Keep the web free, say no to Web3
yesterweb.org
yesterweb.org
Something like NFTs, which are totally worthless digital files in real life, are marketed as "valuable goods", and it's literally insanity... Trust me, I've seen plenty of pitches even when I didn't want to on social media... Non stop. If you lose your wallet your money is gone? No FDIC protections? Good luck waiting for government to catch up on proper regulations.
Even if this poorly though out pyramid scheme of branding the online greed heist as "Web 3" succeeds, it will be short lived once the rich cash out, and all that will be left is a totally broken internet with no commerce flowing through it, and the value of real world products and services will be severely corrupted by it all. Everyone will suffer for it, from the rich that get literally mugged on streets by the disenfranchised to the disenfranchised that spend years trying to find success with their last dollar.
The solution is to stop supporting platforms that are peddling this phony pyramid scheme, and to reinvest in keeping the Internet open, and to stop money and influence from changing how the Internet worked 5 years ago, but even if you don't change this terrible course, you'll suffer too when you realize that everything has been dumbed down or made overly-complex on the Internet and function and utility have been corrupted to get you to pay for upgrades each month...
Internet-based business had been making record breaking profits for years based on fair payment for advertising space, and for selling tangible goods and services. If you start a high-overhead business for free and then try to convert it into a paid service then that's where the business model went wrong, not because users are now dependent on the service and primed for milking that dependency.
The only people advocating the schemes are people who are invested in them, but they're too caught up to admit the simple truth. We will learn how to communicate in real life again probably while the Web3 dumpster fire burns out, and then rebuild hopefully... :/
You can use a smart wallet where you assign your own set of n guardians (even your own phone can be a guardian), and m and n of those guardians can recover your wallet, with you deciding on m and n.
Such wallets can even have software enforced daily withdrawal limits, which can only be overriden with the approval of the guardians.
It's a completely open system which can be configured any way one wants. A one-size-fits-all government solution destroys innovation and breeds rent-seeking bureaucracy.
I suspect the people most vehemently lobbying against open-finance/Web-3.0 are those most deeply entrenched in the centralized power structures of the establishment.
One thing I could agree on is the multitude of scams, deceptive marketing etc in the Web 3.0 space. This is a consequence of money being freed from its reigns. It has both positive and negative consequences, and those are the negatives.
But finance is on the balance beneficial to humanity, by facilitating more sophisticated coordination, so when you turbo-charge finance, you get a net boost to human coordination.
Crypto shills are not the underprivileged, poor/homeless class of society either? They’re usually well-paid, educated tech/finance bros.
Some interesting facts about crypto asset holders:
Nearly half of Millennial millionaires have more than 25% of their wealth in crypto. Millennials have otherwise been floundering relative to older generations in terms of wealth. Crypto is a rare bright spot for the younger generations, so it's unsurprising much of the older establishment wants to crush it.
Also, 44% of crypto holders in the US are non-white: https://archive.md/slVPj
I recall crypto ownership is 2X more common amongst hispanic Americans, and 3X more common amongst black Americans, relative to white Americans.
.. highly volatile assets? Where has all this money come from, other than people bidding each other up?
> Those in the lowest fifth in terms of socioeconomic status (SES) had the “highest rate of lottery gambling (61%) and the highest mean level of days gambled in the past year (26.1 days).
The wealthy people are the ones selling the lottery tickets (/crypto).
https://journalistsresource.org/economics/research-review-lo...
Depending on how Hispanic people are counted, thats almost exactly in line with the 2020 census, which puts the non-hispanic white population at 57.8% [0]. I think if you adjust for the average age of cryptocurrency holders, 56% white would actually be more white than the demographics of the overall age group, which I think is not the point you were trying to make.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
Now crypto user not only will need to audit all source code of his wallets ans every smart contract written in whatever flavor of the day language including Haskell. But they will also need to do an interview and assess technical knowledge of every signer of his wallet. Every wallet. It will be glorious :)
2. The centralization is not mandated - you can choose to audit the software yourself.
3. If you do choose to rely on a trusted third party, the set of parties you can choose from is open, with no restrictions on who you can choose to rely on.
Overall it enables a much more configurable and open financial system, with a larger set of parties able to participate in the market, and a much larger range of configurations that those parties can utilize.
Web3 is not for you, but for people excluded from internet commerce in 1990-2010.
You are already rich in comparision to them.
If the government wants to harass or harm you, they will simply turn off the internet and all of your crypto stuff will not work.
It's easy as that.
You can't do that with a bar of gold, or a bundle of banknotes.
I think especially this has been done for decades, if not centuries, and is probably one of the core definitions of smuggling.
Not to mention that it's exactly as easy to smuggle and disguise a $50 worth of digital currency as it is to smuggle and disguise $50k worth of digital currency. This can't be said of banknotes, especially if all you have available is lower face value notes.
I agree that marketing NFT's as investments is outright insane, but a NFT is not just a "file". It is simply a certified, non-forgeable stake in a crowdfunded endeavor. NFT's can thus be used to promote openness, no different than any other form of patronage.
Tom Selleck selling reverse mortgages was bad enough.
In reality, a lot of NFTs are ultimately purchased by their owners in the course of laundering money due to the lack of oversight, and there's a lot of profiteering in the process of minting NFTs, so there's a vested interest in recruiting people into the establishment.
People that trust it without proper research are getting ripped off in droves, victimization at it's worst... A Lot by this hustle. The modern way of downloading a car.
Really makes me wonder if anyone (except corporations) really is making honest money over the Net any more to be frank.
(with extra steps)
No it's not. It is not non-forgeable (blockchain can always do a "Vitalik" and rollbback whole database), it also doesn't certify anything because there is literally no space inside NFT for certificate of any kind. (technically there are a few bytes, but that's not enough)
> NFT's can thus be used to promote openness
No they can't. Again, there is nothing in the NFT to facilitate this.
The web is also free because I can use it to promote myself and my work by writing articles, posting images, doing whatever I like.
I'm willing to pay the hosting fees for that and it's my decision not to pass this on to any visitors.
You are willing to pay hosting fees. But do you pay for Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and a whole host of other platforms that the majority of the population uses?
Remind me how companies that have billions of users pay for it? How many people are going to visit your website compares to theirs? How much do people like you contribute to the entire revenue stream?
The creator economy is tiny compared to these platforms.
You don't need to rent hosting.
Cost of hosting and bandwidth is asymptotically approaching zero. For most things it can be easily subsidized with pocket change. For bigger things, the pre-tollbooth-on-everything Web has already figured out Bittorrent and p2p protocols where basically the receiver pays/subsidizes it through their ISP.
How is that different from what banks do right now for all your transactions? It's the exact same and owned by Wall Street oligarchy (Morgan Stanley, Goldman, BoA, Citibank, etc). The only difference is that you can't reverse the transaction.
As for the rest of your argument, I agree; although, idealistic and unlikely. I simply found it ludicrous that author thought the internet is powered by fairy dust.
In the real world rich are getting richer and use their wealth to gain even more control too. But in a PoS system this is not a bug, but the core mechanic of the system. You can't even make a PoS system that is even slightly egalitarian, because then a "rich" wallet could be split into many "poor" sockpuppet ones and gain even more influence.
Noone who has any interest in web3 is going to change their minds based on strawman sloganeering arguments like those presented in this article, and it's hard to imagine someone who is currently undecided being persuaded when the very first arguments presented are as weak as 1)"There are projects with this thing called 'quadratic voting' that I don't like" 2)"You don't need cryptocurrency to be decentralized" 3)"If it was good why would FB and Twitter allow it?"
For example, I can remember Debian for example having "lively debates" about its voting system inside and outside the community since at least as far back as 2000. I don't think anyone outside that project has any right to an opinion about how Debian want to arrange their voting and I feel the same way about every weird-ass token-voting system some web3 project wants to put in place.
What it doesn’t do though is propose any sort of solution.
The problem right now is that there's a peverse incentive for entrepreneurs to jump on the crypto/NFT bandwagon because a bunch of VCs are desperate to fund those sorts of companies. Nobody in that space is incentivised to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
What problems does web3 attempt solve anyways? The internet is mostly decentralized already. Maybe the apps and services are localized walled gardens, but you can already vote not to participate in them w/o hashing anything.
Censorship resistence for developed world countries. When you cant just rewrite history we might finally get rid of "illegal numbers" situations like blue-ray keys and such.
And for less fortunate, failed or just athoritorian states there will finally be some option to access international banking system. It's like tor for money. Because crypto is controversial in countries with functional government, but it's might be the only way to fund opposition activity in more oppressive regimes.
This is one of those things that either can't really work or is going to cause a massive disaster, such as when someone publishes the next OPM leak on the blockchain.
to do what exactly?
and how is this censorship resistant if the traffic is easily recognizable and blockable?
In crypto you're represented by pair of keys and by design anyone can have as many pairs of keys as they want. And to fix it you'll have to compromise on decentralisation and / or privacy.
For now almost every single crypto project including majority of legit ones is some sort of pyramid scheme.
Personally, I'm curious to see a project like Mastodon or Peertube fund itself using a token. I don't think those projects will ever get any meaningful use aside a few nerds and outcasts that got booted off of Web2 properties. You'll probably get speculators in it purely for profit, but to me it sounds better than the alternatives.
Agreed. Most of the people criticizing Web3 are underestimating the power introducing token incentives will have. "Ordinary people" just don't care enough about decentralization of data for projects like Mastodon to take off otherwise. They've been around for a while, and they're not competing with Big Tech. A Web3 platform that rewards successful content creators natively with a token and not hearts/likes might though.
s/Web3//
I am concerned about monopolies turning evil. Average Joe wants facebook, and google. People need those services to be regulated.
And average Joe can't deal with descentralization. Average nerd should deal with that.
Btw, anyone else have issues today because AWS-US-East broke?
What kind of freedom is it if it's completely dominated by hostile megacorporations?
There are still many good blogs out there, niche news sites, people who really love sharing what they know.
What we need to do (again) is to make these hidden gems accessible and "findable" by whatever means, as we see that search engine providers are often motivated by money alone which leads to declining quality in their results.
I wouldn't worry that much about Web3 because very few organizations will care to partake, there's not value in it for them.
If a bunch of kids want to make fake money, tokens and have fun in the their 'Web Tree House' and call it 'Web 3' with Paper Pirate Hats and Wooden Swords then so be it.
This defeatism is kinda almost the point. Why are we just conceding the internet to this small group of companies? Why not at least try to take it back? I really don't understand what this particular bullet-point is trying to say here.
People tend to forget that users determine the course of things, companies just build for users. Web2 gets better as things centralize, Web3 gets better as they decentralize and compose/interoperate. That is how we change this dynamic and "eliminate the middlemen."
Most of the problems cropping up are due to insecure computer programs that run on a blockchain (aka Smart Contracts).
Centralized control whether VC's and money, or Goverments and regulations, skew the decentralized world into a framework that works for Profit or Fit a government model.
Cheers
You can't just have a bunch of people and call it community owned. By that definition then this world is already community owned, the internet is already community owned.
You can't also just bypass humanity, this world is the way it is largely due to humanity, not capitalism, not socialism, not because it's not community owned. If the human beings in your community inherently have the same traits as human beings in other communities, how can you make sure you community doesn't end up like the other communities?
The individual precedes the community, and results tend to wobble around a Pareto Optimal[2] 80/20 solution.
The ones to keep an eye on are those preaching some idealistic ultimate answer this side of ${APOCALYPTIC_EVENT}.
The hubris of youth is useful for bringing change, but experience shows that often the effects of that change are poorly understood and often cause significant issues.
We don't need blockchain for this.
Just point people to your immutable public key, that's it.
It’s easy to explain how web2 works right now to a lay person in non technical terms. I think it’s much harder to explain blockchain and even more so the systems and standards built on top. You’re basically going to be asking for blind trust from consumers
Wait, so is web3 a technology/concept that can benefit people in general? Or just a “get rich quick” scheme, since ignoring it will make you “stay poor”?
Not all web3 apps will use this, in fact most will run away from any kind of voting system, so moot point.
2. "on a handful of very-expensive-to-run nodes hosted on Amazon Web Services and maintained by insiders."
Use Bitcoin, with lightning, runs in your Raspberry.
3. I don't even get the point he's making.
4. Ethereum themselves suffered a leak that drained their cryptowallet of $55M.
Again, use Bitcoin, don't use centralized hackable shitcoins.
5. "These attacks happen at least a few times a year. Some famous events are Bitcoin Gold in 2020, Etherium Classic in 2019, and Verge in 2018."
And again, the answer is use Bitcoin.
"Any entity (or group of entities combined) that control 51% of the hash rate have the collective power to control the network,"
So you want to buy 51% of bitcoin's mining capacity? You absolutely can, it would only cost you billions, well within the reach of any tech magnate or nation state. But the more you pour into it, the more profitable the mining becomes, thus other miners get more BTC, that they can in turn transform into USD to buy more mining equipment.
6. Artificial scarcity.
I don't even follow.
7. Early adopters etc.
And again, the answer is to use Bitcoin, not preminted centralized shitcoins.