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Comment by tmcw | Hacker News Reader

People are building things like renewed web standards (Project Fugu, for example) and P2P networks (Beaker, Hypercore), and light clients (Mighty). These projects don't get any attention from the "Web3" crowd because they don't involve currency speculation.

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Why exclude IPFS? That is near and dear to the web3/cryptocurrency space, but can also be leveraged without participating in currency speculation at all.

Because IPFS does get attention from the web3 crowd, it's even used in MetaMask and the comment you're replying to is commenting about projects that don't get attention from the web3 crowd.

IMO GP's comment had a narrative that newer projects that are pushing forward renewed web standards are getting completely ignored by "Web3", however one of the bigger projects is heavily embraced

You cannot separate economics incentives from networking protocols.

You need an actual sepeculative market to price and offer these services.

Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.

That is an extraordinary claim. Network protocols and currencies went some 60 years being unrelated to each other and I see no reason to think they won't continue right along that way after this current set of grifters finds a new set of marks

I've heard it argued that a huge flaw of the big protocols like HTTP is that they chose to be entirely unopinionated about payments. Apparently standards bodies did discuss standards for microtransactions, for example W3C's abandoned efforts: https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/

When HTTP was first developed there was literally no available mechanism for micro-transactions. If HTTP had been opinionated about micro-transactions it would have been stuck with Beenz [0] or Flooz [1].

Personally I don't want an application layer protocol, especially a global standard, to be opinionated about payment methods.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com

Being opinionated about payments is not the same thing as building a speculative digital currency into your protocol.

> Network protocols and currencies went some 60 years being unrelated to each other and I see no reason to think they won't continue right along that way after this current set of grifters finds a new set of marks.

The speculation was being done on wall street in form startups like Juniper, Cisco stock. The 'Token' of that time is the stock.

> ” Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.”

That’s a bold statement. Most of projects that do acknowledge this reality also fail. Like all for-profit and even those web3 projects that are using cryptocurrency speculation. So I think there are tons of reasons that open source projects fail, not just because of this reason.

What about bittorrent?

Bittorrent is fantastic for 'altruistic' activity.

But it is useless if you want to build a for profit Netflix. You may have to look at something like IPFS that accounts for economic incentives I the protocol.

BitTorrent was used for the blizzard updater as well as internal tech for moving around files needed on many machines at various companies.

But none of that matters because it was created and was/is well used

I'm having trouble finding mighty on ddg, got a link?

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