> 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?
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.