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Comment by imagine99 | Hacker News Reader

That's actually very interesting. One problem I have started to run into recently however, is that you can't mention the word "blockchain" any more without being laughed out of the room (in some circles), and in many cases rightly so. The word has just been to much vaporware-ified and misused because VCs and other decision-makers were eating it up like crazy.

However, it seems like blockchain-based technologies are to be an integral part of web3, or are there alternatives to it? Is there a way to talk about the concept without mentioning blockchain?

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Blockchain(s) are certainly one of the building blocks, but it should be possible to talk about what you're building without mentioning the underlying technology. Indeed, it should be somewhat irrelevant unless people want to dig into the detail.

That's why efforts like redecentralize are so important. It's more talking about objectives like privacy, censorship resistance, etc.

There are a subset of people that go, let's build with "the blockchain" for the hype and another subset that recognizes that blockchains are one of a number of tools in the arsenal of solving a problem.

Efforts like Matrix, SSB, OpenBazaar, and IPFS are all 'Web3' technologies without being on the blockchain.

If you do need to talk blockchains, two terms that likely aren't so loaded are 'smart contracts' and 'dapps' (distributed apps).

Cryptography is not blockchain.

Blockchain is a very heavy technology that solves the Consensus Problem. That's amazing, but almost no real world problems except cryptocurrency has a Consensus Problem.

For almost everything else, there are much simpler, easier-to-understand and _far_ computationally lighter cryptographic solutions that aren't blockchain.

When the blockchain / dapp hype got huge for a minute in 2017, I asked a “crypto enthusiast” friend to pitch me on why I should use his dapp (some sort of gambling game).

He went on and on about double spending and consensus. i asked him why anybody, even his “ico investors” would care about any of that just to play a (slow) game.

He went back into double spending and byzantium generals and using Brave for tokenized payments.

This pattern repeated with every single dapp I came across.

Definitely sounds like an inability to pitch correctly. In the case of a gambling game there are a number of things that you could pitch in a better way:

  * It's possible to gamble even in jurisdictions that make it illegal.
  * The rules are encoded and visible, the house might always win, but at least they're not cheating.

Disclaimer: I'm not pro gambling

Neither of those require a fleet of GPUs powered by a hydroelectric dam to balance the accounting.

The former point almost certainly makes small disposable servers in a variety of jurisdictions a requirement. There might be many millions of crypto users around the world, but there are very few running their own nodes, and fewer still actively mining. Block generation is practically as monopolised as the banking system it supposedly replaces.

To the latter, I worked a cryptocurrency casino and the provably fair algorithms were implemented using the core Node.js crypto libraries and completely independent from all the blockchain nodes. The sheer frequency of by users completely rules out any chance of leveraging a smart contract or block data as a base for the RNG.

The real problem is this. How do we determine which speech to punish in 2021? The algorithm is if one person in a non dominant group reports that the words made them feel bad, after the fact, then the words caused actual harm and must be punished. How do we know ahead of time? I don't know. But I do know that it leads us to strange situations where certain words cannot even be quoted, and the even the banning itself cannot be discussed. And the outlawing of discussing the ban cannot be discussed. And so on.

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