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.
I wish you bitcoiners could decide if bitcoin is a currency or not.
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.