Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem with the current state of Web3 is that it really doesn't seem to solve meaningful, mainstream problems yet.

Even the most widely accepted use case which is crypto-currency fails to break out of the theoretical value outlined in the different white papers. I own several crypto-currencies and there hasn't been a single moment in which I thought of buying something with a crypto-currency. I have crypto-currencies because I'm speculating in their asset class value, not necessarily because I'm betting on their utility.

Now, I know that crypto coins are indeed used in real service/product transactions, but I think there's a difference between the present economical use of cryptos and its potential mainstream use where cryptos can effectively replace fiat currencies in super wide economic settings.

I believe that Web3 would happen but I honestly can't see a clear trajectory for Cryptos, NFTs, DAOs etc to become effective instruments that can replace existing Web2 instruments.

In fact the reason why everything in Web3 feels like BS right now is because everything in this space uses Web2 distribution. People promoting NFTs on Twitter feels a little bit like someone faxing you a webpage. Owning the rights to a random JPEG is something that feels too abstracted from the present Web2 mental model and value proposition.

View on HN

>I own several crypto-currencies and there hasn't been a single moment in which I thought of buying something with a crypto-currency.

This is entirely personal and subjective, but I prefer the user experience of Aave and Yearn to traditional banking with e.g. Chase. I also would way rather make large purchases with crypto (e.g. down payment on a house) compared with wiring money.

Why is ‘wiring’ so bad from your point of view?

Indeed. I’ll gladly pay $20 to have a professional human in the loop when I transfer the down payment on a house.

Wires are often free. My bank (HSBC) charges me nothing for domestic wires, my brokerage (IBKR) charges me nothing for domestic wires, Schwab charges nothing for domestic wires, neither does Fidelity, USAA or Ally - even FTX charges nothing for domestic wires - even though moving USDC-ETH out of FTX and into your wallet costs $25.

> Wires are often free.

Do you have a citation for this? The articles I found online suggest fees are almost universal, with only a single bank (Fidelity) offering true $0 wire transfer fees to all customers [0].

0 - https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/wire-transfers-wh...

Here's references, although it looks like Ally and USAA have started charging fees since I looked.

HSBC offer free wires for Premier customers. [1]

IBKR offers the first domestic wire per month free, subsequent $10. [2]

Schwab also offers 1 free per month for qualified customers. [3]

Fidelity offers free wires. [4]

FTX offers free wires ("We are not currently charging for wire deposits or withdrawals.") [5]

Chase Premier Plus and Sapphire checking do not charge wire fees. [6]

TD Bank offers 1 free wire transfer per statement cycle. [7]

Citigold accounts offer free wires. [8]

CIT Bank depending on balance. [9]

They're not always free, to be sure - most of the low-end accounts charge for them, but then, those low-end accounts charge for practically everything. That said, TD Bank, Fidelity, Schwab, IBKR all offer at least 1 free wire per month for all customers.

If you have any meaningful balances or monthly income, you shouldn't ever pay for wires. Every retail bank offers free wires for qualifying customers to the best of my knowledge.

[1] https://www.us.hsbc.com/content/dam/hsbc/us/docs/pdf/deposit... p.3

[2] https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=14718

[3] https://www.schwab.com/legal/schwab-pricing-guide-for-indivi...

[4] https://www.fidelity.com/customer-service/choose-eft-or-bank...

[5] https://help.ftx.us/hc/en-us/articles/360043579273-Fees

[6] https://www.chase.com/content/dam/chase-ux/documents/persona...

[7] https://www.feeds.td.com/en/document/oao/pdf/1_fees.pdf

[8] https://online.citi.com/US/JRS/pands/detail.do?ID=WireTransf...

[9] https://www.cit.com/cit-bank/resources/schedule-of-fees

I'm not OP but I had to wire money earlier this year when I bought a house. To accomplish this, I had to drive to my nearest bank branch (1 hour drive), talk to a bank teller for 15 minutes while she filled out forms and printed out papers I had to sign, and then they told me the wire would probably arrive in time for the house signing (3 hours later). This was to send ~$15k. Compare this to sending USDC on [smart contract enabled blockchain] which takes a few clicks and minutes at most.

For arguments sake I will point out the downsides to using crypto in this case:

1. Most people don't want to manage their own wallet

2. USDC is centralized so there is some amount of risk

3. If you send it to the wrong wallet, RIP to your money

FWIW, I was just as scared of sending the wire transfer to the wrong place as I was when I send crypto. And with crypto you can quickly send a small test amount first. You can use something like DAI which is less centralized than USDC if that risk is a concern. Wallet UX will improve over time

You might want to switch banks, I wire money a couple times a month, it takes about 5 minutes via their website, it goes out very soon after initiation (if it’s within business hours).

That’s a failing of the US banking system, but not of banking systems everywhere. In the UK you can send up to £250,000 within 15 minutes, and you can generally do this online.

And one that's actively being remedied by both RTP (already rolled out to many customers) and FedNow in 2023.

People are probably tired of hearing this, but this is not a problem with wiring, it's a problem with US banks.

When i bought my home in the UK six years ago, i phoned my bank, told them how much i wanted to send and to who, and they did it, with the money arriving straight away. If the amount had been less than 20k, i could have done it online rather than over the phone; the back-end payment machinery is the same, but i suppose the bank think there's less chance of a normal customer making a mistake with a large transfer if someone walks them through it. My bank is rather old-fashioned; more modern banks let you make large transfers online or through their app:

https://www.starlingbank.com/blog/high-value-payments/

That page mentions that "one of our team members may need to double check a few details before the payment can be made" - again, that's nothing to do with the machinery, that's in case you match some pattern looking for fraud or money laundering etc.

> People are probably tired of hearing this, but this is not a problem with wiring, it's a problem with US banks.

I have a US bank and I can send wires online. It's really not uncommon. I don't understand how or why the OP is banking with an outdated bank an hour away from his house when there are good options that can be accessed entirely online.

There are a lot of behind-the-times banks in the US, though. If you're stuck in one, considering switching.

My credit union can do wires online too, but only up to a certain limit, which wasn't high enough when I bought my house.

Banking in Australia with ING I could simply call them up and have the limit raised for a one time payment such as a house deposit which can then be completed online.

This sounds worse than using a website: incredibly easy to steal money from the bank by faking voice and phone number.

You have to punch in your pin number and answer a security question before you can talk to anyone. As is standard for phone banking.

> I'm not OP but I had to wire money earlier this year when I bought a house. To accomplish this, I had to drive to my nearest bank branch (1 hour drive), talk to a bank teller for 15 minutes while she filled out forms and printed out papers I had to sign, and then they told me the wire would probably arrive in time for the house signing (3 hours later). This was to send ~$15k. Compare this to sending USDC on [smart contract enabled blockchain] which takes a few clicks and minutes at most.

You really need to switch to a modern bank that doesn't force you to go in person to do a wire. That's insanity.

Fidelity has free wire transfers, no need to go into a bank: https://www.fidelity.com/customer-service/choose-eft-or-bank...

You are just using a bad bank. The bank I use lets you initiate a wire via their iPhone app, and then they simply call to confirm security details etc.

Far easier and safer than anything crypto has to offer.

Not to mention that it’s a complete fantasy to expect all but the tiniest number of sellers to accept crypto today, so the comparison is between something that exists today and works very well, and something that is only imaginary.

The bank I use is PNC, looks like it is currently the 7th largest bank in the US. To be fair, in the past month they opened a new branch which is a 10 minute drive, so that makes the first part a lot better. I am also lucky enough to live in a fairly high population area.

After seeing the other comments I guess this wire transfer issue is specific to the US. I agree that a tiny number of sellers would accept crypto payment today, but what do you mean exactly when you say it is "only imaginary"? Transferring USDC is very real and exists today. I don't expect the average person to ever transfer USDC the way it is done today, it would be a terrible user experience. But I'm trying to figure out the disconnect between what I see as a powerful financial primitive and what you see as imaginary

I left PNC when they started charging me $3 per check image viewed online through their web interface. I didn't believe it until the charges actually accumulated.

> I don't expect the average person to ever transfer USDC the way it is done today, it would be a terrible user experience.

Therefore the service you are comparing against is one that only exists in your imagination, and is not real today.

> For arguments sake I will point out the downsides to using crypto in this case:

Which are all reasons why someone makes you drive to the nearest bank.

As others have pointed out, these issues are highly US centric, as sending money in the UK/EU can be done almost instantaneously. And so, if they can be done almost instantaneously in other countries it means the technology is not the barrier, but the politics. Thus crypto's only advantage is not a technology one, but a political/market/bureaucratic one.

One good thing about crypto is that if it does take off and becomes a legitimate threat to wire transfers, then banks will change their tune VERY quick, and then once that system is in place then we can have all of the nice things that help protect your money in a US bank accountant (FDIC insurance, access to financing, fraud protection, etc.) with the advantages of crypto.

There is a reason the Winkelvoss twins store their crypto wallet pass-phrases in bank vaults.

For the record - I have my own thoughts about how bad the US finance system is, but I think crypto advocates love to ignore why these systems exist in the first place.

I'm in the US and it's a very messy and archaic system that involves paperwork, multiple human intermediaries and days to clear.

I wouldn't. The Bitcoin might not cover the down payment when it arrives ten minutes later.

The person you replied to said “crypto” not “Bitcoin”. They can convert their coins to an algorithmic stablecoin and make the payment in a single transaction with no price change.

So is Bitcoin no longer being pushed as a currency? Is that “official”?

Who are you looking to "officially" decide that? Best you can probably do is look at what hard forks have occurred (such as bitcoin vs bitcash in this case) to see community splits.

I don’t know, that’s why I asked. I’m not sure why a legitimate question is being downvoted.

I don’t participate in the community. So I’m not sure if the project maintainers have different visions than the investors or whatever.

For many years now Bitcoin has been generally viewed by a large consensus to be a low throughput store of value, akin to digital gold. Many disagree with this ofc but it is a pretty mainstream view.

I mean there’s very little you’ll find as an official spokesperson for Bitcoin but yeah, the dream of on-chain transactions being used for anything other than a funny speculative asset is pretty much gone.

It’s actually kinda crazy in a “voting yourself money” kinda way. Because as long as people believe that BTC should always increase in value then in the long run the returns should gravitate toward something like the weighted average worldwide inflation rate.

The downside of course is that unlike normal investments they don’t spur the real life economic growth necessary to sustain that inflation.

> The downside of course is that unlike normal investments they don’t spur the real life economic growth necessary to sustain that inflation

Wouldn't it indirectly, because people trade bitcoins for USD most of the time, and that USD you'd assume eventually goes to buy products or services?

It is definitively 'official'.

If you cannot use Bitcoin to quickly pay for your groceries at your local supermarket then it is quite useless to use isn't it?

There are other cryptocurrencies which are more suitable to these very basic use-cases hence why Bitcoin is the easiest cryptocurrency to attack for most critics.

Those goalposts got moved years ago

As bizarre as this state of affairs is, Bitcoin is legal tender in El Salvador, who in turn have a seat in the United Nations.

That makes it an official currency: low transaction rates, energy costs, and wild fluctuations relative to other national currencies aside.

If the downpayment was accepting bitcoin then it would be a set amount like 0.1btc and not a dollar value.

Well, no, because the value would flail around wildly. No sane person would do that. BTC crashes 10% in minutes, who would knowingly expose themselves to that kind of forex risk for the few hours it takes to get the confirmations needed to feel comfortable? When one could instead liquidate their position in seconds, confirm the amount, and wire it to their recipient - free of charge often. Domestic wires are free on FTX but sending USDC-ETH to your own wallet costs $25. There's literally zero good reason for doing what you suggest.

Trying to pay in Bitcoin or any other non-stable crypto asset sounds like a nightmare. I think that people rightfully don't do this anymore but instead use stable coins like USDC (https://www.circle.com/en/usdc).

I have no idea who would accept crypto as payment given the gigantic price swings.

OpenSea is an online market for digital goods. A majority of the prices are denominated in cryptocurrencies (ie an item is priced at 1 ETH). As measured in USD, OpenSea did 8% of Amazon's volume in a month.

Had anyone tried to convert those fictional tokens to actual usable money, you'd very quickly find out that the actual volume is about 0%.

Off-ramping is a non-issue. It's like saying the stock market is worthless because its value is predicated upon keeping capital tied into it. Really, you can extend the same reasoning to any market. It's fine being a nihilist, but not very realistic.

> Off-ramping is a non-issue.

It is. The moment any of those fictional tokens are used for anything other than meaningless exchanges with other fictional tokens, they are worthless. For now they are only perpetuating their perceived self-worth.

> It's like saying the stock market is worthless

Stock market is almost entirely worthless. It's the same speculation not rooted in objective reality.

ah, nevermind. I had written a thoughtful reply to one of your other posts but it's clear the gap between us is bigger than can be solved in this medium.

> I had written a thoughtful reply

Ah yes. The fictional thoughtful replies that are as rare as examples of projects where blockchains solve anything.

> or the gap between us is bigger than can be solved in this medium.

Or, perhaps, the reply wasn't as thoughtful as you thought it was. Or, perhaps, you could post it as a blogpost to narrow the gap.

But nope.

Oo you know what would be cool is if we could have an anonymous coffee chat/virtual meeting. That would be fun!

If you (and other crypto peddlers) can't put your thoughts down in a coherent form that doesn't raise more questions than gives answers, no amount of talking will help.

I treat the underlying "currencies" (ETH, Avax, Sol, &c) as speculative assets and do actual payments and other financial transactions in USD pegged stable coins.

> I also would way rather make large purchases with crypto (e.g. down payment on a house)

For a purchase that large, I would rather make it in person. With a check. Which is way more secure than crypto or a wire transfer.

Not trying to be facetious — who lets you make a down payment with a check? I’ve worked with title companies (though only in 2 US states) and never seen a closing that wasn’t wire based.

Me. I have

All the transactions for my previous house (buying and selling) were done by passing pieces of paper between persons.

Bad checks have other ways of being dealt with through legal means. There's no reason to doubt the check held (and handed over) isn't good.

With a _personal check_? Nobody I'm aware of, having done a good 10+ transactions myself.

But everybody is happy with a _cashier's check_. Admittedly you have to go physically get those, which kinda sucks. Or wire the money to the title company instead, which I personally prefer over carrying around a piece of paper worth $75k (or whatever).

I haven’t even seen a check in decades.

It’s incredible to me that you think a piece of paper and human contact is secure.

It’s incredible that you think it isn’t.

I never understood how a personal check could be secure. You can literally have them printed for you over the internet, and deposited via image. I just can't understand where the security comes from, it feels like a liability just having them.

They aren’t cryptographically secure, obviously.

The security comes from the capacity of the banks to hold or reverse them, and the capacity of the legal system to jail people for check fraud.

that's by law in Italy

Both parties have to be present in person and sign the documents in front of a notary that also collect copies of the checks emitted directly by the bank at the moment and write down their id number on the deeds

Checks are converted to ACH payments.

True, but handing over a check in person ensures you “got the payment in” at a specific time if you’re trying to beat another buyer. But I guess you can do a wire transfer in person.

There's definitely something to handing a physical artifact over, I agree.

...or a wallet to wallet transfer of USDC...

How much time does a transfer like that take for tens of thousands of dollars

Asking because I don't know, and because I suspect it takes longer than I'd like if I'm trying to get my payment in first to secure the item (like I have had to do when buying used cars from private parties.)

It depends on which chain you're using but somewhere between a few seconds (on Avalanche, Solana, and many other newer chains) and an hour (on Bitcoin, which is in my experience really not useful for anything).

Have you actually sent large amounts of money through crypto? My experience is that it is incredibly nerve wracking.

Daily, it’s literally the easiest way to send large amounts of money in existence.

Unless there is a typo, in which case it’s the easiest way to lose large amounts of money in existence.

Echoing GP, I also do not find sending crypto to be all that nerve wracking. I frankly find sending a wire to be a lot more stressful (since I understand it a lot less well).

Unlike with crypto where the money is always lost forever, mistakes with wires can usually be corrected. If you don’t understand Wires then you may be unaware of this.

My understanding was that wires were quite difficult to reverse, and it's ACH transfers that can be reversed.

Regardless, the reversibility aspect has both positives and negatives. It does allow you to reverse transactions, but with the added complexity of the transaction not really settling until after that reversibility period passes. If I receive a crypto transfer (ex: a stablecoin), I can know that the money is actually mine within a few minutes, and can't be taken back. There are major benefits to that.

The risk of the money being fraudulently taken back is close to zero. If you are worrying about that happening, then you are either a fraudster yourself, or just being paranoid. There is no major benefit to not having this.

On the other hand, if a crypto transaction has any errors, the money is instantly lost forever, and nobody can help you.

There is no upside to that at all.

I have been the victim of chargeback fraud and major banking errors that resulted in major losses that took months to recover.

Irreversibly transferring funds and having complete ownership of them once they are in your possession is a huge feature.

I don’t know if you realize this but you proved my point perfectly.

Someone defrauded you, and you were able to recover the money.

With crypto, when you get defrauded, you will never see the money again. If you think there is no fraud in crypto, I have some things to sell you.

They never would have been able to access my funds in the first place if this was on a blockchain.

Your argument amounts to the same as relying on the police to return your car after it has been stolen and then declaring that as security.

Yes, my argument does amount to that.

Your argument amounts to claiming you have a car that is impossible to steal, and yet becomes permanently inoperable if you press the wrong button on the dashboard.

Being able to recover stolen property is a good thing, you know?

Yep, it's hard/stressful for beginners but then you get used to it. I prefer it to any other method I've seen for large transfers.

I agree.

Recently purchased a home with a loan from aave polygon and it was pretty painless.

Is your loan delimited in dollars or non-stable crypto?

Dollars via aave

Do you mind sharing the details like amount of crypto(s) / USD, interest rates, repayment terms etc.

You could scale all money numbers (not durations please) by a factor if you prefer.

I'm interested to see a real-life example

It was on Aave polygon.

There are no repayment terms per say, just interest charged on the loaned amount.

Aave has variable interest on stables that varies between 7-4% and they offer an incentive bonus of about 3% MATIC, making the effective rate 1-4%.

My loan to value rate is around 35%, which gives me a very healthy liquidation buffer in case the market gets even more volatile.

My collateral is mostly BTC and ETH, with smaller holding of MATIC and AVAX.

It’s a really nice system, I get to keep my crypto holdings and extract real world value. Paying 1% interest on a loan backed by assets that are appreciating 100% a year feels really good.

As an additional safety precaution I wrote a smart contract to liquidate some of my other positions if I am ever at risk of being liquidated by Aave to avoid the liquidation penalty.

Clarification for confused outsiders: crypto loans are over-collaterized using crypto assets. In case of non-payment, Aave won't come try to collect your house, instead they'll just keep some other crypto that you put up as collateral.

Is there any credit impact or such from paying with a loan?

Nope, it uses my crypto as collateral and operates outside the credit system.

> I also would way rather make large purchases with crypto (e.g. down payment on a house) compared with wiring money.

Why would you ever sell an appreciating asset when you can borrow USD against it and wire it free of charge?

That is maybe some US centric view.

Wiring even large amount of money in EU online banking was definitely easier than anything I have seen in crypto world.

I said this in another comment on this post, but check out ENS. I’ve been a blockchain skeptic for a long time (and still am about art NFTs and most other things) but the idea of “SSO without a company attached” feels like something the mainstream public actually does want (think of all the negative public sentiment around big tech companies harvesting data and the grudging acceptance people have of their dependence on FB and Google for identity and easy sign-in). It’s also something that requires blockchain and can’t be done without a “decentralized consensus” about who owns what username (this is how you get around relying on a particular company). And ENS works now, it’s the kind of thing you could just go ahead and add to a web app you’re working on without having to wait for “the tech to arrive” or anything.

Again, I’m still skeptical about most of this stuff, but this one thing seems like a pretty good and somewhat practical idea.

I think blockchain SSO could be cool, but do you really think "the mainstream public actually does want" this? The negative public sentiment of big tech is coming from news platforms. As far as I can tell, hundreds of millions of people (e.g. the mainstream public) are using TikTok, Instagram, Snap, etc every single day. I've also never heard of any significant negativity towards Gmail for SSO (aside from my nerd engineer friends, and even among them a minority).

The mainstream public doesn't want their identity attached to a private key that they can lose.

And if you're letting someone else store the key, then it's just another form of "Login with X".

Unless the 'someone else' is a multisig consisting of a mixture of friends & relatives, instutitions and hardware devices.

And those institutions where everyone knows you go to register and hardware devices everyone trusts don't exist, so you're back to

> doesn't seem to solve meaningful, mainstream problems yet

And this is something that could power reversible transactions as well which I think is a current, but solvable problem of all crypto platforms.

What you are proposing is actually a lot better than the tech we have now. If I ever lose my Google login and their customer service does not want to deal with me then honestly, I'm not sure what I'd do. I'd rather trust my friends and family to help me out than FAANG.

An exciting new set of attack vectors and failure points foisted on people who mostly can’t understand what a safe URL looks like.

When my partner clicks on a phishing link, not only are they exposing themselves but potentially also my identity in this multisig world.

That's honestly the worst solution I could think of, and not one I would ever want to rely on. Not for me, not for my family, certainly not for my parents.

Well if you think this is bad, wait until you hear about MFA ;-)

On the real, I think there are people who will want to try this if it’s made easy enough. Some people could try getting a name and keeping a wallet through a 3rd party, in which case they’re no better or worse off than they are now. But at any moment, if they feel the need, they could transfer that username to a cold wallet if they want to take control of their security. Or transfer it back to the third party if they later decide that’s too much work.

The cool thing about this is that it’s another option out there and it offers flexibility. For the record, again, I’m not one of those people calling this a revolution or “the biggest thing since the invention of the web”. I just think this one idea is kind of neat.

MFA only works because someone can re-set it for you. That's the point. "Not your keys, not your life" is simply the worst of all worlds.

Yeah much better to have it attached to phone number that can be sim swapped, biometric data that can be easily stolen, centralized user accounts, and my favorite national identity that you have no control over at all.

>And if you're letting someone else store the key, then it's just another form of "Login with X".

Luckily there's a way to have other people store your key without the key ever technically existing outside your own computer - https://app.tor.us/, and using common web services (like email) to retrieve everything you need to construct the key in your browser whenever you need it. You can even use this to send money to a public key before its corresponding private key has ever been constructed by anyone! Meaning you can send money to someone who lacks a wallet by email, or by telegram, or by discord, or by reddit, or by anything, and they retrieve the money without anyone else ever seeing their keys or having to manage their keys themselves.

How it works: https://tech.tor.us/

Disclaimer: NOT associated with torus, just think its cool.

$150+ to own one for a year?

It's $5/yr in eth for the actual registration fee. The problem is that the transaction fee gas to register and maintain that registration is steep. So it's fairly common to register your ens for multiple years to save on gas. Once L2's/rollups are more mature and under community control, I expect ens to migrate to one and cut those transaction fees down substantially.

> It's $5/yr in eth for the actual registration fee.

Unless you want a 3 or 4 character do... ENS name. Then it's spicy.

One of my friends got their name for 10 years for $120, so it seems like it fluctuates.

How is it any better than OpenID? OpenID doesn't require a blockchain at least.

Wait until you learn that ENS domains are NFTS.

Which is why I now specify “art NFTs” ;-)

Client certificates have been a thing for years. They haven't caught on because the user experience is so terrible. ENS seems like client certificates with extra steps.

But, it is definitely a real use-case, so hats off to people for having a go at it!

If you want to trade easy of use against trust and security, you can use a browser extension like MetaMask that can hold your private key (or one of your private keys which you’ve chosen for this purpose) and perform the auth flow on sites that support this stuff. The UX is pretty smooth.

If you want more control, you can build one of these browsers or extensions from source and audit the code yourself. So you can choose your level of challenge/paranoia.

Mozilla's Persona project solved federated ID for the Web pretty well, a decade ago. The problem is that a lot of the big tech companies want to completely own their relationships with their users. Google is never going to let you log in with something other than a Google ID, etc. There is no technical way to solve this problem.

Oh totally true, I’m not expecting them to. I just think this could be a way to pick some of the low hanging fruit: users who want easy sign-in on sites that don’t want to roll their own IDP. Right now that niche is filled with the multicolored array of “sign in with FB, Google, MS, GitHub, Steam, LinkedIn, Apple”. This would be a way to add an extra option of “sign in with ENS” that would offer the benefit of not including tracking or any association at all with a particular company.

Maybe not that many people would use it, but unlike a lot of other crypto stuff, this doesn’t require universal buy-in in order to be marginally useful to the people who do use it.

persona was good, but was abandoned prematurely, probably for the reasons you mention

I can log in somewhere with metamask however without involving google. It's orthogonal , and that s why it can succeed

I mean, no, but they do let you sign in with a non Gmail address. (My @microsoft.com is a consumer Google account. Same way my @gmail personal email is a consumer Microsoft account.)

Means of contact end up being a pretty useful way of organizing identities (phone numbers have their issues) and having ways to fix mistakes. The one thing I haven't seen solved in web3 is communication to a user. Easy enough to encrypt messages in ipfs though, I suppose.

> And ENS works now, it’s the kind of thing you could just go ahead and add to a web app you’re working on without having to wait for “the tech to arrive” or anything.

What they don't tell you is that every single operation for every dApp on Ethereum, the gas fess make using this totally useless, which mean you have no choice but to tell others to wait for 'the gas fees to go down'. Rendering it useless.

Everyone knows that every operation is so expensive, that you cannot use Ethereum to pay for your groceries; making it totally useless in general since everyone needs to eat. Not even the other L2, ZK contraptions are ready or are even optimised enough to be useful so that isn't an option despite the hype around it.

Seems more like a centralised domain registrar contract having a sub-domain on .eth (collides with Ethiopia's three letter TLD) on an expensive blockchain controlled by so-called 'trusted' key-holders.

Quick sidenote - when signing in with ENS, you sign a message off chain using your private key, which they validate against your public key (your ENS domain is viewable onchain and does not require ETH gas fees to retrieve). So there's no additional cost incurred when signing in via ENS (besides the initial cost to purchase the domain + annual fees).

To your point about operations in general on Ethereum, yes, they are expensive, prohibitively so for the general population.

Just took a look at ENS, within 5 mins I was able to find <pupular_first_name>.eth's first and last name, who they work for, their LinkedIN profile, their ETH address, how much they have in crypto holdings, what NFT's they buy/sell and full tx history... Who wants that?

Even if nothing else pops out, it’s a huge error to point to illegal activity as some kind of bad, irrelevant use case. That smuggles in an assumption that lawbreakers are universally evil. There have been plenty of periods in history where those enforcing the law in a given country were the oppressors, and the resistant lawbreakers the innocent. It’s worth considering what the value proposition of crypto looks like if you were to find yourself living under an illegitimate authority. It may be marginal if the authority can stop it, but the more illegal activity we see in crypto the stronger the belief we should hold that it will be hard to suppress.

Yes, but you generally can't build a business on top of an illegal industry that's closely scrutinized by law enforcement.

Already law enforcement agencies are campaigning hard against ransomware, and central banks and tax agencies investigating how people are using cryptocurrencies to launder money.

It doesn't mean it doesn't have value; it's just that the real expected value can't be expected to have legitimate businesses on top.

Certainly. But if one is going to argue about the value proposition of Web3, it may not be insane to postulate that in the future a large % of the world will live under regimes where the ability to interact with others illegally will be a strong value prop. (Not just financially, but in terms of speech, etc.)

> It’s worth considering what the value proposition of crypto looks like if you were to find yourself living under an illegitimate authority

The cables where communications pass through are protected by armies

If crypto eventually could pose a threat to those illegitimate authorities, they would give orders to cut the cables and games would be over.

they could also trace them back to your house.

I wrote:

> It may be marginal if the authority can stop it

Because often the response to claims like the one I made is to just hand wave it away as some kind of Armageddon situation. But it doesn't have to be. The USSR and the modern day CCP operate in an environment where certain levels of criminality are virtuous, but things are not so draconian or suppressive as the environment you state.

of course they would not literally cut the cables.

they would.block the crypto traffic

Give it a decade or two and we’ll have satellites beaming connectivity via lasers to the middle of territory controlled by authoritarian regimes.

We’ll probably also have aircraft or satellites run by some of those regimes looking for transmitters, of course.

If your government was cutting off access to internet over the possibility that people might use it to conduct their business in cryptocurrency, do you think local demand for crypto would increase or decrease?

The cable-cut might work for a while, but it wouldn't take too long for partition tolerant crypos emerge. You don't really need global consistency for most things, given that resources tend to be local.

> it wouldn't take too long for partition tolerant crypos emerge

Wouldn’t it? This is an unsolved problem and there is nothing that implies it can ‘quickly emerge’.

One of the paradoxes about crypto is that all problems with it can be quickly solved in the future, but somehow continue to exist in the present.

As far as moving the bits around goes, I think that the scuttlebutt protocol handles it nicely. And if you look at the tokenomics of CirclesUBI there's nothing to prevent partition tolerance--you already have the restriction that tokens can only move across links in the web of trust, so you'd just have to add the additional restriction that the parties involved in a transitive-trust-transaction have to be contactable for verification at the time of the transaction. Although CirclesUBI runs on Ethereum (xdai) and would have to be ported to scuttlebutt.

The plan isn't fully fleshed out: you still need to incentivize running nodes and handle cases where bad behavior on the part of node maintainers becomes transparent so that users can revoke trust in them, but my point is that this is not some blind faith in the ability of the community to adapt, but rather something that I have diagrams on my whiteboard for.

> The cable-cut might work for a while,

I don't see any crypto zealot laying cables in the ocean to connect Europe and USA

do you really think the army would allow it?

but cutting cables is the nuclear option, I see much more probable that terrorists will try it in the future, because is such a fundamental weakness of the internet right now

a government would simply block crypto traffic

NFT's don't grant you any rights of ownership of JPEGs

They don't but that’s how people interpret NFTs. They think of NFTs as buying an asset that demonstrates authentic ownership of media.

NFTs conceptual value doesn’t map to anything that seems remotely valuable at present moment. There’s no mental model for owning this inmaterial thing that is pegged to a digital file that can be duplicated infinitely without your approval.

> that’s how people interpret NFTs

Almost no ‘people’ interpret NFTs this way.

> There’s no mental model for owning this inmaterial thing that is pegged to a digital file that can be duplicated infinitely without your approval.

There is no mental model because there is no ownership.

> There’s no mental model for owning this inmaterial thing that is pegged to a digital file that can be duplicated infinitely without your approval.

We have been dealing with this since the dawn of Napster. I'm pretty sure people understand ownership of digital creations and the ease with which they can be duplicated/pirated.

We are underfunded but we are building software to solve meaningful problems with Web3:

https://intercoin.org/applications

https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf kind of explains what needs to be fixed in the space. I’d tove to get your feedback

I use crypto on a weekly basis, from renewing domains and web hosting, to accessing loans in 15 seconds without gatekeepers.

what happens if you stop paying your loan?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com