesn't change the predatory and destructive nature of drug dealers and cartels in the system as it exists today. If you want to support personal, recreational use of drugs, the ethical, responsible way to do that is through campaigning for reform of our laws, not through enabling and funding violent organized crime groups that profit massively off keeping people so addicted they can't function in society.
I get paid across various countries (UK, EU, US) and it's sure easier to get paid with a stable coin than fiat. Ever dealt with a US business when you only have a UK account and they're asking for your routing number? Had a one-day $1000 contract last year to write a quick training document and it took an extra day of communicating with their accounting team to find a solution. And then it takes days to transfer across systems. My normal payment route is EU -> UK -> US which has fees and takes two days, or I can get paid with a stable coin from EU -> US in around two minutes.
Ya pretty cool that someone from Ghana living in Canada could send $5000 worth of crypto to their family without a bank intervening. Also pretty cool that they could be paid per second instead of weekly or monthly using something like Superfluid.
If these are problems that don’t exist for you, consider yourself lucky and remind yourself of the opportunities for many that you’re advocating against.
How are the people in Ghana transform that crypto allegedly worth 5000$ in real money or in things from real life, like paying utilities, food, transport costs and others?
It's not pretty cool that I can send whatever malicious content I want to a wallet and the receiver has no recourse against receiving it. Want to harass someone with dick-picks that empty their wallet when they try to "delete" them? Web3 has got you all day long.
No it is not. An image cannot be stored on any of the popular block chains. An NFT contains a link to an image, which the chain has no way of displaying, third party websites like Opensea display the images.
And you can never delete anything from a blockchain so your second point is completely false as well. And even if you could delete something from a chain it could not "drain" your wallet unless you explicitly gave it permission to use your coins.
It's one of those articles that you don't plan to watch through, because it's extremely long, but watch all of anyway, because it's extremely and consistently good.
I feel that I'm going to watch all 2h18 more than once before I'm done with it.
It'll be interesting to see how it affects the mindshare in these discussions. For a long time environmental concerns have been the primary criticism of things like NFTs but he completely ignores this criticism and instead focuses on a broader anticapitalist criticism of the financialization of everything. This idea has been in the air for a while but hasn't ever really gained traction outside of a few thinkpieces.
Pretty sure this is because markets are going down. if/when prices go up again headlines will be skepticism disappears as people get into crypto again.
And its crashes are generally spiraling upwards. I remember playing a drinking game with the Bitcoin ATM at Google Campus in London back in 2014 guessing if it'd go up or down when the price updated as it fell dramatically from $1000 to $300.
These critics have been around for a while. Dan Olson started researching this video long before this recent crash. You should watch it. https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
No doubt. Its just basic financial reporting, when XYZ is going up the headlines are about how great it is, when its going down publicity is given to the bears.
It feels like most web3 discussion is just discussion and none of the core parts exist at all…. and some folks just threw nfts and crypto currency into the bucket to have something concrete to point to.
I don’t have a problem with discussion about meta discussion but I’m also skeptical that it matters/ that this is just meta about meta …. with nobody doing any of this web3 stuff.
No it doesn't. Ultimately people and investors vote with their feet (and money) and then stuff is built and gets traction or not. The "debate" about whether web3 is a thing or not or should be a thing is not that interesting.
A lot of those investments strike me indeed as unlikely to have any ROI worth reporting on. But they did get lucky with Coinbase. So, a few of those achieving some level of success is not completely unthinkable.
Free markets and network effects leads to the accumulation of wealth and power by the few. Piketty did the hard work of documenting this. Getting away from theory and into business strategy, network effects are an often discussed strategy in start-up culture to become a "unicorn". What is a unicorn? Usually the winner of a battle to seize a market leveraging "disruption" brought on by new technology.
A truly decentralized, unregulated network will therefore lead to more power being seized by fewer. That is, a decentralized financial network will tend to lead towards the centralization of the value represented within that network. Without the ability for democracy to step in and regulate that network.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are an inherently anti-government project, through placing all governments in a single authoritarian perspective and insisting that they must be decentralized; "crypto" is fundamentally anti-democratic. Throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The great thing about crypto is that anyone can make a coin.
Crypto is not anti-democratic. It's not pro-democratic either. It's simply egalitarian in the classical sense of the word.
If anything the equity collapse happening in real time and in crypto might allow for the hype to deflate and something valuable to grow. Think of it like the regrowth in a forest. Hopefully all the hucksters will be so burnt that they won't touch the space again allowing space for those projects people deem to be valuable to grow. It sounds naive, but maybe thats the way forward.
> Keep in mind that it was still early when the dot-com bubble popped. Google Maps hadn’t been invented yet, nor had the iPhone and Android. Online payments were in their infancy. No Twitter or Facebook. No AWS and cloud computing. Most of what we rely on today didn’t yet exist.
> I suspect it will be the same for crypto. So much is yet to be created. Let’s focus on the parts of the Web3 vision that aren’t about easy riches, on solving hard problems in trust, identity, and decentralized finance. And above all, let’s focus on the interface between crypto and the real world that people live in, where, as Matthew Yglesias put it when talking about housing inequality, “a society becomes wealthy over time by accumulating a stock of long-lasting capital goods.” If, as Sal Delle Palme argues, Web3 heralds the birth of a new economic system, let’s make it one that increases true wealth—not just paper wealth for those lucky enough to get in early but actual life-changing goods and services that make life better for everyone.”
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excit...
It's had over a decade now for "something valuable to grow". There is still no use case for cryptocurrency (that I've ever heard of) that isn't either done at least as well without it, anarcho-capitalist fantasy, or purely about making money off having more of it.
People like sdiehl and molly white are getting 100x their normal engagement sharing unresearched crypto hitpieces in the same way NFT bros are making 3 mill for a low effort monkey picture. its just the thing that all these people attach themselves to right now.
A simple maxim: web3 cannot succeed when the underlying currency is a good investment.
Actual web3 users, if they exist, have to convert IRL money to coin to power a dApp. Thus, the price of coin rising against IRL money represents inflation in the cost of using the dApp.
In this fashion, web3 is similar to housing. The enthusiasts want it to be a great investment, but to be best for fulfilling human needs it should be a poor investment. The only difference is you can’t opt out of needing shelter.
>>Even with the increased amplification of skepticism, the crypto and Web3 space continue to grow rapidly. Only time will tell if we will have a new decentralized blockchain-based utopia or if the skeptics were correct all along.
So basically, this is now just falling off the "Peak Of Inflated Expectations" into the "Trough of Disillusionment" on the Gartner Technology Hype Cycle graph[0][1].
Perhaps notable that it is going through the cycle so quickly. I expected a more substantive analysis, but it seems to be merely pointing to the name-calling ("a solution in search of a problem". "con job") of a few skeptics.
Actually I now recall lasers being called "a solution in search of a problem" for several decades, but now they are ubiquitous, although it does mean that the initial laser manufacturers were not necessarily the big winners.
My vague understanding is Web3 will be distributed assets being loaded by people who have wallets that can receive small funds for distributing them and users that have wallets that can receive a split of the proceeds from providers that are orchestrating ideas+assets into user data that is valuable for marketers.
I don't actually see why people are skeptical of this, people who don't care about "data ownership", "distributed web", etc have incentive by some "free" money, decent amount of political incentive for some people to move to less "centralized" authorities of discussion and online socializing, and a growing political incentive for "privacy and ownership of your own data".
Whether you care or agree that it's a problem, or if it's solving any of the issues and arguments has very little bearing on actual adoption of this stuff when being able to get "paid" (even in shitcoins) for seeing ads/seeding assets/doing computations when AFK, is alluring and marketable to a lot of people and I think there are enough smart folks that want to figure out a way to get a more distributed web along with a profit model that I don't know if i'm as bearish on this iteration of "web3" as the comments on HN tend to portray.
> [...] as crypto becomes more mainstream and people experience its downsides, critics' warnings are starting to be heard.
I'm not sure that public sentiment is actually being measured or is shown to be changing, or at least there's no evidence presented here.
The biggest thing happening right now is the selloff, and I think that's happening due to the economic headwinds that face all asset classes. Look at the stock market - it's not doing any better.
It looks like we're in for an extremely rough 2022, and people are selling off their crypto (and everything they can) to prepare for the storm. 7% inflation on cash is nothing compared to the loss in equity valuations. Now is the time to hold cash.
(I'm a crypto skeptic, so don't take this as a defense of crypto.)
Really? As of writing, the S&P500 is down ~10% from its all-time-high. Bitcoin is currently down over 50% of its ATH. Other cryptocurrencies are faring even worse. The stock market is doing significantly better.
This is an oft frustrating topic in the world of cryptocurrency enthusiasm. The contemporary American banking and finance system is awful. It's worthy of a great many of criticisms. But crypto solves none of them, and removes the few, feeble protections that are in place to protect average everyday people.
Crypto-currencies make a few people win out at the cost of others, who in hindsight mistakenly "invested". The ones who won evangelize it the most, but they don't stop and think about, where that money came from. Might be an uncomfortable thought. Then you have the hopeful ones, who hope to win out in the future. Basically all driven by volatility and the believe, that they will be able to exit at the right moment. And maybe they will be, but then others are the losers.
I don't find this to be an ethically OK way to act.
Yet another friendly reminder that only Bitcoin is real decentralized and freedom empowering finance.
Saying that you cannot participate is reaching the same level of saying that you cannot participate in the use of the internet. In ten years or so, you'll likely be having to use Bitcoin whether you stand against it now or not. Just as someone that said the internet was a scam or a fad back in 1999-2003 era of the web.
People who are anti-cryptocurrency often like to conflate Bitcoin with all these other scam coins. It's true that all of them are a scam besides bitcoin and that none of them have security or decentralization. There is only Bitcoin. It does not matter what is agreed upon, only the truth matters. Only the math matters. Only code matters.
I like crypto, at least it's interesting. But what still annoys me is that I have to pay so much for sending money. It's hilarious, SEPA and other methods are cheaper. I bet Western Union is cheaper, and they have airport prices...
Those ETH gas fees are crazy. I recently had to pay ~25 USD to throw a few hundred bucks worth of TIME on wonderland.money (do not recommend if you like making money). I recently sent 1000 USD to Tunisia via Western Union using my debit card, and the fee was $7.
The receiver in Tunisia needed to provide proof of identity to claim that money.
If they are a foreigner in Tunisia, they might also need to provide a passport, valid visa, etc., as well as deal with someone in a foreign language.
I'd prefer my money to go to my phone and not have to deal with anyone in person or give up my personal information, especially over small amounts like $1000.
ETH is L1. There are alternative L2 blockchains that cost pennies to send funds.
This is why BNB got huge. It's ETH but more centralized and with less fees. Made it easier to play with smart contracts. Made it easier to scam people too.
A healthy criticism of things is great, however, I feel context needs to be brought to the table too. What is this Bitcoin being compared against?
We need to understand the current fiat system, how is fiat money is made? How exactly is the USD brought into the world?
Many of you might be quite shocked on how the current system works, all based on debt, or just arbitrary printed to suite the needs of big government. Its quite interesting. Did you know 40% of all USD in existence was create last year based on nothing for instance?
Fiat, and crypto have their merits, and failures. Some obvious issues, others underlying, and needing to be addressed.
I would separate the crypto craze from Web3 to be honest. On its face it doesn't really have to do with crypto currency at all. A centralization is otherwise no really desirable for many users.
“Web3” is a marketing campaign created to drum up demand for cryptocurrencies. That’s why the sales people blow off technical concerns claiming that the answer is to buy the tokens they conveniently already own so you can then maybe help build a system which actually works later.
No "Web3" really isnt just a marketing campign. Look up web3.js, which had its first release in 2015, it offers a set of tools for creating and interacting with ephemeral/emergent internet architecture which is what Web3 is really about.
I dont disagree there are a number of less than scrupulous people floating around selling worthless tokens, BUT to solely focus on them is to ignore a real core of interesting computer science advances.
> BUT to solely focus on them is to ignore a real core of interesting computer science advances.
Examples? Specifically, which advances are you referring to which solve a problem other than “now you can do something you could do before but by paying me instead”?
How do those innovate beyond the decades of prior art in both cases? Proof of work means Whisper will be expensive so it must have a compelling advantage which helps the applications be correspondingly more capable to compensate for that. Similarly, storage using smart contracts does not seem like a game changer compared to similar projects' weak market demand.
Im not going to bother filling in the blanks for you.
Tangently if you want to start a journey to understanding why the movement away from centralised infrastructure is important (and arguably unavoidable) from a fundamental perspective, go and read one of the primary sources for crypto libertarinism - https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transi... this book was published in 1997 it describes cryptocurrencies and their terminal implications on prevailing powerstructures and so much more. The Author was a member of the House of Lords in the UK and his son is now the current Leader of the House of Commons.
> Im not going to bother filling in the blanks for you.
This seems suspiciously like you are unable to. Note how unusual that is for true innovation — HN is full of posts where people can say they switched to something because it was faster, better, cheaper, etc. If all you have is a book from the previous century which predates those systems existing, that does not speak well for their merits.
Did you even read the summary on Whisper where it compares its use case vs. traditional multicast protocols like UDP? I guess not.
I'm not going to waste my energy further, you are dismissive and closed minded. The prior art you allude to is all from the previous century too, your point?
Frankly I couldnt care less if you dont end up getting "Web3", although it would be a shame for you if you didn't bother to make a concerted effort on your own behalf beyond trite comments.
I’ve been trying to be open minded but you haven’t exactly given me much to go on. There have been many P2P protocols over the years, and the only thing which appears to be of interest here is that this one is tightly coupled to the Ethereum network. Since you sold it as a computer science advance I assumed you had some idea of what that was.
The concept of web3 only exists to further the goals of cryptocurrency speculation, and the proposed technology is in no way distinguishable from cryptocurrency systems, so they really aren't unboxable.
Since any currency is merely an agreement about value between at least two parties, technology itself isn't going to differentiate what is and is not a "cryptocurrency" from "something using a blockchain".
They're absolutely inseparable. Web3, at least as I understand its fuzzy definition, is: websites, but... state stored on the blockchain! There are virtually 0 technical reasons for doing this—decentralization and most of the "neat" examples shown (e.g., logging into arbitrary websites without signing up) can be done much better sans-blockchain, using plain old asymmetric keys.
What's motivating this is people with deeply vested interest (a16z investors, in no small part) in crypto tokens (e.g. ETH) increasing in price.
Bitcoin doesn't have the capability to do smart contracts. There are bitcoin maximalists that are pretty anti-Web3. Jack Dorsey being one of those people.
No. And, frankly, I'd think anyone with a half-a-brain and 30 seconds to think through the ramifications of such a terrible idea would be able to figure out why.
Well one thing it helps combat is link/data rot (assuming that blockchain stays up of course). Meanwhile on our current web, data is disappearing all the time. Like this recent study on the links on NYT articles:
"Predictably, it found that, as time went on, links were more likely to be dead: 6 percent of links in 2018 articles were inaccessible, while a whopping 72 percent of links from 1998 were dead."
But to the best of my understanding, none of the blockchains currently in widespread use can actually store whole websites on them. They can store....links. To existing webpages. Which are still hosted exactly the same way they've always been, and subject to the same likelihood of link rot.
Agreed. To the extent that web3 means anything (in he sense that web2 meant anything), it's a descriptor of the goal, not the technology involved.
The goal is to give people control of their online experience again (like in web1) without throwing out the benefits that came along with web2 (simplicity for the end user and the ability to execute online commerce). In the goal-oriented mindset, blockchain is one of many solutions that could work, but predicting it will be the one is would have been like predicting that PayPal, Google, and Amazon were going to happen at the beginning of the dot-com boom.
Too much focus on the technology increases the likelihood that nothing will happen. Remember, "web3" had already been used previously to refer to online assistants like Alexa and Siri before this blockchain craze; predicting the socioeconomic future by scrying technology is a fraught game.
It’s not that they are too abstract it’s that they only hold in a fantastical alternate reality where the elite resign without a fight.
In reality, if cryptocurrency takes power from the elite they will make it illegal and arrest 95% of its users who are incapable of learning how to mask their network participation. This is not reassuring for an idea whose decentralized powers are predicated on mass adoption.
What do you think those are, and how much does the average person care?
The original web was more decentralized than what web3 proponents are selling, but over time users consistently chose a few major services. Why will they switch back and what will avoid that repeating again?
It’s relevant because it’s not “people are too stupid/naive” but rather that most people have different priorities. If you want people to use a new system, you need to have it do something they care about better than the status quo. That’s why I suggested learning from history: the reasons why people moved from personal sites to Facebook/Twitter/etc. are important for anyone trying to get them back.
No I don't think it's about personal sites at all and I wouldn't rely on the limited history of the internet but you'd see decentralized services have flourished until powers at be shut them down or gobbled them up.
To those with different priorities than what I listed (privacy, ownership) they usually care about usability, and decentralized platforms can be just as usable and popular.
I think all the hate is from the powers at be being threatened by Web3 and the power/control it gives users. If they can't shut it down or gobble it up, they'll run hate campaigns and convince smart people to hate it for them.
Noone is hating on Web2 monopoly tech as much as this, let's just love all of the internet.
Ask yourself, why are you rooting against this thing?
But the really really cool thing about Web3 is, it doesn't matter what the haters say, it's here to stay and IS the future because it can't be stopped.
- edit -
> I'm rooting against scammers using something I do care about as a sales tactic for something which has failed to find market demand.
A moral crusade then. Maybe tackle scamming on Web2 first?
I said "I'd argue" like I would, just as GP said "I'd argue". That means we aren't yet. I just wanted to voice that I disagreed so others could pick it up.
Central point of failures, ownership, privacy, etc etc. Obvious stuff I don't want to ramble about.
Only HN would try to downplay decentralization, something we know the benefits of, only to bash crypto/web3.
Actually, the benefits of decentralization are worth weighing against the costs of decentralization.
There's a reason that the process of going from web1 to web2 involved quite a bit of centralization. If web3 cannot meet its goals in a way that either maintains those benefits or creates a new benefit that substantively offsets the cost of losing them, people won't care. And if people don't care, this web3 will be as much an empty buzzword as when web3 referred to Siri and Alexa.
Does taking advantage of the benefits of web3 require users to become operators? Much of the transition off of small self-maintained websites occurred because new users were not interested in being operators, and existing operators were more interested in putting content out than in taking on the perpetual responsibility of being involved in the cat and mouse game against every malicious user on the planet that being an operator entails.
I don't think web3 is dead in the water... I wouldn't even discuss it if I thought it was. But the challenges of creating a new paradigm that displaces the old one aren't technological alone... They're how to solve real problems real people have. What I have seen of the blockchain based solutions suggests to me that they aren't doing much to simplify using the blockchain itself, and I don't think we're going to boil the ocean of converting most web users to even neophyte cryptographers to get them on board with the trust model necessary for the blockchain to help with web3.
Isn't the general thesis of Web3 partially based on the principles of decentralized blockchain technologies, a lot like crypto? If so they are certainly related to each other.
There is no shortage of snake-oil and perverse incentives in the space; but the most charitable reading is that Web3 is a diverse family of technologies attempting to fill in two gaps from Web1: (a) self-sovereign identity, and (b) distributed value exchange. Their absence fueled the rise of the quasi-feudal [0] Web 2.0: outsourcing these functions to centralized firms (Google ID, PayPal).
The proposed identity models sometimes involve blockchains and smart contracts, but can also use simple private keys, or trustful P2P models like holochains. The solutions for value exchange are where crypto-tokens enter the picture (setting aside the perverse incentives of Supply attempting to create its own Demand); but one could certainly envision the same technology working with state-backed digital currencies, while still disintermediating finance middlemen (credit card fees, eBay fees, brokerage fees, etc).
Well, then they are also related to a file checksum. I believe some ideas were around ledgers providing a means to authentication, which I don't like at all.
For me it was about decentralized platforms to emancipate people from large social media moguls that have enough info on user behavior that they can influence behavior. Interconnectedness would ensure that the draw of peers using the same network would vanish. At least theoretically.
Yep, I was pretty blissfully ignorant of Web3 while into crypto for a long time. I eventually decided to make a deeper dive into it, but I could have easily kept ignoring it.
Diehl regularly neglects disclosing his conflict of interest when railing on crypto - he is CTO of a centralized block chain company that will be selling to governments and central banks.
Take the united states... people are basically free to sneak in, without becoming residents, without "downloading the American OS into their brains" aka citizenship.
Now, what if all countries allowed this? Or, what if a "decrentralized country" offered citizenship with no actual geographic location?
Does American citizenship offer people benefits overseas? For example hostage situations? What if there was a better, decentralized country, that would come to your aid?
Decentralized ideologies are what's being practiced right now; and in fact, it's part of the USA's geopolitical strategy of pushing democracy onto countries, whether subtle or otherwise.
And in any case, any individual should be focused on empowering other individuals to the point they can at least vote with their own wallets and migrate to another country or group should the need arise.
Right, but if they empowered to move, they have only a limited list of countries to select from. Those countries could be puppet states, corrupted, etc.... So what if one of those countries were to be formed on decentralized, open source principles?
I guess what I'm saying is we should start a new country that will be constitutionally immune to some of the new challenges of modern times.
What is a religion, if not an extension of citizenship overlayed onto existing governments? It's basically additional rules you follow, with some benefits of membership.
Moreover, what is the fundamental difference between a government and a religion? Should governments be compatible with religions, and should religions be compatible with governments?
I am confident that people's concerns about crypto's impact on the environment is simply jealousy masked by virtue. What they are saying when they say "ban crypto" is actually - let's bankrupt these bastards who made all this money off crypto. Jealousy is a powerful force.
First, it assumes crypto is "stuck in time" and not evolving. Proof-of-Stake + Layer 2s are orders of magnitude more efficient. Like any new tech, it gets more efficient over time.
Second, there's a distinction between energy usage and carbon emissions. Energy usage with zero carbon emissions is not bad for the environment. Bitcoin mining is perfect for carbon neutral energy sources because it can be mined anywhere, which is why Bitcoin mining energy sources are between 39% and 73% carbon neutral and growing [1].
Third, I think there is real value in a widely-used currency that is not centrally controlled. There is some cost to do this, manifest in the form of energy consumption. The fiat banking system also consumes substantial energy, and I would be curious to see a complete comparison.
In general, I get a sentiment of "it's ridiculous all these people got rich" followed by "there's a reason to justify my outrage" and, without further research, calls to ban an entire technology.
The part I don't understand about the crypto fear-uncertainty-doubt crowd is how binary they think the outcomes are going to be
NFTs - yes you can right click and save as. No they haven't figured out at scale how to attach the image / work to the ledger. Yes hype and pyramiding is a fucking disaster and people would go to prison trying those antics in any other industry. But digital art, music, & culture has a real deficit in ownership, provenance, etc.
Cryptocurrency - Yes there is pyramiding and wash trading galore. Maybe tether has inflated the entire market by a million percent. Yes proof of work uses too much energy. But gov't money printing, censorship, property rights, transfer complexity etc has left a vaccum for something that even resembles a currency that serves the individual.
As others have noted many times over we are very early, it is unlikely that we've yet seen what will be a broadly used solution but there is real product market fit here already illustrating massive demand.
On HN in particular how do you build something to serve to that end?
> NFTs - yes you can right click and save as. No they haven't figured out at scale how to attach the image / work to the ledger. Yes hype and pyramiding is a fucking disaster and people would go to prison trying those antics in any other industry. But digital art, music, & culture has a real deficit in ownership, provenance, etc.
There are several NFT "thought leaders" who have casually floated the idea of eliminating "right-click save-as" functionality for NFT'd images. So it seems to be slowly evolving in the direction of a DRM scheme.
I can imagine that someone is going to come up with a way to encrypt the stuff, such that only the holder of the private key "owning" the NFT can decrypt it, or something along those lines.
We have a financial system, why not try to optimize it instead of trying to build something from scratch?
The problems we have (long, inefficient transactions for example) are there because it's hard to do regulation right. You're not helping anyone by creating something impossible to regulate. It's like trying to solve misjudgements by completely getting rid of law, or trying to do law by public opinion (the consensus problem).
Also there's always been a lot of new companies that serve customers with new financial tools. How you do banking did not stay the same in the last 20 years right? Yes it's slow but, as I said, it's hard to do innovation when you are playing with people's life savings.
But suddenly a ponzi scheme comes and all sense is out of the window.
> As others have noted many times over we are very early, it is unlikely that we've yet seen what will be a broadly used solution but there is real product market fit here already illustrating massive demand.
"It's still early stage, PoW/Ethereum/NFTs are just the first iteration, there are potential applications in the future" is the perennial crypto investors' motte.
"PoW/Ethereum/NFTs are revolutionary, they're here to stay, you would be so cool if you bought a hexagonal ape profile picture" is their bailey.
This is why we launched leatherboundledger.com if NFTs have value on their own their should be appetite too store their ownership the old fashioned way.
> Based in Bermuda the Leather Bound Ledger is bound by the laws of Bermuda and thus ultimately the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The privy council can trace its origins to the Witenagemot of the old Anglo Saxon Kingdoms over 1,000 years ago.
Fascinating. How much interest have you had?
Blockchain NFTs do about $800k/day in sales, mostly on the Ethereum book, which is worth about $23B.
How many NFTs are being add to your book per day? How much is the total value of that book worth?
If your book and the value of the ownership that it annotates is larger than Ethereum, then you've really got something special going on, and all these crypto bros should probably give up and join your project.
Now you might be thinking "that's not fair, this is a growth project! we just started!". Ok, maybe you've not displaced Ethereum yet, but you will soon.
Are you experiencing hypergrowth? Are investors clammoring for a share of your book? If so, I'd like to learn more about what they find interesting and how I might invest. If not, it sounds like your project might not be a good investment opportunity.
You are, of course, correct that the leather bound ledger is not currently drowning in customers. But the underlying technology, that is to say, the law of contract supports a much larger market than web3.
All this FUD is some ludite commie nonsense.. its one thing to see articles and stuff like this written by the bbc or something but tech people? Really?
You guys don't see how solving byzantines general problem is ground breaking?
You guys don't see any potential in decentralised networks resistant to sybil attacks?
No value in being able to "own" things in the digital world?
You guys couldn't imagine any uses for something like Zero Knowledge Proofs?
Its just stupid. Most of you guys are over payed dorks who lack any sort of vision or imagination..
You don't need to be genius to see that we are in a euphoric bubble when jpegs of apes as selling for millions and its pretty cool to point out/warn people of the scammers and charlatans in this space.. but to dismiss the cambrian explosion of innovation happening here..
I mean.. I'm baffled.. tech people? I know this sounds harsh but the sheer stupidity in a phrase like "blockhains are a solution in search of a problem"...
There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Most of them will fail and be forgotten, but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products. Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?