Web3 is going just great
web3isgoinggreat.com
web3isgoinggreat.com
For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art.
But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men.
This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions).
I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed?
Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions.
But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software.
So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become.
I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.
But from that, there is no way you should conclude that cynicism is wrong in general. You should not overreact to too much cynicism by discarding criticism entirely! You should react by seeking better information.
> And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved
A few keywords: threshold signatures, zk-snarks, consensusless protocols, byzantine fault tolerant protocols, vrf, vdf, starks, bls
I haven't personally looked into blockchain or related ideas enough to get excited (I'm harder to excite now that I'm older, and I have less time) but sometimes I feel like I ought to, just because the flavor of the criticism reminds me of the smug nastiness that got directed towards people who were interested in things like computers and Star Trek when I was young. These nerds think they're onto something cool, and we have to mock them until they can't believe in it anymore. I almost feel like I should start learning the technology out of solidarity with the little kid I used to be who embraced computers despite knowing how hopelessly dorky that made him.
Of course the concept of nerdiness has been socially rehabilitated since the 1980s, and now the stigma is nominally directed towards scams and environmental waste, but the people delivering the stigma have designed the blast radius to work pretty much the same. The entire topic is stigmatized, any interest or optimism is stigmatized. I think the history of computing and the internet shows that it's hopeless to try to disentangle the utopian hope for social transformation from the grifting and greed. Scam artists can smell the hope for progress and transformation like sharks can smell blood; it means a meal for them. It's a crude distortion to argue that either optimism or greed alone properly characterizes "web3" without the other. When we look back twenty years from now they'll both be part of the story, whether these ideas fizzle out or have a transformative impact or something in between.
It's kind of how I feel about crypto – cautiously observing, investing money I can afford to lose, toying with ideas on how and which real problems it could solve, and doing my best to ignore the parts that smell like pure hype, MLMs, and land grabs.
There is something here and I don't know what yet. I doubt NFTs are it. And we already know it doesn't quite work as a currency.
Cui bono as they say. Crypto won't fail because of the group that is driving most of the demand. It's a small group of people with lots of money. If it was a big group of people with little money, you could make the case that cryptocurrencies will fail. It's success has little to do with the math and quality of the technology.
It's easy for me to make that case. Ransomware aside, there's no underlying value in cryptocurrency, unlike currencies which have the full faith and credit of governments. This is a fundamental problem that I see no way around.
At this point currency is an abstraction relying on computers. I handle cash personally once a month.
Amazon cashier-less stores are just as much to normalize the behavior of not paying as reducing jobs).
Producing currency, securing it, moving it, the old banking infra just for finance management has a huge environmental impact.
Banks are easily socially engineered. Corruption is rife.
Eth shouldn’t be pegged to a dollar. It’s not a currency. It’s an information network.
What crypto should be is not property but the technical network abstraction we develop and roll over.
Grifters are trying to generate traditional wealth off the idea it’s a literal thing but we could just keep rolling new protocols out. Up to you to store your work.
It’s a logical substrate for transmitting and storing information that can’t be monopolized like physical money if we see it as such.
Unlike banks with full vaults, ephemeral network control can be coded out. No one person can become a black hole with disproportionate pull on social agency.
Of course, there is a value: it's a decentralized write-only database that can be used for things like proof of ownership without the requirement of a central authority. A famous use-case is the illicit online drug trade, which cannot currently be achieved (to my knowledge) with fiat currencies.
It might never replace government-backed currencies (or it just might, who knows), but to say it literally has no utility betrays a lack of knowledge about the system.
It allows proof ownership without proof of identity.
This is outside of IP or laws. You can move money without laws.
NFT are a differet topic. NFT are a way of having a digital token attached to something that can be used to determine ownership to an account. Do they need to be decentralized? No but it opens up ownership to all not just the approved.
Hmmm... centralized and opaque/corrupt. So like a traditional bank?
> please tell me why are we replicating them them again but in worse way?
But this is just your disputed opinion. It is like asking "why is Kanye always singing and selling bad new songs, and we already have the beatles". Because they can and want to.
My stuffed animal from when I was a baby has no "value", but I find it quite valuable. This isn't pendantics either - it determines more or less your entire economic perspective. If you believe in a utility or labor theory of value, of course crypto is a scam. A subjective theory? Not so much.
If someone trades an ETH for a Dollar, has value been changed? Moved around? Created? Has someone been scammed? Has wealth been created? Has net happiness been increased? Value is an extremely non-trivial thing and will lead you to love or hate the exact same situation depending on your chosen definition.
At any rate, I agree, crypto contains no value intrinsically. That said, I'm buying at the current price!
Those crypto-fans who are saying "ah well the -network- has intrinsic value" are missing the point. Value does not exist in the world. Value is like beauty or color - it's a subjective experience. All statements in the form of "X has no value" must be concatenated with "to me".
If anyone finds this incredibly interesting, and a fairly ignored part of epistemology, I strongly recommend reading Carl Menger's "The Origin of Money"
Many people will be selling at the same time, and suddenly the subjective value for everyone will be lower because it will be easier and easier to buy it.
My sense is that there is a cap on the demand for purchasing crypto, but the supply is very low because mining decreases over time, and generally people holding lots of crypto are younger and have no need to sell in order to pay for things, they can just pay with their fiat income.
This equation will change drastically as people start to retire and need to sell lots of crypto in order to fund their lifestyle without working.
Bitcoin slows down ensuring it's value continues to increase with fewer buyers.
Proper retirement planning means moving from 100% risky in your 20s to 50/50 in your 40s to 10/90 in your 60s.
Food and shelter have value which is pretty near to objective. In fact it is routinely used to compare economic levels throughout history or societies. In fact it's quite useful to distinguish market price from usage (intrinsic) value. Usage value is variable from individual to individual, but there is a hierarchy of things we usually agree on, at the bottom being water, then food, then light, ... (biological stuff) then social interactions, intellectual stimulation, ... (more complex social stuff), then things like healthcare or gun access which will obviously depend on your political ethic (but which still are largely clustered, just not universal). So sure market price doesn't denote value, and intrinsic value is a fuzzy hierachy that is more and more precise given more and more assumptions on social norms, but the bottom of this hierachy is non-trivial (not everything at 0) and the top isn't that diverse.
Marx & Engels had a (critical) theory of capitalistic value where value is actually pretty well defined, as the amount of human work which has gone into something. That may be seen as an extension of what i first said (the value of human time being at least cost of life for that time).
So sure, most reasonable people would agree on food and water - but that's introducing a very very powerful new actor - your ability to judge other peoples actions as reasonable or rational. If you reserve that right - then sure, let's call crypto irrational - let's stand on the sidelines and say "well I wouldn't do that!" - let's start building the hierarchy of "reasonable values". I'm only suggesting that our ability to call someone else's valuation irrational behavior is dubious at best and aggressively violent, the birth of social engineering, the sourge of humanity, at worst (hyperbole maybe, but maybe not).
That impulse to guide "rationality" is exactly why we have modern monetary policy, and the only philosophical reason to like cryptocurrencies: a well designed, well distributed immutable ledger is more or less immune from such "guidance".
Edit: Obviously, I disagree strongly with the labor theory of value. I don't have anything handy, but there is a lot written on this (and I think the labor theory of value is fairly well demolished!). Let me know and I'd be happy to send links!
About your pick on judging other and building a hierarchy of reasonable values: well that's politics/ethics/moral (i'm no philosopher so i don't fully understand the difference between these concepts)! I'm not here saying there a is a total order between value systems, mostly a partial order based on inclusion/precision. And i'm asserting that whatever the set of living things you're taking, they'll have a non-trivial greatest lower bound (eg there is a common notion of intrinsic value) (but i think you got that).
About rationality: perhaps we don't understand the same thing by rationality but i believe one cannot be irrational, it's kinda vacuous. One can be in irrational with respect to some value system, but every one is (boundedly) rational with respect to his values (and it's by this axiom that we can infer peoples value systems). My comparison of value systems isn't on qualitative comparison between alternatives (me good you bad), it's a comparison on commonness/shared-base (this specific to me, this specific to you, this common).
on your edit: :) you feel nice to disagree with, send already, but i'm not promising i'll read! Btw i'm not sure i'll actually disagree with such critics, i personally don't really believe in value (as a homogeneous unit) because different things aren't always comparable and even different orders of magnitude of the same thing aren't always comparable (i've got no value for 0.01 house or 100 house, or more precisely it's not 0.01 resp 100 times my value for 1 house).
When a currency goes through hyperinflation, that generally happens because the government goes crazy printing the currency and the trust that others have in accepting the currency goes down.
If crypto collapses, it will likely be because it just becomes computationally infeasible to work with. The problem with the blockchain is that every action on the blockchain requires the whole blockchain. As time goes on simply storing the blockchain will be something that's simply not reasonable.
An issue specifically with bitcoin is that as time goes on, transferring a single coin in a day, month, or year becomes computationally impossible. Bitcoin is quickly rushing to a point where holders of bitcoin will be incapable of trading it.
That, IMO, will be the collapse of crypto. If you can't move the currency, it doesn't matter how much others value it. It'll become a game of hot potato. with the last few holders getting more and more desperate to unload the potato for money.
When you try to take a digital currency and exchange it for digital items and digital ownership, you do so in a realm where "information wants to be free" - ownership of data is not often as interesting a concept as you want.
Finally, when you try to exchange digital currency for physical goods, you start to realize ownership itself only means anything as part of the existing legal constructs - a distributed ledger "title" will only be valid when the government says it is, and a successfully executed smart contract can be effectively overturned by a judge's order.
The parties/exchanges that don't acknowledge any of this and push the decentralized, out-of-government-control messaging seem like they are tending to be the ones who are structured corporately to be highly resistant to being taken to court over false claims by their customers/victims.
Many cryptocurrencies have been ruled securities. Securities are not "currencies", but still have value, don't they? Even if it is just speculative value (you don't know whether the underlying business is goiong to be successful, or if it is even a scam).
This strikes at one of my primary complaints with crypto/web3 discussions: Advocates switch between specific cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency in general, and the concept of a blockchain in general as convenient for their arguments.
The concept of a cryptocurrency will always exist, but that doesn't mean that we can't be critical of the current financial shenanigans going on in the space.
If it helps, remember that the thing people talk about the most when discussing cryptocurrencies is always the price. But cryptocurrencies don't have any built-in notion of price. 1 BTC is 1 BTC. What people are really excited about is the exchanges and the on-ramps and off-ramps, which have nothing to do with the blockchain or cryptography.
Isn't that like saying that what gets people really exciting about beer is the euphoric feeling after consuming it, which has nothing to do with the liquid itself?
If it wasn't for the exchanges and on- and off-ramps then cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist at all. Potentially spending it one day is the only thing that makes the crypto world go around.
"Spending" it doesn't require cashing it out in a hypothetical cryptocurrency future. People can, and do, transact in cryptocurrencies. Though it's actually quite painful, slow, expensive, and lacks all of the benefits of traditional transactions so everyone avoids it if possible.
But this exposes another flaw in the currency argument: If the on-ramps and off-ramps were to become so cheap, fast, and ubiquitous that we could transact instantly in cryptocurrencies for free, then suddenly the underlying coins wouldn't need to have any speculative value. If I could click "buy" on a product and the exchange into crypto, transfer, and end-user exchange out of crypto was basically instant, then the exchange rate doesn't actually matter at all because I'm only holding for a brief instant. Yet that would break the speculative use case entirely, so the hype tends to follow the deliberately inefficient coins. Crypto proponents don't actually want cryptocurrency to be easy to use. They only want you to buy it, then do nothing with it. Ever. If you lose it, even better (for everyone else).
It’s really not. For several years, paying with crypto has been faster and easier than credit card or PayPal.
No arbitrary blocks, guessing traffic lights, aligning shipping and billing names and zip codes, figuring which card will work for what country and payment processor, biyearly renewals, SMS confirmations, risk of having it abused despite having good opsec, being on the phone with PayPal, etc etc.
I just open my wallet, unlock it used my preferred method, [scan a qr code/copy-paste something], click OK, done.
I understand that many people on HN get profiled “white” enough by “the algorithms” to not have to experience the Kafkaesque frustration of the status quo.
For the rest of us, cryptocurrency is faster, easier, and sometimes cheaper. Today.
Crypto bros do the same. Adoption - "look, Bitcoin", but its not working - "look, shitcoin1", but it's premined - "look, shitcoin2", but it's used by 3 persons including devs - "look, Bitcoin". And so on and on.
Easy to destroy a poorly constructed argument.
Those who could have a well constructed argument often choose to spend their explanation energy on those who are less skeptical.
Can you elaborate on this?
The best critiques of blockchain tech, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, etc. describe fatal flaws at the core of those technologies. For example, the lack of monetary policy and regulations, privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs.
It'd be great to read a positive analysis of the core merits (the math and the incentives) and how those can be applied to solve problems.
But does it have any practical use? That's the question. NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle, or as a way for artists to sell unique creations (leading to investment vehicles, I suppose). I'm not sold on the utility, long term.
> But does it have any practical use? That's the question.
Sounds like a solution searching for a problem.
Then ETH at the worst gas fees looks generous
The cryptocurrency guys who think cryptocurrencies will be immune to this are probably gonna be shocked and annoyed.
Home computers were good for games or learning to program, not sure they were actually that useful outside of those things.
Edit: Ok Atari STs were good for music and Amigas were apparently good for graphics rendering.
Monorail concept appeared around 1900, trying to reduce the elevated railways problem. One designer thought of reducing the use of metal. Wuppertal suspension railway uses much more metal for tracks than conventional trams. There is a special monorail in Britain, built in 1940s, that stands on A-shaped legs. The only rail is supported by some metal triangles, using the same amount of metal. Later models, first built in Disneyland, use concrete (which contains a lot more iron in the concrete itself besides the reinforcement), and rubber wheels (sacrificing the advantage of low friction). Their biggest problem is switches: they're heavy and huge. Suspended monorails use big box instead of a rail, because swaying carriages are uncomfortable, and to hold them, the track must resist the force of a long lever. Errr... what was the reason to go for all that, in the first place? Make simpler track and use less rails/metal? Not achieved at all.
Electric buses... just 2 words: they're 3-5 times more expensive, and a whole route of e-buses requires just as much electric equipment as trolleybus line. Plus, e-buses spend twice more time charging than riding. Which means you need to triple the fleet of triple-quintiple more expensive vehicles. Even if battery technology progresses, as some insist, let it improve for private, not public money.
It seems that blockchain is similar: couple of advantages, lots of big disadvantages.
The way I look at it is that this is a tool. The way it is used is up to the creativity of the engineer(s) working with it. I think that using NFTs in this manner is a lot easier for me to manage than other approaches, and it's pretty fun. Practical use? Idk it's a fun art project that I hope people enjoy, but yeah I do think it was easier for me to implement in this method than a traditional web app.
But I do think there are plenty of practical use cases that you could leverage this technology for in terms of access based on ownership of the digital assets.
I saw a short video of Keanu Reeves laughing at NFTs because they had value but are easy to copy.
Which I found somewhat funny. Keanu gets paid a lot because he acts in things that have value but are easy to copy (movies).
The reason why those have a high value is because of copyright. The people that financed the film have control over the copying of the film. Because people with guns agree with the copyright scheme (US government).
NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them.
You're confusing the hyperlink with the destination. The hyperlink has scarcity and is impossible to copy. You can make a new near identical hyperlink, but it's not the same as the original, the community says so and will ignore the imposter. The hyperlink are what people are buying and flipping. It has whatever market value other participants agree it has.
However, I want to focus on the other possibilities for NFTs - I am making an NFT project that does have the art aspect, however the tokens also provide access to unique services like hooking into a video game engine to allow users to interact with their art. Since it's trivial to detect forgeries and ownership, even if someone was to create an NFT pointing to even the exact same piece of art, they would be denied access to the service as it is a forgery.
Right now proof of ownership is usually in the form of discord bots allowing access to servers, but there's much more you can actually do with this concept than we are seeing now, like the example above.
But it's neither decentralized nor a proof AT ALL. NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it and some centralized humans governing all interactions between clients.
What exactly do you want an NFT to facilitate? And are you raving mad at the people who make the NFTs, the people who buy them or both?
With hicetnunc.xyz, there is already one example of a "marketplace" shutting down and being immediately replaced with alternative interfaces - which works because the underlying smart contract doesn't care what system people use to interact with it. The "blockchain is a distributed database" part does indeed work if a system is designed to use it.
Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product
> transfer of ownership,
The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership?
> enforcement of ownership,
Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product.
> decentralization,
How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really?
> universal standards and so on
What universal standards exactly?
No, it's not, unless you are calling an entry in DB with an URL inside "a product". NFT system is selling NFT only, and NFT itself is almost nothing and useless.
> The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership?
Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file.
>Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product.
I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :)
>How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really?
Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today.
>What universal standards exactly?
That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.
Calling an entry in a DB? What kind of db exactly... maybe a public distributed ledger (aka a blockchain)? Hmmmm..... The Mona Lisa itself is almost nothing and useless. Just some paint splashed on a canvas hundreds of years ago. Totally worthless. To someone out there. Just like NFTs are totally worthless to you. Heres a small life tip: do not waste your time, energy or money in anything in life that has no value to you, because you find it totally worthless to you. But you are just one being, among seventy billion others alive today. So what is important to you, will be worthless to billions of others. Does that make them idiots? No. But it kind of makes you one if you expect everyone else alive to value only exactly what you value. Live and let live.
> Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file.
You used to term "gullible buyers". The key word here being BUYERS. The definition of buyer is someone who takes ownership of a PRODUCT... in this case an NFT from someone else. I'm glad you find the concept amusing. Welcome to the world of trade and capitalism. The buyers are usually speculators. Look that term up. Ever heard of the dot-com mania? The tulip mania? If you think they were just buying flowers, you have a lot to learn about human emotions and motivation. Coca-cola is not just selling "colored sugar water".
> I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :)
So what? If I buy an NFT, I wont be buying it because of "proof of ownership". The very fact that I can buy it today, and sell it to someone else at a profit tommorow is all the proof of ownership I need. Got that? Thousands of NFTs are being bought and sold daily, in a marketplace. Not sure what other proof of ownership (the ability to legally sell something) you are looking for... but like I said, it seems you're still new to this world of trade and capitalism. You'll learn eventually. Hopefully.
> Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today.
It is possible. You just dont understand how it works. The only impossibility here is your ability to understand what proof of ownership in the digital word entails. Can you proove that you own the hacker news account you are posting from? How? Did you just say email account and password... DING!DING!
> That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.
Fads will come and go. It is human nature. NFTs are no different. Websites were once a fad in the dotcom boom. Some fads help advance our tech and knowlegde.
I'd say speculation more than investing.
The peoblem with public blockchains and related technologies is that they have been list in the middle of huge speculation markets... which brings all sorts of bullshit and scams.
That's why I like to look at hyperledger and similar technologies. If you remove the money incentives, you are left with the pure technology essence. And then you can judge it by what it is.
I mean, the 'ownership' is as real as "buy a plot of land on Mars" scams.
An inefficient distributed database filled with assertions of legally unenforceable pseudoproperty rights seems somewhat underwhelming.
Even ignoring that, many NFTs do not convey any ownership of the digital work, but rather of the NFT itself.
So far the most likely value is in a platform that actually lets you leverage that ownership, such as Meta letting you put a framed monkey on the wall in your virtual home. But that sort of platform tie-in means it is basically the same as say the DRM-encoumbered media stores we've seen go bye - ownership which is only recognized within a platform is only really providing durable value to that platform.
These fatal flaws have not prevented capitalism from blooming all over the world.
Lest you think I'm some species of these crypto libertarians, I believe it's an imperfect solution to hand humans more greed levers to go about life dictating their actions by perverse incentives.
The solution for me looks more like a free net whose power is contributed by a mass group of volunteers. But who then will run the datacenters? With what materials will they build them and who will freely give it to them?
Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.
I agreed up until your last sentence: is the state the bigger problem (versus multi-billion corps and capitalists)? is currency the main lever of states (versus diplomacy, infrastructures, military, etc)?
I think these are the only technical arguments here, and there's real improvements there depending on what project you're looking at.
Promoted by people who think government is a terrible idea, an idea so terrible that literally every large group of people invented it.
Of course if I had mined some bitcoin when it was new, I'd be telling you how great it was to ensure my own profits
I don't know if government is a terrible idea, but if you agree that monopolies are a terrible idea then maybe at least you should give people against the concept of a government some attention regarding the "monopoly on violence" contradiction that's pretty much alive in all forms of government in place today.
If you want to gather 100,000 of your most random friends and try a new idea though, that's great.
But history suggests you'll invent government.
History suggests what the stable state of something is as much as reading tea leafs suggests it.
Many groups have tried to live without government, which have succeeded at scale?
Let's just listen to the man himself for a second, while we're talking about star trek and money: https://youtu.be/PV4Oze9JEU0?t=143
I guess you could argue that NFTs isn't the main aspect of cryptocurrencies, and I think you'd be right, but I find cryptocurrency projects in general seem to lean heavily into the scarcity aspect, and promise that early adopters will be able to cash in that scarcity later.
Not even a major aspect. Just like neither are the main aspect(s) of Web3.
Despite what con artists and puppet farms on Reddit and Twitter are pushing.
(The web3 moniker in its current form came years before the first NFT contract)
Alt-coins/shitcoins are grifts, they can be worth what people want to pay but anyone can spin up a new coin. And they do. Pump and dump for chumps.
NFTs are the same. Anyone can create an NFT for whatever. There is no value in it whatsoever.
The interest in it is purely because of the vast problems it creates are opportunities to gain something. These are numerous compared to the roughly single benefit and the technology itself.
It’s yet another market created to manipulate arbitrary wealth tokens. The masters are different that is all.
(Probably not though.)
I’d rather interact with cosplaying nerds than with those haughty-taughty process and procedure geeks.
[1]: I of course have not watched that, either.
Who knows what the future holds, though. There's clearly huge hype in this space. Will anything come of it once the pyramid scheme and ponzi scheme foundational core of web3 is realized and replaced? Or will that day never come? I don't think it will and this is just another gold rush.
Some people are surprisingly open about it, running scams and hyping up other people to try to strengthen their own pump-and-dump scams. We see things like this with people Tweeing/Telegraming/Reddting/whatever about AMC stock too. At least in regulated markets this is easier to catch and change, and it's the minority of trades, where it's the foundation of cryptocurrency.
Thinking more about it, I think I feel bad for the people caught up thinking this will be useful or game changing technology. I wonder how much they realize the core technology has limited use, and all of the hype is around trading unregulated, untaxed asset bubbles.
Paywalls are shitty. Nobody wanted that to happen except for the money-men. It's for this very reason that if an article gets linked here and has a pay-wall, a few volunteers will go hunt down a free version of the article and post it on archive.org for everyone else to view. You may see this as flawed - but I see it as beautiful. The way the "good parts" of the web still work.
Money/currency/blockchain absolutely does _not_ have to be a fundamental structure of the internet. There is zero reason why a currency needs to be fundamental to the basic operation of "the web" other than for incumbents to try to increase the value of said currency. Like - seriously; the internet was supposed to be about democratization of information. I realize that didn't exactly happen due to big-tech extrapolating value out of everything - but the "solution" you are proposing is to say "oh you don't have any [insert coin here]? Yeah - you'll need to exchange 20$ USD first before you can even use our internet. Or if you don't have any cash we can give you some freebies so you can shill for us." Like - what? No. Not going to work.
Or maybe it will. But, not because it should.
Information can be copied almost for free, but it still takes a fixed amount of work to produce even one copy of something. It is better to sell more copies at a fraction of the price assuming the revenue ends up the same because more value is created in the world. Unfortunately you can't charge people low enough amounts via the current financial system as they're not interested in innovation. So we are stuck with ads.
Moving on:
> So you'd rather choose privacy invading ads just because it's technically not a paywall? I'll take microtransactions every time.
Surely there is some middle ground there? I find _both_ ends of that spectrum deplorable. At least with the freemium model I can bring my own ad blocker. But no, I don't "choose privacy invading ads". I accept that the current internet has flaws. You understand that cryptocurrency is going to get co-opted by mainstream elites and the top 1% though, right? Sometimes I feel like I'm watching history repeat itself.
> the current state of the internet can be directly attributed to content producer's inability to directly monetize their work so they have had to find an indirect way to get paid.
I agree and I think the causation is actually reversed; the internet has enabled cheap copying of 0's and 1's since its inception. This has of course caused all sorts of issues and I agree that content creators should have a more direct way to monetize their work.
What I don't see is how NFT's enable that. Yes, they enable a content creator to collect currency from a one-time transaction, or perhaps a smart contract setup to provide a commission. But; the file contents are not actually encrypted anywhere. So ad-based websites can still easily steal content and profit from it. Further, even if they were; it would be ad-based networks buying the best content as they can afford to.
Google has tried this with Contributor back in 2015, and then again in 2017, but it wasn't popular because you were committing to pay a noticeable amount of money every month (which is more than many people think they can/should pay) and the people who would pay that would only pay that if they didn't see ads at all (since you were effectively bidding for your own ads, this wasn't a given). If, as is common, you hit sites which weren't using Google's ad network, you'd still see ads and the prospect of paying more to buy those out wasn't going to be a fun sale.
Now, maybe Google isn't trustworthy here but they're far from the only party to try this and there are also services like Apple News or Blendle which are trying a more targeted approach. I don't know how their sales look but the fact that it hasn't been newsworthy suggests that the status quo isn't going anywhere quickly.
Direct cost efficiency isn’t the only factor: I think site operators value the simplicity of not needing a relationship with each visitor (especially internationally) or needing to ask permission to access content, and visitors like that they don’t have a taxi meter ticking as they browse around.
I’m definitely not saying the system is perfect but any time something is this resistant to change I would assume it’s better at a factor we’re not considering. Ads certainly aren’t perfect and the major publishers would drop Google/Facebook in a heartbeat if they thought they could afford it, so I would look at proposed replacements from that perspective.
A blockchain based system has a few obvious challenges but the biggest one for me is the assumption that enough people don't like ads enough to pay a comparable amount of money & deal with thinking about transactions. That experiment has been tried enough times that I think the failures are an important lesson about revealed consumer preferences.
Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals flocking to it...), fair enough: bet on it disappearing overnight or over long cold crypto winter.
But if you think there's a slim chance that web3 may persist, and that it's not all just the bad bad things you think it is, do take a look, play around, join a community like Corruption(*s) (https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1470525607104684032) - I assure you you will reconsider your stance if you look close enough, and it'll position you in a much better way for what's to come compared to continuing to ignore it.
PS: and for some reason I still don't see need to believe, even for an off chance of going to heaven. Same with crypto.
If you're familiar with the space, you have to at least admit that it's filled to the brim with grifters and people looking to acquire life-changing wealth for themselves by hyping things that they have a vested financial interest in.
There is a lot of energy in the space, but that's because it's just about the only thing web3 has going for it right now. The value of an asset has an exponential relationship with the hype around it, so everyone is working overtime to hype hype hype. Few people are interested in discussing what's underneath all of the hype, though, and instead allude to all of the vague future uses of the technology (which will allow everyone to flip their current investments for huge profits, or so the narrative goes).
Unsurprisingly, the quality of Web3 communities IMO is inversely correlated to how much price-talk they engage in (e. g. in token-gated Discord servers).
So your "web3" consumption happens entirely on web 2.0? And its existence doesn't actually require anything web3 related?
What makes it web3, other than the fact that maybe someone built a bot that requires NFT ownership to get into a Discord? Just the fact that people are talking about web3 in it?
- Yes, NFTs: just like most websites are crap, so are most NFTs, and the tulip bubble that has formed around them will eventually bust (but return in different ways...). What will IMO almost certainly remain is the significant paradigm shift on two aspects: 1. indisputable ownership of digital goods that unlock other things: logins to apps, usage of software, access to certain communities / social clubs. 2. A dramatic unbundling of the way software is designed and used. Entire game universes will be build in the NFT space that are permissionlessly composable. A game designer may take an character NFT and build a game around them. Take a look at Loot Project, the first of this kind. Corruption(s*) by Dom is my favorite here: https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1470525607104684032
- DAOs will profoundly change the way in which we work. Wrote an article here: https://www.daos.fm/blog/daos-and-the-civstack Most NFT communities eventually become minimal DAOs as they often at some point pool a bunch of NFTs into a community wallet that they govern together. Sometimes for lols, sometimes to fund public goods
- Permissionlessness may sound like a buzzword, but it's huge. I think the NFT space will move toward a CC0 model in many parts, which means that anyone can build on top of existing things and expand on a successful model with an existing community.
- Most importantly, community, and this isn't fluff: consider this - most on chain tech is by definition open source and easily forkable - it's on a public chain! The differentiating factor for a project then is solely how well the community works, and how well its community is rewarded for helping the project out. Take the ENS (Ethereum Naming Service), which let's you shorten your ETH public key to a "domain.eth" one. They incorporated as a DAO and as a token of gratitude to their early adopters airdropped ENS tokens into every early users wallet. These tokens were immediately worth around 15k USD and instantly tradeable. Many didn't trade them but instead used them to vote for a delegate to represent them in the ENS DAO.
It's mindblowing how fast the space moves.
This indicates that you are either disingenuous or ignorant. I could put any closed binary on a public chain, that doesn't somehow magically make it open source.
Your post almost reminds me of how "mind-blowing the space moves" pre-2008, the space being the mortgage debt derivatives matket.
More and more complex derivatives that provide seemingly no value but allow the creators to make a lot of short term money by selling them.
Shit, I remember I received snail mail spam of penis enlargement crap in my town here in Mexico . They forget what brought the US legislators to the CAN SPAM act, and being 100% legal, also to the DMCA and all new legislation to prevent rampant copyright infringement (now... I dont agree with copyright law, but it's still the law).
We are at the same stage in the crypto space. Theres really interesting new tech and ideas (the Yahoos, Amazons, Googles, CD-Nows, MySpaces of the 90s), and theres also plenty of shady and blatantly illegal stuff (the Napsters, emules, Edward Davidsons of the 90s') .
That doesn't decrease the value of the technology.
What's wrong with hyping things you've invested in, or seeking life-changing wealth for yourself?
It's funny that cryptocurrency proponents will often lambast the traditional banking system for being corrupt and self-serving but then ask a question like this. Is cryptocurrency supposed to be a more fair way to invest/bank/move money or not?
This should be obvious. When was the last time you saw a coca-cola add? Did it say "please buy this because we are vested in it" or did it say "coca-cola tastes great".
> Is cryptocurrency supposed to be a more fair way to invest/bank/move money or not?
I honestly don't think so. It's great for some use cases though, like cheap, instant cross border payments.
Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
The thing that is wrong with it is that you are intentionally deceiving people.
In most other spaces the idea has real world utility. Not like, invent virtual land and sell it to people. Oh but no use for it for now. It could be worth lots later!
You fork a project, put up a webpage with aspirational talking points, and dump your premined coins onto the rubes that buy in.
Gambling has real value, and that's about all the value crypto provides. Which is the hot pyramid scheme of the month so I can make money off less intelligent people who don't understand it's all a scam veiled by perfectly valid technology?
It will all inevitably implode the next time any risk off sentiment takes hold.
Think deeply about what you just did. “If you’re on the sidelines and not playing the game, you’re an enemy”. That sounds exactly opposite of democracy. It sounds like Authoritarianism.
Just curious, are you at a college/university, or fresh out of?
that being said, the main reason I haven't bought one (i'd love to see the concert) is you have to use ether. that means taking on something like forex risk, plus costs money and time for what feels like the sake of costing money and time. if i could buy one of the things in dollars with a card or paypal, i probably would.
i get (at least some of) the ideas behind using a value token that's endogenous to and therefore in the control of the software ensuring trust, etc., but it seems to me that the cool parts of NFTs are somewhat negated by the cryptocurrency part of the implementation.
Why do you need NFTs for that though? Bands have been selling exclusive access to content for ages using regular old currency.
That's where I'm at. I don't want that vision of commercialization and commodification of everything.
I think there is a possibility that all of that crypto stuff might succeed and I'm terrified of it throwing us into an even worse capitalist dystopia than the one we already live in.
I was a very early crypto fan, loved talking about decentralized trustless networks, legal smart contracts, that kind of thing. But after years and years of just getting burned by the space being taken over by financial people spouting cultist rhetoric, the space has lost it's shimmer to me.
Asking somebody to join a community and look around themselves is a huge demand of trust when the industry has coordinated rugpull after rugpull using social tactics very similar to your own.
I would very much like to hear about promising applications of crypto and blockchain outside of some esoteric financial ploy for more money.
What I am most interested in is making something like game cosmetics into NFTs that can be traded around players. For example: Imagine getting a rare Season 1 helmet in the new Halo game, and then being able to trade it with your friends in season 2 for something else. The blockchain is actually useless here aside from the fact that it's a protocol that defines ownership outsde of the game so that the central authority can't place limits on trading.
But I just haven't seen anything in that capacity so you'll still have to color me cynical
It is exactly how you describe, but so so much more: why limit your Halo / skyrim character to one game world when you could take it into any other format and play with it there? NFT composability is a huge topic and extremely exciting in terms of these optionalities. Again: https://www.lootproject.com/
Also see my comment above with some more examples in response to another question...
[0] one could just decide to ignore the NFT after all, or mint their own NFTs for the same asset.
Despite the likely bad PR, fiddly intellectual property issues, and the fact auctioning off high value gameplay items to the highest bidder turns games into tremendously boring pay2win experiences, the value in NFTs is that a game company might let players use assets bought or acquired in one game in a different game, even though they could do that already do that by just making private contractual relationships between existing game companies.
Are you excited by Cassandra, cockroach db , scylla or similar technologies? Then you can be similarly excited with Blockhain databases.
The concensus mechanisms in public blockchains are an interesting mechanism from the purely academic PoV. But yeah... what is happening now is like if a bunch of non-technical marketing and sales people took MongoDB in a MLM campaign.
Cryptocurrency has been the opposite: we’re over a decade into endless talking it up from the sales people but there’s still no reason to buy in unless you like day trading. The pitch of “wouldn’t it be great if everyday life was as full of microtransactions as a mid-2000s mobile game?” just isn’t appealing, and the need to recruit others so your down line makes you rich is actively repellent to many, especially for those of us who grew up in an era where the dream of the web was making everything accessible to everyone, not just the rich.
(before anyone writes indignant answer to me - for example "NFT facilitates decentralized proof of ownership" is a complete and utter lie in our face, "like "black is white", and it was written by multiple users just in this topic, and same happened in every other discussion too, it's always the same story and the same lies)
You can literally make a project that has tokenized assets in the form of NFTs, and provide services based on ownership of that collection. It's trivial to detect whether an NFT is a forgery, and also trivial to detect if a user actually owns the NFT they claim to own. So when you are making claims that this is a lie, I have no idea where you are even coming from. It's literally proof of digital ownership for essentially a ticket/token into a service.
It's a totally fraudulent industry and certainly deserves the anger directed at it. It undermines trust in society, and the people participating in this fraud deserve prison and asset forfeiture.
Just like communities pumping AMC and other meme stocks. People get hyped easily when they can get something out of it. Why is that a criterion for anything?
> bet on it disappearing overnight or over long cold crypto winter.
Did you actually look into this? Because it's way riskier than you make it sound. In particular, I don't think it's financially sound to make this kind of bet as long as Tether exists with so little transparency.
> I assure you you will reconsider your stance if you look close enough, and it'll position you in a much better way for what's to come compared to continuing to ignore it.
After reading all your comments here, I still don't know what I should look at, beyond the "community and energy". The tech might be advanced and hard to grasp, but that's actually the part I do understand. What I'm still not seeing is the business case. Take any of the blockchain projects you seem to be fond of: what would happen if you just removed the blockchain? Would it really be worse off?
But, this seems more a list of people doing stupid shit with blockchain-y things, and not an argument against it as a whole. That doesn't distinguish blockchain that much from other technologies (e.g. consider WWW during the hype of dot-com bubble).
I pretty much believe its all absolute bullshit, but picking some egregious examples, while amusing, doesn't really show that.
And yet neither group are forthcoming enough to offer up the examples themselves. It feels like an invitation to indoctrinate yourself.
This is one of the narrative items I have a major issue with. The critics of cryptocurrencies in general seem to push the concept that only the insane, extremists, or shills would not hate these systems, and that all one has to do to hate it just like them is to read about it!
That's not really borne out in reality. This is one of those "everybody knows" things that's actually a falsehood.
I have yet to encounter anything yet that has changed my mind. Might i be wrong? Of course. I've been wrong about other technologies, i might be wrong about this one (and i would be happy to be proved wrong. I'd love to have new technology that can do cool new things)
As far as if "everybody knows", sure my opinion is not a universal one, but its not exactly an obscure one either.
No - I don't want to write inherently buggy smart contracts for your scam. If I wanted to do that, I would have gone into fintech awhile ago.
Edit: actually, maybe the justification of the SemVer bump is that people stopped caring about IE5 support :)
You might disagree with the approach, but using blockchain as the backend for an app is very different from previous iterations of the web.
The fact that you build your “web 3” application using Web 2.0 techniques (SPAs, etc) tells me that web 3 is not a thing. It’s another type of backend, and the web is designed to have those appear in perpetuity.
Interesting and constructive.
I don't know what committee of developers "that don't own/trade cryptocurrencies" you imagine exists that has some authority on what marketing terms you can use on twitter, or why a group explicitly disinterested in a topic should be consulted in the creation of those terms...
I also challenge the notion web3 is a "sucessor" to the web. I wouldn't call web 2.0 (the social web) a "successor", it didn't replace anything. It's just a descriptor for a different user/product relationship.
Web 1 -> read only Web 2 -> read/write (comments, primarily user-generated content) Web 3 -> read/write/own (users "own" the content)
The reality is that programming work surrounding payments and/or finance is going to be deeply unappealing to most devs as it is incredibly dry and extremely tedious.
Apologies, as an outsider I'm sure I have used some conflated terms. To clarify, I was explicitly referring to smart contracts (and the like). These programmed arrangements carry with them the minutiae and stress of what I imagine programming at a bank or large financial institution would be like. Coding a bug in a smart contract or at a bank can have very severe consequences. It should be done with the utmost care by highly skilled persons, not your average web programmer (which is the position you are taking by calling this stuff Web 3 and when, for instance, Ethereum decides to base its smart contract language on JavaScript).
While this is true for some specific segments of the current internet, it is not inherently true. Or rather, as a programmer, I can choose to avoid such fraught tasks.
Most of cryptocurrency marketing works that way, throwing jargon at you until you feel stupid for not understanding why it is supposedly so revolutionary. And once the thousands of marks who have already been roped into the scheme discover your comment, they'll be all over it to protect their investment and you'll feel very alone.
Not sure I understand your point. What developers do you need to consult? Some random developers coined that term, as much as some random developers coined the web 2.0 terms. It's up to people to use it or not.
I kid, I kid … mostly.
The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago), including egregious privacy leaks (Cambridge Analytica), and comical wrist-slaps (Equifax anyone?) is just silly. I could make the same argument about technology in general and it would be wrong (you'd still have snake-oil salesmen roaming the streets).
Finally, the idea that rug pulls don't happen in other markets is also just such a jejune interpretation of markets. I take it author is not familiar with SPACs and IPOs? It's just clueless posturing. Look at what happened with Nikola just earlier this year. Is that not a rug pull?
> The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago)
That’s also worth thinking less shallowly about for a second reason: if a cryptocurrency service, wallet, etc. you used was hacked due to log4j, you’d lose everything without recourse. This is not true of the mature banking system, and it might be useful to consider how many people would consider that a requirement.
Many (maybe even most?) of those web 2.0 applications are written in Java and those that are, almost all of them use log4j.
(web1 was serverside rendering of html, sending down complete html pages for each user interaction.)
It’s just a library, and compiling into byte code for some blockchain VM wouldn’t make it a cryptocurrency library, either.
Web 2.0 is basically websites with user generated content.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 and most other sources you find when googling "what is web 2.0"
And by the way, a significant number of java backends don't use log4j2 as a logging backend (the vulnerable part).
Let's assume Web 2.0 is 2008 to the present day. Every single big corp I worked at during that time was a Java shop (serving via Tomcat/Jetty), and log4j is ubiquitous in every Java shop. Minecraft (a gaming epitome of Web 2.0), basically blew up because of Log4j.
> The Play logger is built on Log4j. Since most Java libraries use Log4j or a wrapper able to use Log4j as a backend, you can easily configure logging that is well-suited to your application.
Please tell me this is a joke. You compared two unlike things, and now it’s “bad faith” when you can’t support the claim?
> Log4j is as part of web2 as technologies like MongoDb or AJAX/XMLHttpRequest
This is half right. As with log4j you can tell what things are “web 2.0” by asking whether you had to use them or not. People built many, many Web 2.0 sites without Mongo or Java but they had to use XHR because that’s what web browsers supported — until Fetch arrived later, there wasn’t a good alternative. Someone using your site didn’t know what you used server side but they definitely could tell what your client-side code (which is what made it Web 2.0 instead of 1) was doing.
Guy is on $100M bail. It's known who he is. There's a fair chance of him getting done for fraud.
Rug pulls are when you come back to check up on your investment and the restaurant is just an empty parking lot, and a tumbleweed rolls across. A skateboarding kid comes out to greet you as he explains some people came there a few months back and took some pictures, pretending they were opening soon.
Doesn't make sense to me if your goal is to actually stop climate change, as opposed to just hand wringing.
Much of the crypto space is moving towards Proof of Stake, including Ethereum. These critics also fail to ever mention that.
But tbh, I feel that's probably the point.
In a world where data brokers can (and will) shake out your whoIS info for the right price which can cost you personally, I commend any effort to re-frame the conversation and “speak truth to power” as corny as that sounds.
This type of thing is an actual example of effective altruism. You’re not saving the snow leopard, sure, but it’s important to do what you can as much as possible.
Web 3 is a marketing grift aimed at high-minded idealism with one goal: to turn your lights off in the name of the next “new thing” because god forbid you don’t get in on the first floor.
Scrolling a bit, I see from the top: NFTs shilled on Twitter, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges getting hacked, things hosted on AWS, Peter Molyneux doing his thing...
I don’t see a single example of Web3. Or even projects or technologies calling themselves such, legitimately or otherwise.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain can play a part in Web3, they don’t constitute or define it. If you coordinate and communicate on Twitter and Discord, host the core platform functionality on AWS and Cloudflare, and send out newsletters via Mailchimp, there’s nothing decentralized or “web3” about what you’re doing.
The OP is like criticizing Web2 because celebrity nudes were leaked via Gmail and this made someone get phished for their credit card believing they could stream more.
Here are some things that I sincerely don't understand about DAO's. That tech stack that you speak of, it needs to become deployed onto a server before the public can interface with it. Who does that?
Will every pull request become an NFT?
Ok, so now you have an NFT and it's a crucial bug fix but what if most people don't want it to become deployed?
What if I own the server and I really don't care what people think nor do I think smart contracts are especially smart and I decide, amma gonna deploy it, so I xcopy it onto the server. Now what are you going to do with your voting rights? Yell and scream?
Will "automate everything by letting the blockchain decide what is the next thing to do" resolve the fact that the server owner can do whatever they feel like, at any point in time?
Who owns the software? A blockchain?
Who owns the hardware? A blockchain?
Since when can blockchains own things?
The whole point of Web3 is that, no, it does not need to be deployed onto a server. Backends and frontends should be decoupled enough that in your given disagreement-scenario, you as the server-owner would be “forked away”. Think of the FreeNode/Libera debacle. The presence of a DAO doesn’t change anything in that sense.
> Will every pull request become an NFT?
I don’t see why any PR would need to be tokenized. There’s no need for transferable ownership (as opposed to authorship) of a PR. Or am I missing why this would be useful? (Aside: Who holds ownership of the PRs I make on GitHub.com on “your” repository today? Me, you, Microsoft, or “the community”? There are valid arguments for all of the above and it feels like a question of little practical use)
> Since when can blockchains own things?
They can’t. But they can keep track of who owns what. And smart contracts, including DAOs, can take programmed actions with the assets or informations it has acquired from others.
might be better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Oil/gas/energy loves that everyone is for some reason concentrating on crypto as if it's the biggest polluter on the planet, so they get a break in the media.
That was my point: complaining about the annoying web3 posts, but they are all negative towards it.
If you don't like it, stop talking about it. But somehow, people on HN really like to complain about web3 all the time.
You could say it's like st(e)aking your meatcoins.
Web2 is still booming. I don't see that bubble popping anytime soon, unless world governments get super serious about regulation.
That's not to say that a web3 couldn't come into the world while web2 is still going strong, but... it seems less likely that we'll see any real transformation until web2 and the tech oligarchies it gave rise to start to falter. Web3 has expectations, cash, and lots of experienced people behind it, but there's little space in the market to occupy because web2 is still thriving. To take a leap, this casually makes me think of the theory around disenfranchised nobility causing the fall of the roman empire...
No intrinsic value = doomed to fail. Crypto has crashed 80% even when economy was otherwise strong. Imagine what it would have done during the GFC?
It's inevitable the entire leveraged, lending, shitcoin, tokens, whatever will epically collapse. Because at the end of the day they are useless bits on a machine that provide no real world value. When shit hits the fan people will come to this conclusion and sell it first above any other asset.
Every "use case" is just a self referential web of perfectly valid technology obscuring the fact that there is no intrinsic value in the application or tie to the real world.
As a matter of fact the internet did not change that much as most people think. Ofcourse CSS changed and made things easier, Javascript is making application development more easy but in the end we are still transferring text and media.
Maybe the biggest change came when browser plugins started listening to http traffic. The change to https was one of the fastest on the internet and right now almost all our interactions on the web are 'secure'.
While I think blockchain tech is in some sense a new idea, I don't think it will change the internet very soon. I think it will come as soon as ipv6.
I wouldn't be surprised if blockchain/defi/other web3 blah fails at 95% of what people are trying to use it for, and destroys 95% of the wealth that people gamble on it, and still changes the world and makes a bunch of people rich. I also wouldn't be surprised if people find uses for it in the plumbing of the conventional financial world in some invisible-but-consequential way.
I think the biggest hurdle to web3 is user responsibility and tech savviness. There was an assumption that younger generations would become better at advanced tech as time went on but that doesn't seem to be playing out. Using an iPhone effectively and avoiding online scams are two different skillsets. The problem is rampant in all tech, not just crypto.
Centralized organizations protect users from the absurdly dumb stuff they do. You can't have decentralized institutions and an adult nanny service at the same time.
All that being said, most of HN seems hypocritically upset at crypto. Its a distributed encrypted database, with some having distributed remote procedures. Nothing more than fancy tech. Are people scamming with it? Sure, but people have scammed with everything under the sun since the beginning of time, nothing has changed about human nature.
Cryptocurrencies used to be decentralized but it isn’t the case anymore (if you hate banks prepare to hate large mining farms… until proof of stake allow the top 1% to be in charge),
It’s anonymous (but governments don’t want anonymous money movement… I personally don’t want that either) and public (but if it stops being anonymous then who wants everybody to know they bought a sex toy online?).
Contracts are awesome but still cost a fortune.
All successful cryptos do not inflate which means the incentive to spend it does not exist, you’re better off investing in the currency itself than using it (you want a light inflation of your currency to help your economy by sponsoring real companies)
No decentralized service has ever succeeded. The closest is email which is federated at this point and even though most people use five providers.
Curious of a solid use case for web3 that surpasses in performance or in usability a trusted “web2” site.
Intermediaries are a huge reason the web is the way it is. If we can eliminate them, the internet looks very different. My biggest prediction is that fundamental protocols like TLS will altered to integrate with blockchain protocols.
Web3 isn't just a scam or waste of resources. It will enable us to do things we already do but much cheaper than we do them now. Lots of smart people are flooding into the space. It will take at least a decade but it's already happening.
A quick look at https://www.escrow.com/fee-calculator shows that fees only reach $20K if you're selling a $2.2 million domain name. At that level, lawyers should be involved on both sides anyway and your $20K fee is better spent on proper legal services to get it done. Escrow.com is notoriously expensive.
ENS domains may allow for smart contract transfers, but the downside of this is that anyone who gets access to your keys can now permanently own your domain name for that same $50 (likely higher) transfer fee. For companies, this means that a single security slip-up or even a single disgruntled employee with the right access can forever destroy your company's internet presence with no recourse. The current domain name system isn't perfect, but there is recourse for hijacked and stolen domain names.
Nothing comparable exists in the blockchain space, specifically because people don't want it to. Sounds great if you're sitting on the sidelines, criticizing other people for their poor OpSec when things go wrong. Doesn't sound great when you're trying to secure a business and realize that loss or theft of the domain keys means irreversible destruction of your domain name.
Yea so, that's kinda the point of what he's saying. Why is it that a domain transfer for $2M is so much more expensive than one for $2? Intermediaries.
Smart contracts eliminate the intermediary. Whether you are selling for $2 or $2M, it's gunna cost the same small fee (and the fee is going to be negligible within a year).
> this means that a single security slip-up or even a single disgruntled employee with the right access can forever destroy your company's internet presence with no recourse
This is actually extremely easy to avoid, to the point that it's far more secure than DNS (domain names get compromised via social engineering of registrars all the time, btw). With ENS, for example, the "owner" can be divorced from the "controller", so you can "own" it with a multi-signature smart contract wallet, or even lock it into a smart contract and make it non-transferable with a time-lock and require a quorum of signatures to unlock.
Any mechanism you can imagine basically, but you have full control of how it works. Point is, it's entirely possible, and easy even, to make your crypto assets VERY secure from hacks, it's just the current market isn't that interested in it yet (most easy solutions would be too gas expensive atm).
> Smart contracts eliminate the intermediary. Whether you are selling for $2 or $2M, it's gunna cost the same small fee (and the fee is going to be negligible within a year).
Okay, fair enough intermediaries suck. Let's replace them with smart contracts.
But what happens if there was a bug in the smart contract? What happens when a situation such as death occurs that wasn't considered when the smart contract was written? Who settles such disputes?
For cases like escrow over digital goods, it should be perfect in a p2p context without human involvement. It already is for any web3 good like tokens or nfts. Bugs happen but these contracts are often simple and used lots of times. We'll settle on more and more common standards to implement simple transactions.
The present day incumbent side of that spectrum is that the DNS registrar could decide one day to just take your domain from you, and there's not much you could do about it. Sure, you could sue, but that takes time and meanwhile your business could be ruined.
A more concrete example of this is social handles. Earlier this week, there was a story about a girl that had the Instagram handle @metaverse, and Facebook decided to just take it from her with no recourse.
Our contention is that shouldn't be possible.
But here's the thing: if you prefer to have a centralized entity control your assets just like today, you have the choice to do that! Everyone that has their assets on Coinbase today is making that choice, and that's totally fine.
The big innovation is, they can decide at any time to take custody of it themselves if they want, or move it to another centralized holder! Just like you have the choice to leave your money in the bank, or you can withdraw it to cash and keep it in a safe in your house. We're just giving users that same choice for digital assets.
Trust me, this will always be possible, "web3" or not. The proper solution here is maybe something federated like Matrix and definitely has to do with encouraging more people to self-host their own services, possible with "web1" tech.
I think it would serve this initiative a lot better if you just completely left the notion of currency, value, and markets _all_ the way out of it.
Focus on IPFS, IPNS, federation, BitTorrent, etc. if you want this to succeed. Leave money out of it. Money is invariably going to be loved by the winners and hated by the losers. It also makes it incredibly challenging to trust incumbents as they have everything-to-gain (and potentially alot-to-lose) by shilling that which increases the value of the coin they hold.
what’s the incentive to sell a domain on ethereum?
> TLS will altered to integrate with blockchain protocols.
you mean the Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic key exchange protocol? what’s the advantage to integrating with a blockchain compared to the way the current protocol works?
> It will take at least a decade
what’s stopping the community from doing it faster? and wouldn’t a decade mean that meta’s metaverse will be long established before this community takes off?
Sort of lends to be like PGP Web of Trust doesn't it?
Anyways, sarcasm aside, that sounds excellent - have a link to the project?
That's what makes me the most skeptical. I don't see a lack of intermediaries in crypto and the crypto intermediaries are far sketchier than their non-crypto counterparts. Just compare Tether to your local bank. Tether could pull the rug on USDT tomorrow and your recourse would be... what? Same with NFTs and the entities hosting the actual art you're paying for. I can have some confidence that Steam will be around 10 years from now; not so sure about boredapeyachtclub.com. The most notable party that's removed from the equation by crypto is the only one I have some small measure of influence on - the government.
From the outside it looks like: "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
The promises for how it changes society are pretty weak. It could change nothing or a lot. Web3 is just a better cheaper tool for humans to use so it'll get used. How it changes society is up to the people using it. Just like how the internet didn't usher in a utopia, web3 won't either, but it will change a lot.
I don't get it. It smells and feels like a grift where people are pretending it's not because they have nfts they want to appreciate and then dump.
They were right about that, until they weren’t.
This feels like a more extreme version of both. There were a lot of dotcoms which could at least have been plausible businesses with better management (pets.com & Kozmo cost to mind) and overpaying for a house at least meant you had somewhere to live but a cryptocurrency has no utility unless you talk it up to a buyer.
I think at the end of the day, Web3, like VR, will have certain use cases that will make sense but won't have a huge effect on majority of the population.
The boom of cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, and all the jazz, sparked a need for thinking about data differently. We already had much in terms of traditional protocols, and there was already work in the space in terms of IPFS, so we already had some tools for reasoning about the data.
What's important for a decentralized internet, is learning to stop referring to data by location, and instead, refer to it by its contents. This is an interesting shift in thinking about accessing data, the integrity of data, and other things which can yield real benefits in certain areas.
So my bet is, whatever this web3 / possible next step of the way we distribute cats between ourselves is, it will involve a lot of immutable data structures, a lot of hashing, of merkle trees, a lot of consensus building, p2p routing, encryption, the jazz, and I think our infrastructure will become more resilient and scalable for that.
This might be a new internet, this might be a side-thing with web2 still going strong, but there is work being done in the space, there are a lot of traditional data structures and algorithms and it's exciting to reason about data in a new way after all these years.
Like it or not, people will always have love hate relationships with money.
> You need to enable JavaScript to view this timeline.
Web3 must be going pretty well if my Web1/2 lifestyle can't even read its text on a webpage.
1. Love it (for reasons) 2. Hate it (for reasons) 3. Confused Vince Vega Meme
I'm in category 3. Maybe I just need some RFCs to come out, 'cause Wikipedia ain't helping.
My favorite quote so far. Need to find the RSS feed for this.
If we want to realistically reduce CO2 emissions by cryptocurrencies, displacing Bitcoin and other proof-of-work chains is step one. Thankfully this seems to be happening. Check out any chart of BTC-ETH. With power-efficient proof of stake coming next year I'm hoping we can reduce the incentives for anyone who's thinking about starting up a coal power plant.
But who am I kidding, theyre gonna call me uninformed and chase after the next upcoming scam to make quick buck.
In real life, if I talk to people about crypto they are curious and open to learning about it and most just don't have the time to learn about it.
However, when I go online and see a post about NFTs or crypto, there somehow is always tremendous backlash, generally by people not involved in the space. I'm curious what about this space brings out the critics moreso than other hot-button issues. Especially since crypto adoption doesn't really impact these people's lives the way other issues such as abortion, vaccine/mask mandates, or drug policy does.
I think this really depends on what you mean by involved in the space. Far too often, someone will start commenting on something based on nothing other than a 2nd hand understanding of the thing, and that commentary is often misleading or naive (or both) as a result.
I’d argue that expressing opinions prematurely is one of the fundamental problems with society today, and one that is amplified by tech.
And even thinking about this in terms of “good” and “bad” seems problematic, when it’s not inherently either, much like the majority of modern technology.
I’m not arguing against the creation of “here are some bad things about x” posts, but there is a subcategory that is not useful.
I try to reduce the flames by just talking about the technical or logical aspects with these types of topics.
Personally I think education systems gear us up for difficulties later in life through competitiveness - the drive to win, come first, be right. We should be learning that it’s ok not to come first and sometimes everybody is wrong. We can be wrong on our opinion of crypto as well.
Ask yourself, who is the most affected by these 2 technologies existing?
Web3 is young still, I'll grant you that, but it will eat the world in 3 to 5 years.
Bitcoin is already mature and it's the most democratic type of currency/money/property in the world, how can you argue against that?
I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways.
Speculators?
Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators?
> I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways.
That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees.
But your comment is a perfect example of the web3 hype: Proponents are convinced that every current problem is basically solved, we just need to wait for the solution to actually arrive and then everyone will see.
Distributed systems where you own the data and there's no single point of failure.
> That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees.
I'm not an expert on the mining mechanics, I might be wrong but not due to the reasons you claim, transaction fees will approach zero as more people move into lightning and block reward will keep getting halved.
That's too abstract, can you be more specific?
> I'm not an expert on the mining mechanics, I might be wrong but not due to the reasons you claim, transaction fees will approach zero as more people move into lightning and block reward will keep getting halved.
Transaction costs could go down but that doesn't change the incentives for the mining itself very much.
If I encrypt my 1TB of the data I have at home and put the copies on AWS, GCP, and Azure, there's also no single point of failure and I own the data. Still, blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. I can own data without relying on a worldwide self-settling ledger.
There's the "shutdown test" for the actual immediate utility value of anything worldwide. If we hypothetically manage to shutdown Bitcoin and all the other blockchains, what would be the overall effect to the world? Some big and small speculators losing assets and no actual loss of value (but less carbon emissions, so maybe increase of value?). On the other hand, shutdown stock exchanges, SWIFT systems, electricity, internet in general - big turmoil.
How does self-sovereign identity exclusively benefit speculators?
How does it only benefit speculators?
can’t I usen openssl to sign files representing agreements and write programs that only run when an authroized keyholder calls a method without the global supercomputer running at a few thousand TPS? it just seems like the most inefficient approach to utilizing cryptographic signatures
granted, no one else has cracked the UI/UX problem of using these signatures so I’m not a total prohibitionist on blockchains, it just doesn’t feel like the right answer to me
And there's a big difference between SSH and SSI.
And solves it problems that, you say, weren't already solved.
So it boils down to blockchains taking too much electricity?
This is wrong. ~98% of the incentive that miners get comes from mining new Bitcoin, not transaction fees. That is unaffected by LN, and if LN is widely adopted, will likely even go up (because it is denominated in Bitcoin and LN adoption may drive the price up).
Accepting any currency that's not a stablecoin, gives power (not just purchasing power) over you to those who bought it really cheap without doing as much labour or as much spending as much capital as the late ones. Bitcoin has been more of a security - like a startup's shares - benefiting early investors at the expense of late ones. It's the opposite of "democratic".
Here's the steps to buy bitcoin:
1) Create wallet 2) Buy from anyone in the world who wants to sell.
The reality of market dynamics has nothing to do with whether you should or should not buy Apple stock. The point is that the ease of buying something doesn't necessarily change the fundamental concentration of power, which is still concentrated among earlier adopters. You may still choose to invest regardless, and that may be perfectly acceptable.
Bitcoin survived an attack from its own wealthy proponents, miners tried to increase the blocksize for speed, which resulted in the fork Bitcoin Cash. Possibly the number of validators will always outnumber miners.
And the code base is not stale.
Am I able to use Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay for my groceries yet? Or do I have to continue to wait 10+ mins for a single transaction to settle whilst overpaying for the fees to make it go faster?
If that is 'web3', then you might as well use Apple / Google Pay then.
This is what lightning will fix.
> If that is 'web3',
C'mon, don't argue in bad faith, Bitcoin is not web3 just like AJAX is not web2.0. Web3 can and should be built atop bitcoin lightning, but bitcoin can exist separately.
when?
It's still in beta/alpha, it works but it sometimes loses the channels, it doesn't lose your BTC however.
I wish you bitcoiners could decide if bitcoin is a currency or not.