Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

For the life of me I can't understand the full negativity on HN. Crypto is the wild west. It may even be the last frontier of the internet. It's a corner of the web that hasn't been fully co-opted and dominated by centralized trillion-dollar monopolies hell bent on quantifying your ad preferences while beating all divergent thinking out of you. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Unlike the Web2 revolution, retail users get to participate and benefit from the value creation. Between social tokens, NFTs, decentralized finance protocols, and DAOs (decentralized organizations), there is now a burgeoning ecosystem of tooling for organizing human capital around a cause or a goal. This goes beyond centralized tooling. It's all open source, it's all forkable, it's creative, it is fresh and reminds me of the early promising days of the internet. It's a chance to get a redo on the promise of the web.

I'm spending my time learning several things in the Ethereum ecosystem. One is using Ethereum for authentication, by using the wallet as a public key login and ENS domains as a user-friendly user name service (effectively acting as a decentralized auth/identity solution).

I'm also learning about IPFS and decentralized data storage through solutions like Filecoin and Arweave. I'm exploring a peer to peer database called ThreadDB.

And I'm studying Solidity and all the tooling for creating and interacting with EVM based smart contracts.

It's a very fascinating space and HN is doing a disservice to itself and its users by not featuring the positive side of it more.

> It's a corner of the web that hasn't been fully co-opted and dominated by centralized trillion-dollar monopolies hell bent on quantifying your ad preferences while beating all divergent thinking out of you.

Yes, but in the view of an outsider who at least has some knowledge of what it's trying to accomplish it seems mostly dominated by people running pump and dump schemes, scams, and other activities of ill repute. As such it is hard to see it in a positive light, and in the solution spaces of most businesses blockchain doesn't really fit and is the worst kind of vapourware instead. Worse, a lot of the applications seem to assume a perpetuity of things where there's no clear path of stewardship (decentralized or otherwise) of what happens when people get bored of it or the network stops being able to meet it's intended goals. Most applications of blockchain require people to not be bad actors and exploit the system, unfortunately it seems to have attracted a lot of bad actors.

The only use I've seen that makes any sense is CT (certificate transparency), where it actually fits the model provided by the blockchain concept well. It's my only example of a relatively 'clean' blockchain tied to something useful and practical and helps even people that don't understand it.

People excited around blockchain seem to be excited with the community they created and I don't think that's wrong. However, it is hard for me to see that community worth personally joining when a lot of what you see discussed around blockchain ends up being bots, salespeople, scammers, astroturfers, or the misinformed. It's not inducing the same medium of creativity as lot of other web inventions like forums, flash, mobile apps, etc. It just ends up being about itself which is fine but nets limited interest which makes the negative actors stand out that much more. I'm sure there's pockets of genuine good here and there, but it's hard to see past the dark vile ichor that surrounds everything.

Crypto will get regulated.

Everything that you’re saying about crypto is (almost) true of the early internet. 99% of the companies then were BS. Crypto is a weird space right now as it’s so void of regulation things that should be illegal are not.

As someone else said, this is the noise. The signal is Ethereum Virtual Machine, dApps and DeFi are real.

Thanks! Seems like I’m not the only person to get it.

Interestingly this post appears to have been removed from HN. Not sure if I did something incorrectly.

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