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Why Web3?

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244 pointssimonebrunozzi678 comments

I'm not convinced.

People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain.

DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization", every DeFi scheme is a money loser relative to just buying eth and waiting for a pump, "collateralized" loans where you pay coin so someone will loan you coin is not a valuable use-case to the vast majority of the population...

None of this is about giving power back to individuals, it's all about making money on mining fees and cryptocurrency speculation.

> NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures

I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose I bought an extremely trendy natural number k ∈ ℤ and I have a signature σ from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k". Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k. How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending σ doesn't suffice, since σ is public. Do I need a new signature?

Ok different setup: σ is actually a signature from me and the inventor saying "the non-inventor pubkey that signed of this message is the owner of k". How do I transfer σ now? Do I send my signing secret key? Who makes sure I deleted my copy of the signing key?

Good questions.

Let's say I create a piece of digital art and create an NFT out of it. The NFT somehow starts increasing in value. Then I copy my original digital art-asset and perhaps use a Photo-Shop filter to make it have a different hue. I turn that into another NFT. And I keep on doing this for all colors of the rainbow.

What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or slightly modified underlying digital asset?

In many cases you don't even need to modify it. Ownership of an NFT often does not provide copyright on the original image (https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2021/04/article_0007.h... has some interesting details on what you do and don't get with an NFT). So if you made the original image, you can just mint a new NFT of that image and sell it.

Heck you can mint as many NFTs as you like of any image you own the copyright of :)

Why do I need to own the copyright to mint an NFT of the image?

So, if you don't own the copyright and then mint an NFT, in theory the copyright holder could get the source image for your NFT taken down (depending on where it's hosted of course)

That hasn't stopped loads of NFTs of copyrighted images being minted ofc.

It is worse than that, there are no pixels! The NFT is a short string, usually a URL. It’s effectively a QR code! You can create as many copies as you like. The “value” of an NFT comes in somehow convincing people you are the official one. This needs a lot of clout: e.g. a sale by Sotherbys that is well known that people can trace back the NFT to. In a sense its like a digital antique when there are easy fakes.

My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1.

> My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1.

Ah, see, I ususually skip over NFT nonsense because of the sheer number of WHY and WHO it brings up… but now and then it’s summed up nicely.

> What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or slightly modified underlying digital asset?

That one seems like a classic supply and demand thing. Make too many, sell none

Having said that, that does actually seem to be the business model in this wave. At least for the ones people are heavily pushing that get on on my radar. Maybe not hues but "accessories" (procedurally generated png layers, flattened)

It seems as if the only thing I get when I buy an NFT is the ability to prove that I did pay money for that NFT for a specific seller.

But because anybody else can sell anybody else very similar NFTs it looks like the supply is infinite.

The only differentiator then is who is the seller, right? But how can the value of a thing be different based on who sells it?

> But because anybody else can sell anybody else very similar NFTs it looks like the supply is infinite.

People only want to pay for the NFT, because it is supposed to represent a desirable piece of art. The only person who has the moral authority to sell it is the artist. Anyone can create an NFT that "links" to some piece of art they found online, but if I am not the artist, why would anyone pay me for it?

Additionally of course, there are artists whose work is more desired, so they command a premium over other artists.

I can see a way it could make sense. The NFT contains text that declares what the buyer of it gets. For instance they get the right to use the digital art on their website. And maybe a right to sell that right to someone else if they stop using it on their website.

If I tried to create such an NFT from someone else's art that would be fraud if I don't own the copyright to that art.

Is that how it works in practice? Do NFTs (typically) include immutable text which clearly spells out what rights are transferred to the buyer of the NFT? And because the text of the NFT is in the blockchain which can not easily be forged, courts will accept that fact as evidence of a binding contract?

> Do NFTs (typically) include immutable text which clearly spells out what rights are transferred to the buyer of the NFT?

This can be included immutably on-chain. Mostly it is done off-chain, which is ok, because enforcement of any such license would happen off-chain and in courts anyway. Frequently, no license details are given at all, which may also be ok, because people who collect fine art aren't doing it for the use value ("I need a stock photo for my landing page"), they are doing it because they feel good about being an art collector. In that sense, very limited use-rights are actually required.

> In that sense, very limited use-rights are actually required

Specifically, what use rights does an NFT grant?

For photographs (and I have a small gallery of them collected over the years in art festivals and galleries), they're hanging on my wall... though I can't publicly display them (that's part of the copyright).

If I sell a print of a digital image (that I captured with a camera) and I sell a NFT of the same digital image, what are the differences in the use rights that the two buyers have?

If the digital image, hosted on a server that I maintain goes offline (I didn't pay my network solutions bill and someone else buys the domain), what does does the NFT retain rights to?

The NFT is just an entry in a ledger. What rights the buyer has to the intellectual property that is your photo is decided by your respective jurisdictions. In general, I would think this is largely up to you - i.e. only the rights you explicitly granted.

However, I believe in the US, there is no right to even download a copy of a file on the internet for purely personal reasons. I could see an NFT buyer successfully argue in court that this right is implied, even if not specified.

What happens if the file goes offline? I would think that this will not effect an existing license that you have previously granted. Of course, the buyer may struggle to make use of their license rights if they did not retain a copy of the image themselves.

> In general, I would think this is largely up to you - i.e. only the rights you explicitly granted.

Do you have any examples of an NFT that grant rights accompanied by TOS terms for minting the NFT that affirm that it is the original artist or someone who is authorized to do so who is creating it?

> However, I believe in the US, there is no right to even download a copy of a file on the internet for purely personal reasons.

There is de minimis which isn't so much a right but rather a "this is beneath the concern of the law".

As to the US aspect, every country that is a signatory of the Berne Convention ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention ) recognizes the minimum standard for protection which includes the right to to make replications or display to the public that is held as part of copyright.

For an NFT, would a baseball card be an acceptable comparison for what it represents in the real world? To that end, I would contend that the same thing happens to it when the player that it represents (there is no ownership conveyed in a baseball card beyond the card itself) leaves the game.

It's interesting to think NFTs as digital baseball cards. Both (can) have scarcity.

But baseball cards also have physicality. They are close to our world we can see them and turn them around. Physicality gives them desirable properties like easily carrying them around, no computer required. A physical thing is unique. Any sequence of bits on the other hand can always be copied.

A NFT is just a digital receipt, and there's nothing that ties the receipt to the original creator or work except for a bit of text that the person creating the NFT has full control over. So they are effectively worthless for determining ownership, especially for copyright purposes.

The "non-fungible" part refers only to the receipt, not the original work.

> NFT is just a digital receipt

Right but a receipt of what? A receipt, evidence, or proof, that a transaction took place. But a transaction of what? One party got money. What did the other party get? A proof that s/he paid the money. For what? For the proof that s/he paid the money ... for the proof that s/he paid the money for the proof that ... LOL.

Makes me think that I should make an NFT out of Brooklyn Bridge. That might gain lots of fame and thus lots of value?

It is proof that you added an entry to a blockchain. That's it.

Your last sentence hit the nail straight on the head. You can in fact make a Brooklyn Bridge NFT and you would hardly be alone.

The photoshopping step is unnecessary. You can literally mint infinite NFTs of the same piece of digital art.

> You can literally mint infinite NFTs of the same piece of digital art.

That's what I fathomed. What I don't get is why would anybody pay anything for them

The use cases are more than art. Art is a part of the equation, sure, and we see these... incredibly inflated prices being paid for art as insane. Digital art. That can be replicated. In which ownership of the NFT may/may not convey ownership of the artwork. Of course this sounds absolutely nuts, and people can be forgiven for believing it is absolutely nuts and that's all there is to it.

But consider a very successful real world use case: trading cards. As NFTs, these digital cards are limited by contract on their respective blockchain such that infinite copies cannot be printed - they are limited edition. Scraps of cardboard for this rookie or that player only have ever had value to people who collect them - now the same sort of thing exists in the digital realm, without the risk of losing the physical collection in a house fire. It's less the artwork that is valuable, but the NFT itself.

Another valid use case is Patreon-like support of artists (especially in the music industry). As it is now, tens of thousands of people contribute money monthly to their favorite artists via platforms like Patreon often in exchange for perks like early releases to tracks or works in progress. NFTs can represent the same sort of thing, except that at some point in the future these early released tracks - or really - the possession of a fact of support for a band during their career as an NFT - has value amongst other fans. In some cases possessing these things can become backstage passes to a band at a concert.

Much of the NFT space right now is a cash grab. That doesn't mean valid use cases won't emerge.

> Digital art. That can be replicated. In which ownership of the NFT may/may not convey ownership of the artwork. Of course this sounds absolutely nuts

So. Digital art can be replicated, and they may or may not convey ownership. And then you immediately turn around, replace "digital art" with "digital cards" and "perks" and pretend that this is now somehow different just because you're using NFTs for literally the same thing, but called a different name.

> That doesn't mean valid use cases won't emerge.

It means exactly that: valid use cases will not emerge because of what NFTs are.

None of these are valid use cases. All of what you describe is solved already much more simply and cheaply without blockchain.

Walter Benjamin talked about this problem in 1935 [0]. It's particularly an issue with photography as an art form. For instance Jeff Wall's masters are all stored as RAW digital files and displayed as light boxes [1]. Theoretically he could produce an unlimited number of editions of each work, and theoretically anyone working at a record label who had received a copy of the hq file could do the same [2].

What prevents this and maintains the value of the work is that there are legal and social norms enforced through a vast network of institutions (galleries, museums, collectors, art fairs) that ensure that there will never be more than 1 actual edition of the work, or 2 or 3, whatever it is the number never changes after it is set, and minting more editions would be professional suicide, and the network of institutions would never allow or recognize it even if an artist tried it.

Lawrence Lessig's book Code developed the argument that any combination of social norms, legal structures/enforcement, and code or infrastructure can function as law, and sanction or foster certain behaviour and markets. "Code is law" was a clever observation and a bit of a revelation, but the NFT crowd seem to believe that it's enough or that it has more value than the social norms and contract law of the existing art world. It's engineering mindset hubris.

There's an attempt now to work social norms into the NFT space and enforce etiquette around "right-clicking", but convincing collectors of paintings that they could continue to collect photography was less of a challenge than convincing generations raised on BitTorrent, DRM wars, and authorless memes to introduce false scarcity into online digital abundance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_... [1] https://artblart.com/tag/transparency-in-light-box/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Destroyed_Room:_B-Sides_an...

This isn't any different than an artist offering a limited run of physical prints and then going back on their word. There's generally some level of trust between the buyer and the artist and if they break that trust then they hurt demand for their work. I've been following the NFT space for years and I haven't seen this issue crop up much at all.

I can understand that trust and reputation has something to do with it but I wonder with digital art it becomes a question of how much do I need to modify my copy of the original to make it a new piece of art.

And if NFT does not give you the copyright I might sell the copyright or license it to 3rd parties who could not care less about you having an NFT somehow "associated" with it.

I guess the key is what does it mean for an NFT to be "associated" with anything.

It's mind-boggling

What prevents a musical artist from publishing a bunch of unoriginal filler after having a major hit? Is this really a serious threat to the concept of publishing music?

Copies of music recordings aren't typically sold under the pretense that they're unique. If your favorite artist produced a record and sold you a copy, guaranteeing that it the only copy that'll ever be made, you might be inclined to pay more for it. Let's say you buy it, because you believe this might be the only opportunity to own this music. If your favorite artist then proceeded to sell other records with the same music but with an additional 100 ms of silence at the end of each track, you'd feel tricked.

It's a terrible analogy from the start, don't blame me.

> Copies of music recordings aren't typically sold under the pretense that they're unique.

My point is that if you buy a new record from an artist you generally expect it to be original music that’s the product of creativity. But a lot of artists release things that are perceived by many to be very derivative, unoriginal, and not creative.

There’s a limit to artists’ ability to do this. It’s called copyright law and it’s enforced by a central authority. Unfortunately no such central authority exists in the NFT space, so it’s perfectly within anyone’s rights and abilities to copy an artwork and sell it as their own.

When you say "sell an artwork" do you mean sell all rights to it or license its copying for personal use etc? Copyright and contract law still applies. But how does it apply to NFTs?

It doesn’t. Or it will some day, either way, this is the point. It’s still going to require a centralized authority to enforce fair use, ultimately making it no different than any other method of distributing art.

> My point is that if you buy a new record from an artist you generally expect it to be original music that’s the product of creativity.

No, you expect it to be one of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of exact copies that anyone else could buy regardless of whether you own a copy or not, and that will usually be repressed if the supply runs dry. It's the product of a record pressing/CD replication machine more than anything else; no creative or original work goes into producing copy 67,904 out of 100,000. There is no expectation that you are paying for original work. The money you spend might go into funding original work, indirectly, but what you're paying for is a copy, and that's also what you generally expect it to be.

If consumers generally each bought the only copy of the records they own, it might have been more relevant.

But again, this thread is about how different separate creative works from one artist are, not how many identical copies of a single work the artist releases.

The NFT would contain "$doomrobo_public_key owns $k as of $date" signed with the minter's private key. When you decide to sell someone the NFT you append "$new_owner_public_key owns $k as of $date" to the NFT and sign it with your private key: this establishes a secure and verifiable chain of ownership.

You can send two of those assignment signatures to two different parties simultaneously.

Is there a way in your system to avoid the double send?

You can do the same thing with blockchain NFTs, just mint another blockchain NFT with the same content. You can say "well, the NFT that was minted first is the true original" but the same is true of the "double sent" digital signature NFT, one will be dated more recently than the other, which affords one identical guarantees of authenticity to the blockchain NFT.

Thats not the same thing.

I just explained why it is. A one line response of "nuh uh" is not convincing.

Its an analogy and diverts from the original point. We were talking about how you were going to solve double spends without a chain.

You point about minting another is an interesting point but its not a double spend so we veer off the topic.

If we take your point then its the same as saying anyone can create a new crypto and call it Bitcoin. If I have an OG Bitcoin and you have a fake one then you can steel my real one. No you cant.

The reason is that people discern what Bitcoin is vs. other coins.

NFT cooy/paste is a problem but it is a distinct and different problem to double spend.

> We were talking about how you were going to solve double spends without a chain.

"Double spend" is a cryptocurrency problem, NFTs do not have this problem since unlike "currencies" the goal is to create a "non fungible" record of ownership for an off-chain asset; a chain of digital signatures satisfies this need, the double spend issue is not relevant to the stated use-case.

The genesis of this discussion is “NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures”. I basically said “how to avoid double spend in digital signatures”, someone replied “but you can clone NFTs!”. I said “yes but that is different”.

You are correct double spend is not a problem with NFT because they piggy back on crypto layers.

However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs.

Since there are multiple people commenting and steering the thread in different directions I feel this is being filibustered. So ill stop replying. Im exhausted!

> However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs.

As I already stated, this is not true. Nobody can stop an author from minting two different blockchain NFTs pointing to the same content, there's no difference between that and "double spending" a digital signature NFT. At the end of the day, the only thing the NFT does is prove "the author authorized this verbal statement of ownership", a digitally signed text file does exactly the same thing.

I think what you are missing is that for NFT adherents, they don't care about the original content, just the NFT.

btw, I own an NFT that represents all natural numbers, therefore all possible NFTs.

The only difference between a fungible token and a non-fungible token is its fungibility: everything else is the same. The stated use case for both is "I want to know for certain who owns something". A chain of digital signatures fails to satisfy that need. Please stop being so assertive about something you clearly don't know anything about: there are tons of useful complaints about how people are using NFTs, but this is not one of them.

A semantic distinction without an actual difference. At the end of the day all an NFT does is state "author X gives ownership of Y to Z", if you trust the public key of X a signed text file stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Z" gives you identical guarantees to a blockchain NFT stating the same thing. Nothing stops author X from minting a blockchain NFT that states "author X gives ownership of Y to Z" and also an additional blockchain NFT stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Q"... it's literally just a digitally signed string.

What blockchains provide is transaction ordering as a service. If Y is an NFT, what prevents that from happening is the code on the blockchain: the same kind of code (literally, on Ethereum) that prevents Y from being a fungible token for a cryptocurrency that they send to two people (aka "double spend").

If Y is not an NFT, but you know the original owner X, and you wish to create an NFT, the same kind of mechanisms work: the first time you attempt to assign ownership is the canonical one. Which you seemed to get up-thread, you just failed to "do the math" to see why digital signatures alone don't support that as you are so sure cryptocurrencies have no value.

If you send two digital signatures to two people claiming they both own something, the big issue is that the second person might not even know the first person exists. You need some kind of mechanism to invalidate the second one by exposing the first one in a trustless global ledger of events.... that's what blockchains provide.

If you only care about the semantics of disputes--which is potentially fair for claims over a physical object: it acts as a kind of "second factor"--you get a long way by just including the entire chain back to the root whenever you transfer ownership, allowing people to show prominence over other chains they obviously dominate...

...but any time there is a conflict--and not just on the original sale!--in your histories you can't compare timestamps to resolve the dispute as you can't trust them: digital signatures cannot show that one thing happened before the other thing as any timestamp is just data being signed, attached by the signer, and is meaningless.

To resolve these conflicts you need to use your distributed ledger to establish that no such signature has been signed previously: you need a way to authoritatively assign prominence. If you have a solution for this, what you have invented is a cryptocurrency and could be used as such (as there is no relevant difference between fungible and non-fungible tokens).

(And note that this is true even if you try to solve this by using some complex web-of trust of a ton of random third-parties or overlapping sets of parties that different people haphazardly might choose to trust instead of a linear blockchain... you are just talking about systems like Holochain or Stellar or Avalanche instead of systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum.)

> all an NFT does is state "author X gives ownership of Y to Z",

Incorrect. As @saurik says, but I'll just restate: an NFT also tells you the ordering of all such statements within one context (a single blockchain). So you can know whether this was the first such transfer by this owner or a subsequent one. This is the entire purpose of distributed databases, including blockchains.

Actually you can’t know it was by an ‘owner’ because nfts are not tied to the real world. You own nothing but the digital signature.

There are so many problems being skated over here about provenance and ownership and nfts provide nothing of value in that domain, they’re just a get rich quick scheme.

> because nfts are not tied to the real world. You own nothing but the digital signature.

The digital signature is thing that people want to own in the real world!

And yet all the talk is not about the signature, but the thing it refers to. Why is that distinction constantly elided? Is it because the digital signature has no value on its own?

It's because there is no other meaningful way to "own" the thing the signature refers to, if you apply a concept of ownership as you would to a physical piece of art.

Being in physical possession of the bytes to a JPEG is not what gives people the sense that they own this piece of art in the way they might own a painting, because the bytes are so cheaply copied.

Owning the intellectual property behind a JPEG is an entirely different kind of ownership; the value is in the commercial exploitation of those rights, and the buyer is now taking over from the creator in being responsible for said exploitation to get their money's worth. This is not what artists or art collectors want.

The whole point is to artificially recreate the traditional experience of ownership, but for immaterial/digital goods. People talk about owning the work (or an edition of it), not the signature, because that is the whole point of the exercise.

Immaterial artworks such as video art, performances etc. are already being sold in the art market; what you get is a piece of paper stating that you own the work. It's exactly the same as an NFT.

It may seem utterly useless for people who don't care about owning editions of immaterial works of art, but there is nothing scammy about it. It is done entirely in earnest.

Of course there are other ways to meaningfully own the digital artwork, you listed some in your response:

You created the image. You own the copyright to the image (which has legal weight). You may restrict distribution or reproduction in those situations.

These are all more meaningfully ownership than owning a digital receipt on the blockchain pointing to a url on a 3rd party site, which is more akin to buying a star or a piece of the moon from somebody who sets up a website and purports to be selling these ineffable things.

I disagree with you about the point of NFTs, the point of them IMO is to provide cover for ponzi schemes and convince marks parting with their cash that they are buying into a get rich quick scheme in which they'll get rich and someone else will be left holding the bag when they sell their receipt for digital art to someone else.

The references to art markets, asset tracking, provenance, new technology etc etc are just indirection used to distract from the fundamental transaction - give me money (including really high transaction fees for the marketplace) for this worthless receipt which says you own* this digital lion pic, unique amongst thousands of other similar lion pics because it has a cigar or an eye patch. No wonder companies like Nike, Games companies and football clubs and are rushing to take part too and sell fans NFTs, they can't lose!

* For certain values of own not conferring any rights over the image whatsoever.

> Of course there are other ways to meaningfully own the digital artwork, you listed some in your response:

By my count you listed just one - owning the copyright. But as I said, while owning intellectual property is certainly meaningful (and can be valuable), it is not art collecting. There is a reason why there exists no art market where people are trading copyright claims.

As a collector, I don't want to be in the business of managing an intellectual property licensing enterprise. Yet, I want the artwork I own to become a well-known, celebrated cultural object; the artist also wants this, and thankfully - incentivised and empowered by still owning the copyright - will try to manage their career to achieve this.

We can all agree that crypto lends itself to rampant and unrestricted speculation / gambling, which attracts all kinds of people looking for a cash grab or get-rich scheme. Those speculative bubbles have been going on for years, and in all likelihood will continue. It's an issue that artists and collectors in this space are struggling to deal with; people don't like that new releases are sold out in minutes, because flippers and their bots think they can make a profit (this is not dissimilar to event ticketing issues).

However, artists who have experimented with blockchain 10 years ago, were not looking for marks to scam. While pics of lions will go up and down in price, and people who bought even respectable art at the height of the bubble will be looking at a loss in resale value, this market will not disappear; it provides a product that artists and collectors find useful.

I am not of the opinion that this will be as world-changing and all-encompassing as web3 proponents proclaim. Art collection is a niche in the real world, and it will be a slightly larger niche in the digital realm.

Creating something is distinct from owning the copyright (though many jurisdictions automatically assign to creators unless otherwise assigned). For example illustrators for hire immediately assign copyright to someone else, so these are distinct.

The art market is a racket entirely divorced from value, if you want to emulate that, good luck to you, but know what you're getting into, the comparison with the manipulated and celebrity led current art market is entirely unflattering to NFTs as it shows them up for what they are - a get rich quick scheme.

I think this market will disappear when the cryptocurrency bubble bursts, which seems imminent now it has mainstream attention again and with the coming withdrawal of stimulus.

I think you are confusing the image of an NFT with the token itself. That two tokens point to the same JPG (for example) doesn't make them the same NFT. They are two distinct tokens.

Wouldn't the author be different if you just minted a copy? So if the original is from a trust/known entity (like an IRL company or suitably famous artist) this doesn't work. The list of trusted entities could be centralized, crowd-sourced, hand-managed, or anything else; let people decide who they trust to make those determinations and let them switch between them at will.

> Wouldn't the author be different if you just minted a copy?

The problem being described above is the possibility of the trusted author minting multiple digital signature NFTs for the same content. A reseller can't create a copy because they can't sign a message conferring ownership from the trusted source without their private key.

But at least you can check the blockchain for all the content the author has created.

The author could use a unique private key for each blockchain NFT if they wanted to avoid that.

The problem of how to associate a NFT with a physical object is a different one from the transfer/spending problem.

I think that is the "minting" problem.

An artist simply signing stuff does not even prove that a physical object corresponding to the token exists.

I like to think of other use cases, like real estate or stock options. If you talk about a plot of land, it seems feasible to find a unique identifier (you could even involve the government).

Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies right now, so I have to leave it at that. The reason why a "government signature on the deed" would achieve the same thing is because we trust on the government to keep a proper ledger. And the government asks for a lot of money for a transfer.

> I like to think of other use cases, like real estate or stock options. If you talk about a plot of land, it seems feasible to find a unique identifier (you could even involve the government).

A deed digitally signed by the government's private key satisfies this need without a blockchain.

"A deed digitally signed by the government's private key satisfies this need without a blockchain."

Only because the government keeps track of who owns what in a centralized database. Typically they also ask for pretty high transferal fees.

Huh? If you can’t verify that the public key is the author’s then you wouldn’t consider the message to be signed by the author.

Why wouldn't you be able to verify the public key?

You seem to be suggesting that a problem with NFTs is that the artist can mint multiple copies of their artwork, possibly using secret additional private keys.

The answer is that this is not a problem, because the whole point is knowing who the creator of the NFT is, and beeple trying to create additional copies using a secret wallet but not telling anyone will be treated by the market the same as me minting a copy of a beeple piece.

There is some project. NFT Replicas - https://nftreplicas.net/ Nothing is stopping any one to mint another NFT with same content.

Indeed, but NFT enthusiasts would say that the replicas are not valid because they were not originally minted by the trusted author, of course, nothing is stopping the author from minting multiple NFTs of the same content so the point is moot.

Why would you want the minter to be prevented from minting multiple NFRs of the same content? The content is totally moot! It’s the ownership of the scarce token which the author claims uniquely represents the content that people are valuing. Obviously if the author is minting multiple tokens and claiming they all uniquely represent the same piece of content, most likely no one is going to value those tokens much. None of this strikes me as odd or troublesome. It’s how all collectibles have worked long before NFTs.

Minty's "Useless Man" could have been about NFTs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqAOaNS1tqM

(May be NSFW depending on who you work for...)

> will be dated more recently than the other

How does the receiver of such a transfer know that the transfer is final? There's no way for them to know that an "earlier" transfer of same item won't show up days later.

Right. This is, by the way, the sole innovation of Bitcoin. Describing a mechanism to establish a sequential order of transactions with finality.

Timestamping servers. Something like RFC 3161 or WebPKI's Certificate Trust logs.

That doesn't help you know the transfer is final, it just gives you a timestamp that the transfer occurred at which somebody reputable has attested to. You can't know that the owner didn't sign a transfer to some other buyer with an earlier timestamp.

Well, no, only the minter can do the first step:

> "$doomrobo_public_key owns $k as of $date" signed with the minter's private key

If you mean the minter could sign multiple owners of $k, of course that’s true, but that’s like saying that a painter could paint the same thing twice or sell printed copies of their paintings. Of course they can, and if they claim that each one is unique they’re likely to find that people don’t value their stuff much.

It's not the same as selling printed copies or painting multiple painting. It's verifying that two different people 'own' the same painting but neither of them has guaranteed rights to it.

You can require edition number / total copies in the original signed claim. Beyond that, you take it to the courts, which is the same thing you would need to do if the same resource was reminded on blockchain. The blockchain may only make it easier to detect a double mint.

You just invent a thing called notaries. You'll have to go back in time to do it since they already exist but that's besides the point. Anyways, a notary puts their reputation/legal liability on the line and counter signs your transaction. Since they've been granted license by a real legal entity with guns and jails they commit to verifying a transaction occurred at X time.

Monies for the transaction can be put into escrow with a third party (you'll need to go back in time to invent that too). When the notary notifies the escrow holder of the signatures they can release the monies.

When you have a legal system to enforce contracts and people put their own money or legal liability on the line two parties don't need to trust one another to conduct transactions. People buy expensive shit all the time. They don't need to trust each other with the money or valuables because they involve third parties that proffer up (staking if you will) liability to let the two parties conduct transactions.

The blockchain model replaces the staked liability with "expensive" proof of whatever. The only problem is monied entities can these proof systems. They can afford to run a majority of miners, stake the most (or spam stake offerings), or whatever otherwise supposedly expensive resource. They're only expensive resources if you naively assume all mining will be done by randos in their bedrooms.

Blockchains are just a way to do something almost no one needs in a slow expensive way.

dish and washing machines are slow and expensive (use a lot of electricity). But in turn you save some time.

Dish and washing machines are not slow. They cut out whole portions of the task of washing dishes or clothes.

No it doesn't, because you can simply keep selling the "old" version with the signature that say that you are the owner. It is digital, so you can make an an endless number of copies.

You can do the exact same thing with a blockchain NFT - there's absolutely no difference in terms of outcome. Each "sale" generates a unique digital signature NFT because the public key of the person buying is incorporated as part of the cryptographic signature.

Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody creates multiple sales of the same item, it would immediately be visible. Of course it depends on the implementation, how do you identify an object?

Leonardo could still create one NFT saying "this is ownership of my painting of the woman that always looks at the beholder" and another saying "this is ownership of my painting "Mona Lisa" and it would perhaps not be immediately clear that they are the same painting.

Nevertheless, that is the "minting" problem and not the "spending" (or transfer) problem.

Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies at this point, sorry.

> Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody creates multiple sales of the same item, it would immediately be visible

Just use a different private key for each sale.

The private key identifies the artist, so that is not a solution.

No, the private key does not identify the artist.

Instead, what identifies the artist, is the artist saying "hey, this thing over here is the real one!".

None of which involves a Blockchain.

Not sure if you understand how public key cryptography works?

The artists says "this is my key" to their public key. Then they can use their key to sign things, and people can verify the signature because they can check that it belongs to the public key, which the artist has publicly announced.

That doesn't work, because anyone can falsely claim to be the artist.

Obviously you need a way to identify the real artist. For example if they put their public key on their official web site, it would be a pretty good indicator.

People also used to create chains of trust with public key infrastructure. Maybe you trust Bob, and Bob trusts Alice, and Alice has personally met the artist at Burning Man and verified their key there.

Or you go to the government and let them provide a register of identities. In any case it is a separate problem.

If you can't verify the artist, don't buy the NFT, or only buy it at a discount, accounting for the risk. Forgeries are a problem with physical works of art, too.

> Obviously you need a way to identify the real artist

Thats the point though. Nothing about the blockchain has anything to do with this part, and this is really the only part that matters.

So, once again, my point stands. The private key has nothing to do with identifying the real artist. Instead, it is something else entirely that identifies the real artist.

> on their official web site

So then the official website is what is doing the identifying here, of what the real art it. Not the blockchain. It is the artist themselves, saying "This art is the real one", not cryptography.

It is not proof of work, or proof of signed private keys. Instead, it is proof of "official website".

> In any case it is a separate problem.

It is the only problem that matters. The actual way to identify the real artist, separate from the blockchain, is what is actually doing all of the heavy lifting here. The private key isn't doing anything on the important part.

" and this is really the only part that matters."

No it isn't. The point of NFTs is to prove ownership and facilitate trade. Not identifying creators.

But you can't prove ownership of the actual art, with an NFT.

You can only prove ownership of that specific crypto transaction, which might be just a fake NFT, or duplicate.

There is nothing about crypto that actually proves it was the "real" NFT, or real art.

You need something else to actually prove that you own the "real" piece of art or NFT.

> Not identifying creators

If you are unable to identify creators then you are unable to prove ownership, because that NFT could just be a fake one, or even a duplicate that the creator has issued many times without you knowing it.

With crypto alone, you'd only be able to prove that you own something that might just be a fake or duplicate, and anyone can make as many fakes or duplicates as they want, so that's not really proving ownership.

You are conflating several issues. Yes, a creator presumably would have ways to cheat the system, for example by selling the same thing on different blockchains (as mentioned elsewhere). But eventually they would be revealed to be frauds and presumably the worth of their creations would plummet.

To verify the identity of a creator is a solvable problem, though, and is also yet another issue than the "sell it multiple times" problem.

> Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody creates multiple sales of the same item, it would immediately be visible.

There is an infinite number of blockchains.

The people decide which blockchain to use.

I want to add, while I suppose in reality people would settle for specific blockchains (like you can identify the Bitcoin blockchain), I can see a problem for NFTs. As long as there is not the ONE blockchain for NFT ownership, it would be difficult to prevent somebody "selling" the same thing on different NFTs.

Even if the seller says "xyz is the official blockchain", it does not really solve the problem, as they could just say that several times for different blockchains. It does not actually add new information (signing something and putting it on blockchain xyz is equivalent to signing something, putting it on blockchain xyz, and saying "xyz is the official blockchain for my NFTs").

You bought a NFT on some blockchain that exists now, you didn't buy the number. I can sell that same number to someone else, and I could print a big picture of it on fancy paper in a nice frame and afix a hologram seal of authenticity. You owning the NFT of that number doesn't give you any rights to that sale, just as my framed picture doesn't give me any rights over the NFT.

You create a new signature signing a message saying you transferred this. The important bit here is some public immutable record. If this happened on Ethereum, and Ethereum ceased to exist, then your NFT would cease too. If you used say a archive.org snapshot then your NFT would live as long as archive.org servers are up.

DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization"

It may come as a surprise but there are other chains that support DeFi apps and which do not have high gas fees like Ethereum. For example, Avalanche and Solana.

Collateralized crypto loans are the equivalent of people taking loans out on their equity position so they don’t have to pay cap gains and don’t need to Liquidate. So the use case is already demonstrated, it’s just now applied in a crypto world.

That is not why people take out loans. They do it for leverage and to avoid selling because they want exposure to ETH or BTC. There are easier ways to avoid taxes.

Go on

> There are easier ways to avoid taxes.

Such as?

Solana is centralized, no? If a handful of people can shut down the entire network in a few minutes, how is it a strong network? How is it not centralized?

To add to this, are not most blockchains centralised around the core dev team?

The money transfer/bookkeeping system might be decentralised in comparison with standard finance, but it’s no less centralised than a fiat currency, and at least the democratically elected government in my country can 1: be voted out, and 2: employs people who actually understand finance and economics…

Both of those are centralized, and will need to compete with zk rollups on Ethereum in the coming year, which will have tokens too, incentivizing people to try it out.

Do digital signatures really make the blockchain obsolete if they fill the same niche?

Even if blockchain are technically equivalent to digital signatures, it seems like it has some real advantages from a business perspective: - it is capturing the market of people who want to buy "official" digital assets and is becoming the de facto way to do so - the market is one that should have strong network effects - gaining the trust of that market is crucial to supporting these sort of trades

I still think NFTs are a bubble that will come back down to Earth eventually. But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, and people don't discuss these phenomena with the same sort of skepticism.

>But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing,

People for the most part don't get rich off of stamps. Is more of a hobby than an investment.

I know people who made a decent living from sneaker trading though.

Same. Know a handful of ppl making well into 6 figures a year selling on StockX.

Yeah I grew up in the hood and some of the more successful people from my area started their financial life by sneaker trading.

you can make a decent living in all kinds of nonsense if you can either find a way to predict collective mood swings or just get lucky. with millions of people scheming at blockchain stuff there will be thousands getting lucky over and over thinking they are smart

But at what point do we qualify something/someone as “smart”? I’d argue that someone that’s getting lucky over and over again are clearly on to something. As the saying goes: “You create your own luck”.

> But at what point do we qualify something/someone as “smart”?

That's a good point. We can only give our guess based on what we know. For example, people regarded Alan Greenspan as "smart" before 2008. I now think he is an idiot at best and a horrible, malicious person at worst (the truth is probably somewhere in between). Maybe things will change in a few decades and people will then recognize him as "smart" again? It is pretty silly trying to predict the future.

> I’d argue that someone that’s getting lucky over and over again are clearly on to something. As the saying goes: “You create your own luck”.

I present Sir Isaac Newton as a counterexample. Clearly a smart person but just because someone is smart does not mean he was right about everything. In fact, we know now that his nonsensical "work" with alchemy killed him. I am positive that this fad will fail. I am just annoyed that now the name web3 is taken by this nonsense.

Most of the entertainment industry is about predicting collective mood swings.

People made good money selling Beanie Babies, Baseball Cards and other fads... at the beginning of those.

For many people, NFTs are also a hobby not an investment. You just hear about the investors because they are the loudest.

> NFTs are also a hobby not an investment. You just hear about the investors because they are the loudest.

Or the only voice, because no one else is interested in looking at a hash for fun. The real artwork is easily digitally duplicated and so if your hobby was to look at the art, you do not need to purchase the NFT.

Spending a few dollars on NFT "ownership" is worth it to me to have my name next to something, just like spending $10 on a League of Legends skin is worth it to some people to have their name next to a piece of artwork in a video game.

I am literally interested in looking at a hash for fun, since it shows up online in NFT viewers with a little picture of it in my account. $10 is such a small amount of money to me, if I didn't spend it on an NFT then I may have bought a CS:GO skin or hypothetically some Candy Crush lollipop hammers, spent it at the arcade or put it into a slot machine or something. The NFT sparks better conversation.

That's before getting into the fact that if I buy an independently drawn NFT, that $10 doubles as a donation to help support the artist's work, and the NFT becomes public proof that I helped financially support the artist.

so NFTs are Candy Crush lollipops, but not attached to a particular game?

That's probably the weakest of my examples, since lollipop hammers are at least valuable for their utility within a video game.

I would think of art NFTs as more like character or weapon skins - completely useless except that it's visually appealing and you can show off your "ownership" of it to other people within the game. With art NFTs, the "game" so far is just NFT viewing tools, social media profile pics, etc.

Actually, premium Steam profile borders might be an even more apt analogy, since they aren't tied to any game and are also useful solely for vanity.

Of course, then you have NFTs that actually do represent usable in-game items like with Axie Infinity or Gods Unchained, but that's an adjacent topic.

You can also spend money and get a star named after you. I suppose you could assign an NFT to the stellar coordinates and sell the stars as well.

Not only could you sell stars as well, you could sell the same star on multiple chains!

I'd totally buy a star NFT sold by God, which is the correct equivalent.

And how would you verify that the address the NFT is sign with belongs to god?

I would presume God would find a way to make his intentions clear, maybe through his earthly agents in his church.

If you are concerned that this would need to happen off-chain, and I would need to trust my channel to God NFT launch announcement, then you are of course correct, but note that is is not a slight on NFTs.

NFTs are conceptually no different than the "Google Digital Art Marketplace", except people are less concerned it will be shutdown in two years.

Beanie Babies, Baseball Cards, Comic Books all had period of rampant speculation whos markets were destroyed once people who "invested" tried to turn their assets back into cash. Hobbyists just suffer through these periods.

Anecdote time, I was at an Xmas party and people were talking about what crypto they were investing in. I said I speculated a bit, then got spooked and got my money out of Crypto.com. (which wasn't easy). This got everyone interested, they had no idea how to turn their Crypto back to dollars. The market is going up, because there's a one way flow of money.

> I still think NFTs are a bubble that will come back down to Earth eventually. But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, and people don't discuss these phenomena with the same sort of skepticism.

While I agree with basically all of your comment, I'd like to point out that plenty of people in the online space look at the sneaker market with the same skepticism... but that skepticism isn't stopping teenagers with rented bots from making some serious money buying and flipping new releases.

Skepticism was a poor choice of words on my part. I think skepticism is absolutely the right response for both sneakers and NFTs.

What I should have said is that it seems a lot of people dismiss NFTs with a certainty that doesn't seem justified considering there are other collectibles like baseball cards without any inherently valuable physical properties that have retained their value long-term.

I honestly don't know anything about the sneaker world besides that it exists, so that shouldn't have been my example.

I actually think there is an interesting and nuanced conversation to be had on what fundamentally is different between an NFT and a baseball card. But that doesn't seem to be the conversation anyone is having.

I have been thinking of this as well. Pokemon cards as NFT would work, but why would the Pokemon company (the central entity) be ok with having a decentralised solution for it? What does the company get?

NFTs need support of the big names but they already have better solutions for what they want. Currently NFTs are creating their own set of *mon cards but I don't see why I would want that.

Another example - currently digital games aren't resellable and NFTs could solve that problem. But why would Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft etc want that?

A couple of things to note here:

- New brands are created all the time; you don't have to be Nintendo to do so. maybe you get bought be Nintendo after.

- Big brands ultimately still need to go where the customers are.

- What the blockchain gives your digital good is a sense of permanence. This may not matter for an individual purchaser who simply wants to speculate in a hot market, but there would be no such market if the ownership ledger was run by single company. The narrative that these ownership records exists on a blockchain that will survive any particular startup failing underpins the whole thing.

Well one major difference is that a person could ruin their cards or bend them.

There is also the grading system and you can't really make the card go up in grade, just down.

The whole boom in the 80s really started because boomers came into their prime earning years. When they were kids baseball cards were mostly to put in their bike spokes to make a clicking noise or thrown around so cards in great shape were in short supply. Most importantly though they were not coins or stamps that their parents collected.

I use to listen to a radio show 5 years ago for card collecting that the whole show was basically people calling in and the host telling them the cards were not worth anything.

This past year though is the all time high for sports cards but we already well off the peak.

The problem with NFTs is they came along at the peak of the everything bubble so the prices have nothing to do with reality. Digital collectibles make perfect sense and are no less goofy than anything else people collect.

Not something I would ever buy but ultimately nothing is as goofy as the price of an original Mark Rothko painting. To me that is the gold standard of collectibles and the rationality of the collectibles market.

> I honestly don't know anything about the sneaker world besides that it exists, so that shouldn't have been my example.

Fair enough! As a neat entry point into it: the sneaker reseller world is incredibly high tech: the bot platforms make huge amounts of money and have quite good UX these days. Impressive bits of tech, even if I despise what they're used for.

Baseball cards now have value, in the period of 1990 to 2000 they were pretty worthless after the bubble of the late 80s crashed. They retain value though nostalgia, as soon as they become an investment again, and speculation starts, a new bubble will build, with a crash following.

Totally agree. Sport card collecting is just as ridiculous as the concept of NFTs.

A piece of thin cardboard changing in value based on a guy hitting more home runs.

Stamps and coins are the WW2 generation version of all this.

Practically everyone has their own personal form of gambling and at the same time everyone believes all the other forms of gambling are foolish.

> it seems like it has some real advantages from a business perspective

Even if homeopathy is just placebo, homeopathy has better marketing.

The critical innovation of blockchain is that it takes your digital signatures and orders them in a way that's byzantine fault tolerant.

if you are trying to be persuasive you should know that what you said is complete gibberish to tech saavy people who are not already bought in to whatever you are talking about.

This shit is so pervasive. Honestly seems more like they're trying to get up-votes from fellow crypto enthusiasts than trying to convince anyone; except perhaps themselves.

I don't really care about upvotes, I just think that it's an important point to understand the technology. I'm not saying anything positive or negative about it. I'm just that blockchains are about more than logging cryptographic signatures -- they're also about ordering those cryptographic signatures.

I mean, if you don't know what byzantine fault tolerance [1] is, then that's fine. It's not gibberish to people who are into distributed systems. And I'm not claiming it's a silver bullet or trying to persuade anyone either. BFT is overkill for most use cases, but sometimes it's useful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

The commenter above was certainly familiar with BFT. It wasn't the term as such that was gibberish.

But rather, the implication you were attempting to make that this is a "critical innovation" that provides value.

What's gibberish about the implication? That's all a blockchain is. It takes cryptographic signatures (or more specifically, transactions that are cryptographically signed), and puts them in order.

As pointed out, the cryptography existed well before blockchain. My only point was that the fancy decentralized way it orders the transactions is the real innovation.

(edit: grammer)

It's gibberish because you don't justify why this innovation provides value.

Instead you just slather more fancy technical lingo on top.

It provides value to people who want to compute things on a public network that no single party controls. We can argue about whether or not that's a worthwhile thing for people to value until the cows come home, but I think it's beyond the scope of this conversation.

But point taken. I'll avoid using fancy technical lingo like "BFT" or "cryptographic" on hacker news any more.

Yeah, this "cryptographic" stuff is just way over our heads.

The blockchain and even the EVM are not distributed systems. They merely run the same (mostly pointless) computation, on every single node participating in the system.

To me, distributed systems means parallel computation. The blockchain by definition, cannot be parallelized (except when someone manages to pull off such a large theft that the developers are forced to fork the blockchain).

They are decentralized systems, which achieve their decentralization by being as inefficient as possible. Sure, it's a bit clever, but it's also incredibly stupid.

>every DeFi scheme is a money loser relative to just buying eth and waiting for a pump

Maybe, until ETH never pumps again.

Eventually the blue chip cryptocurrencies will find their fair price, and price swings of 10-20% in a single day will be a thing of the past.

DeFi DAOs like Curve Finance [0] (currently leading the DeFi pack in terms of Total Value Locked [1]) will generate income for whoever holds a CRV token... so long as the crypto trading markets exist.

Curve actually provides a service. They pool liquidity to enable larger trades with less slippage, and as such they're extremely popular.

The gas fees are not an issue either, as Curve works across 7 different layer 1 blockchains at the moment and I am sure that is bound to increase in the future.

[0] https://curve.fi/

[1] https://defillama.com/

> "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization"

Some popular types of Layer 2s, namely zk rollups, have on-chain data and on-chain transaction verification, so I believe you are wrong on this count.

I guess I am really out of touch but I understood about two and a half words of what you just said.

It means that everything you need to arrive at a consensus on the validity of a transaction is on the blockchain, and thus enforced by the decentralized network of nodes that validate the blockchain.

So contrary to what the grandparent comment claims, these layer 2 (i.e. scalability) solutions make no compromises on decentralization, as they would if they had a consensus-critical component that was managed by a centralized off-chain party.

It's a bit like having an in-mem db that then commits your transactions to the actual DB which is much slower.

Are you referring to the likes of Polygon / MATIC?

Polygon has several products. Usually when people say "Polygon" they are referring to Polygon's popular sidechain product, but Polygon's Hermez product is a zk rollup like I was talking about.

>>NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures.

A credibly open and neutral protocol for holding and trading digital assets is not something digital signatures can provide alone. Digital signatures do not solve the double spending problem without trusted third parties. Thus far only blockchains have been able to provide this set of qualities.

>>All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain.

Digital signatures provide no guarantees about data processing and availability. Massively distributed public blockchains do.

I have to say your statement is quite accurate. But the last sentence just reflects the eventual success of the Web3. It is all about making money, aka being greedy.

Agree. It's only the term `web3` is confusing. It should be called `crypto`, since it's a niche, not like `web2`, which is universally suitable for everyone.

One correctiong. NFTs is just a tool. I believe what you mean is that Digital Arts market based on NFTs is a bubble.

I agree and I wish more people understood this distinction.

To say that NFTs are all scams is like saying that pixel shaders are all games. One is often used to implement the other, but they're not the same thing.

NFTs will likely find niches outside of signifying ownership. For instance, I'd like to see them used to denote package maintainer status. That way you could have automation that allows package maintainers to do certain maintenance things like publish the hash of the next version, and if they transfer the token to a new maintainer, no permission rejiggering would be required.

Pixel shaders are useful.

Except, ironically, when they're used for mining cryptocurrencies (okay, not pixel shaders, but close enough).

Token ring protocol was useful, back in its day. Those tokens were also non fungible (admittedly, there were weaker assurances around that nonfungibility, but I think that's orthogonal).

What happens to the package if the maintainer loses their password?

This is a cool problem. Never looked into it any further but there is some proof of concept code out in the wild about this.

"Social key recovery" https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

How's that different/better from just passing an rsa key around?

Sharing private keys is bad practice for a lot of reasons.

Presumably in this case you're doing this without a third party like github (e.g. the code is stored on ipfs).

Rotating that rsa key requires all of your users to update things on their side so they'll continue accepting updates signed by the new key. That's a problem because you want key rotation to be low-effort so people do it just in case, and notifying every user is the opposite of that.

On the other hand, when a new user or organization takes over for an old one re: publishing updated versions (presumably there's a smart contract that gets updated with the latest trusted hash by the tokenholder), that's an event where you really do want all you users to scrutinize the new maintainer.

Key transfer is opaque, NFT transfer is transparent.

Another application I've seen is using NFTs for reselling digital tickets.

This is exactly one of the use cases I am excited for NFTs.

I hate tickets resellers.

If NFTs could allow you to resell digital tickets out of Ticketmaster’s hands. I’m all for it. Otherwise I’ll be really disappointed.

Also, people collect tickets. After the event has occured.

Largely agree with this. The big promise of defi was to “bank the unbanked”, but Eth is

- slow (15 txn/sec, 22-23 with the move to proof of stake) - expensive (I read somewhere that globally Eth users spend more on 30M USD in fees per day!) - too volatile to be reliable for everyday banking use cases - bad for the environment

Blockchain technology is interesting and very powerful, but VCs and founders have all too often put the cart before the horse. A few years ago I spoke to an Aussie tech entrepreneur who had raised funding for his “Airbnb for RV” platform. He didn’t get much attention until he said it was blockchain based. In 9.99 out of 10 cases there is no need for a blockchain when a trusted, centralised ledger will do just fine.

Edge cases I can think of where a blockchain makes sense is in cases such as post-trade activities or trade finance where multiple parties need to settle complex transactions in a distributed way (Contour is a good example of this). Disclaimer: I do not own shares in Contour; I just find it interesting.

>>- slow (15 txn/sec, 22-23 with the move to proof of stake) - expensive (I read somewhere that globally Eth users spend more on 30M USD in fees per day!) -

This is no longer the case with L2 solutions, like zk-Rollups. See what StarkEx, which is one particular Validium/zk-Rollup L2 solution, is doing:

https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson/status/1475206185762578437?...

>>Past week, @ethereum ~ 9M txs. StarkEx ~ 6.25M TWO THIRDS THE TX COUNT OF ETHEREUM.

L2 solutions can process transactions at scales and fees a couple orders of magnitude greater and lower than Ethereum L1, respectively.

>>too volatile to be reliable for everyday banking use cases

Stablecoins aren't volatile, and they are a major, and rapidly growing use case of Ethereum

>>bad for the environment

Ethereum's energy consumption declines by 99.95% upon the completion of the transition to Proof of Stake.

> Ethereum's energy consumption declines by 99.95% upon the completion of the transition to Proof of Stake.

Why do Ethereum fans keep using this example as if it’s already done, when it still isn’t?

It's an argument at the end of the day. 'We know it's bad now. But it's being worked on.'

Just like a Tesla investor might believe autonomous driving is being worked on.

We're talking about the long-term viability of something, so it makes sense to talk about how that something will look in the very near future.

The completion of Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake will occur very soon, most likely within the year. The testnet for the merge - which is the term describing the technical process that completes the transition (it refers to the currently running Proof of Stake Beacon Chain being merged into the execution chain to allow Proof of Work to be turned off) - is already running:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/12/20/kintsugi-merge-testnet/

L2 solutions: yes they do indeed scale them, but it appears to be a centralised solution to a decentralised problem. In other words, putting lipstick on a pig.

Stablecoins aren’t volatile, correct, but that’s because they are pegged to an offchain fiat currency or other form of “real” collateral. Even DAI, which is the most “truly” decentralised stablecoins of them all, is pegged against fiat.

POS is good yes, but the Eth community have been saying this for a long time now. “Show me the money” ;)

>>L2 solutions: yes they do indeed scale them, but it appears to be a centralised solution to a decentralised problem. In other words, putting lipstick on a pig.

L2 block selection can be entirely decentralized. The first iterations are centralized because the software is extremely immature and having the block inclusion process centralized allows bugs to be more quickly and effectively dealt with. The major L2s all have decebtralization of coordinators in their roadmaps.

>>Stablecoins aren’t volatile, correct, but that’s because they are pegged to an offchain fiat currency or other form of “real” collateral. Even DAI, which is the most “truly” decentralised stablecoins of them all, is pegged against fiat.

Dai is pegged to the dollar, but can use entirely on-chain assets like ETH as collateral. Other stablecoins, like RAI, are not even pegged to any fiat currency, and use only on-chain assets for collateral.

>>POS is good yes, but the Eth community have been saying this for a long time now.

Progress has been made. On December 1st, 2020, the Proof of Stake Beacon Chain.

The Merge, which will complete the transition to the Beacon Chain, now has a testnet, launched on December 20th, 2021:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/12/20/kintsugi-merge-testnet/

The transition should be complete within a year. It can't be rushed, given the amount of financial value involved.

> Largely agree with this. The big promise of defi was to “bank the unbanked”

The un-banked aren't un-banked because there are no banks, or even because banks are inaccessible. They are un-banked because they do not have money. This is a social problem characterized by folks falling through the cracks. It's a lack of social safety net, a lack of unionization, a lack of inflation-adjusted minimum wage, a lack of healthcare. Broadly, a lack of of social programs.

I've never met a single person who had money but couldn't get a bank account* - have you? What good is a bank account to someone with no money anyways? What are they going to put into it? Just opening a bank account doesn't make you magically any less poor. You can grab one at ally.com free of charge right now with no minimum deposit. They'll even pay interest on your checking accounts which of course stablecoins will not unless you put them at massive risk.

Not to mention for the poor, a massively volatile speculative asset with astronomical fees is literally the worst thing they could put all their money into.

* outside people on the OFAC list, which, I would argue, is a good thing.

> I've never met a single person who had money but couldn't get a bank account* - have you?

I don't agree with defi but this is absolutely a problem in a lot of rural america. People with money, who get paid, but without a bank so they have to take their checks to gas stations who take huge fees.

That you haven't met someone like this isn't surprising at all.

Why can't they open an online checking account like Ally which will allow them to deposit a photo of their check free of charge? My understanding is a lot of low-income folks have smartphones as desktop replacements. Is this not a strictly better solution than anything in crypto?

I'm also open to postal banking as a solution to this problem, but I'm not really clear on where the system is actually currently failing folks who have money. Are they banned by ChexSystems or something?

I get it, "Bank the Unbanked!" is a compelling narrative, but folks seem not to be asking the relevant questions: (1) who are the unbanked exactly and (2) why aren't they banked - specifically - when there's a ton of banks out there, a bunch of which charge nothing.

Many banks, both historically and presently, have pervasive and capricious fees that disproportionately impact people with less money. Both because those fees are large relative to the amount of money they have, and because those fees arise in situations more likely to occur with less money (e.g. overdraft fees, policies that intentionally do withdrawals before deposits to cause overdraft fees, minimum balances, ATM fees, and many others).

And furthermore, the institutions more likely to be friendlier to customers with less money are sometimes also institutions on a smaller scale that may have a harder time offering some of the services of larger institutions (e.g. branch/ATM locations, compelling variety of credit and account instruments, investment arms, better online banking experiences).

To the extent this is changing, it also has to change in people's perceptions, in a fashion that makes it easier to predict and feel confident in.

> Why can't they open an online checking account like Ally which will allow them to deposit a photo of their check free of charge?

You have an incredible amount of optimism for both Ally's marketing department and also rural internet. Furthermore, this doesn't solve the cash problem unless you want to pay upwards of $5 just to pull out of an ATM.

> folks seem not to be asking the relevant questions

This is an incredibly well researched situation affecting a lot of americans. You not knowing isn't the same as this not being well understood.

This sounds like parts of the US has a problem with checks and a lack of good, digital bank services.

I can transfer money and pay my bills with my phone. I can even transfer money to people not having the same bank as I have. I did it today, it took 30s or so and the recipient could immediately see the money on her phone. Where I live we also tend to use cards a LOT. I can pay in almost any store with my debit card and the money is drawn from my bank account right away. It was decades since I've saw a check.

That's a long winded way of saying that you live in New York.

>>It's a lack of social safety net, a lack of unionization, a lack of inflation-adjusted minimum wage, a lack of healthcare. Broadly, a lack of of social programs.

Social spending has risen at unprecedented rates since the 1950s:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

If the social democratic narrative were true, we would have seen the rate of wage growth rise. The opposite has happened.

It turns out social democracy benefits only the public sector unions.

A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield:

New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:

https://archive.md/JnJQY

In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.

California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. That is where all the social welfare spending is going.

>>Not to mention for the poor, a massively volatile speculative asset with astronomical fees is literally the worst thing they could put all their money into.

No, the worst thing is lottery tickets:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/amazing...

Tokens on the blockchain on the other hand provide hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines with a way to make a living, and literally saved many from death during the mass-unemployment created by the lockdown. See the rise of Axie Infinity.

And there are plenty of crypto platforms that offer zero/near-zero fees, like Axie's Ronin, which is a near-zero-fee Ethereum sidechain.

>>outside people on the OFAC list, which, I would argue, is a good thing.

What about innocent people from countries on the OFAC list. Do you think that is a good thing? Acceptable collateral damage? What about WikiLeaks, which was blockaded by the credit card companies, under pressure from US government agencies, after it revealed war crimes? Good thing too?

You speak from a position of privilege, to reinforce centralized structures of control that perpetuate that privilege.

> Tokens on the blockchain on the other hand provide hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines with a way to make a living, and literally saved many from death during the mass-unemployment created by the lockdown. See the rise of Axie Infinity.

It's clearly a Ponzi scheme, where new entrants pay a large entry fee ($1k+), which funds the returns of the existing players. Poor people borrowing money to fund other poor people, until the last to join are stuck with the bill (earnings are already crashing).

More details in:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725845

- https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483

- https://ambcrypto.com/axie-infinity-ronin-blockchain-see-dec...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/AxieInfinity/comments/odmdrk/how_do...

It's not poor people funding Axie. It's whales, who pay poor people for the SLP tokens that their grinding earns them. It's the same economy that was once seen in World of Warcraft gold farming, but allowed to globalize and become streamlined, so that more gamer whales can connect to more people willing to work for them.

Beyond this enablement of more sophisticated coordination between those with capital and those with time, the emergence of digital collectibles might increase the aggregate amount of physical wealth, as the emergence of physical collectibles did some 30 some thousand years ago:

https://archive.fo/pvabs

> It's the same economy that was once seen in Warcraft gold farming, but allowed to globalize and become streamlined, so that more gamer whales can connect to more people willing to work for them.

You say that like its even close to a good thing. It's unproductive, a waste of time, resources, human capital. It's also a Ponzi scheme because all payouts are made from new investors minus operational costs. Gains are illusory in aggregate.

It's a transfer of wealth from those with surplus capital, who are looking to expend that capital on entertainment, to those on the brink of starvation, so yes it's a good thing. And no, if the transfer is done for entertainment purposes, as many game asset purchases are, it's not a "ponzi" scheme.

>>Gains are illusory in aggregate.

Gains might not be illusionary, given they are giving rise to new stores of wealth which can have economic utility. See the essay on the rise of physical collectibles 30 some thousand years ago.

> It's a transfer of wealth from those with surplus capital, who are looking to expend that capital on entertainment, to those on the brink of starvation, so yes it's a good thing.

I mean, you can make the same exact argument about any exploitation of poor people for entertainment purposes. Your description maps perfectly to Bumfights. I think most would agree that your description alone does not make an intrinsically good system, let alone a moral one.

> And no, if the transfer is done for entertainment purposes, as many game asset purchases are, it's not a "ponzi" scheme.

The rich folks are buying in to make a gain, not entertain themselves. They are 100% of liquidity. The system is unproductive and yields nothing of external economic value but purports an increased value over time via 'number go up' all while operators slowly bleed capital out of the system. This is a Ponzi scheme. Ask yourself, would it work if money weren't involved in any way?

> Gains might not be illusionary, given they are giving rise to new stores of wealth which can have economic utility.

Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff were just ahead of their time, apparently. Given sufficient mental gymnastics, they too could have been captains of industry. Bernie after all gave rise to a new store of value! Shares of Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities LLC with meaningful economic utility! You could even lend them to others to earn a yield via a brokerage, I suspect! Alas, time makes fools of us all.

>>I mean, you can make the same exact argument about any exploitation of poor people for entertainment purposes

Paying poor people, who are grateful for the opportunity to feed their family, is not exploitiation. People heeding your admonishments against 'exploitation' would lead to more suffering, and no party being better off. It's pure politicization of interactions, at the expense of actual real life humans.

>>The rich folks are buying in to make a gain, not entertain themselves

It's a game, with a competitive element, so obviously some proportion are playing for entertainment.

>>Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff were just ahead of their time, apparently. Given sufficient mental gymnastics, they too could have been captains of industry.

Your hyperbolic comparison, between a game with digital assets, and actual ponzi schemes, is immature.

And arguing that digital assets, which become far more durable forms of property when NFTized on blockchains, can find economic utility as a store of value, is a completely reasonable argument, and your extreme reaction to this, full of snark and hyperbole, suggests your stance on this is far too motivated by emotion and bias to assess it.

> Paying poor people, who are grateful for the opportunity to feed their family, is not exploitiation. People heeding your admonishments against 'exploitation' would lead to more suffering, and no party being better off. It's pure politicization of interactions, at the expense of actual real life humans.

I mean it depends on what you’re paying them to do and how much you’re paying them. Axie “players” now make on average less than minimum wage in the Philippines and continued earnings depends on more people buying into the ponzi.

> Your hyperbolic comparison, between a game with digital assets, and actual ponzi schemes, is immature.

The economics are clear and you haven’t really disputed them except by invoking the intangible magic of the blockchain and digital assets.

>>Axie “players” now make on average less than minimum wage in the Philippines and continued earnings depends on more people buying into the ponzi.

The minimum wage in the PH is zero, with millions unemployed, and many more than normal, due to lockdown restrictions.

Axie saved many lives, and if you were to put aside your agenda, and objectively study this, you'd find out how many people in the Philippines who were on the brink are grateful for the lifeline Axie provided them.

>>The economics are clear and you haven’t really disputed them except by invoking the intangible magic of the blockchain and digital assets.

Collectibles don't suddenly become "ponzi schemes" (!) when they become digital or are issued on blockchains. Your analogy is absurd, but I suppose that's ok, given the abundance of hyperbole on the pro-blockchain side.

I agree that the biggest problem poor people have is lack of money.

> I've never met a single person who had money but couldn't get a bank account...

This is an exhaustively documented problem.

There absolutely are banking deserts (riffing on the "food desert" phrase). Those pay day loan and 3rd party check cashing services exist (to exploit) those communities which don't have banks, credit unions.

I agree with your views in a country like the US where banks are widespread and people have Internet access. However in a country like Indonesia it’s quite different. Only 50% of the population have a bank account, and even if they have a bank account they might not have sufficient credit history to apply for a loan for their business or a home. Banking is much more than just a checking or savings account with a debit card. DeFi theoretically has a lot of potential to disrupt in these countries (as many people own a mobile phone), but it looks like it will be up to the horizontal platforms like Grab and Gojek.

> Banking is much more than just a checking or savings account with a debit card. DeFi theoretically has a lot of potential to disrupt in these countries (as many people own a mobile phone)

You dont need DeFi for that. See M-Pesa.

> None of this is about giving power back to individuals

Artificial scarcity is the aspect of web3 that bothers me most.

The web is all about abundance; reducing the marginal cost of software and information to zero so as many people as possible can have access. It seems like web3 advocates seek to do the opposite and lock software and information inside the digital equivalent of diamond mines.

I've asked for this many times (though not here) and still haven't received a satisfactory answer, so I'm curious: who said any of this? Is there a single influential architect of the net or the web who believed this or is this something that was and is a politically aspirational goal by special interest groups like the GNU folks?

One reference is “Free” by Chris Anderson, https://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp...

DHH has written about abundance as part of his approach to Rails, https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-won-t-let-you-pay-me-for-my-open...

The “Post-scarcity economy” article on Wikipedia lists a number of references, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

Generally, computing trends toward abundance. Computers are priced about the same, but do more each generation.

Right but none of these folks were associated with the origins of the net or the web at all. They're people who either inferred post-scarcity through trends they saw or wanted to apply an ideology to the net and the web. DHH is the only technical person in that list.

The reason this distinction is important is because a lot of folks try to make the case that the ideological origins of computer networking were with an eye toward post-scarcity, but this seems incorrect to me. Instead it seems to be ideological anger that the internet is not supporting post-scarcity economics.

Tim Berners-Lee, “The Many Meanings of Open”, https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Open.html

> “The World Wide Web turns 25 next year. We have come a long way, but we must all continue to push for these various forms of openness in the appropriate places. Only then can we ensure that the Web is for everyone.”

While his essay doesn’t use the words “abundance” or “post-scarcity”, it gets pretty close. My guess is that the guy who gave the Internet away for free probably approaches technology from an abundance perspective.

> “…but this seems incorrect to me.”

I’m curious what has led you to the opinion these people are wrong? I’m interested to know about histories of the web that reflect a philosophy of scarcity.

> While his essay doesn’t use the words “abundance” or “post-scarcity”, it gets pretty close. My guess is that the guy who gave the Internet away for free probably approaches technology from an abundance perspective.

Thanks for that essay. I actually didn't see anything that got close to post scarcity. The only point that seemed to touch on it was the point about Open Access but it seemed to be closely scoped to academic work.

> My guess is that the guy who gave the Internet away for free probably approaches technology from an abundance perspective.

Maybe? Giving things away for free doesn't lead to a post-scarcity mindset. Not every person that donated to charity or volunteers with their time thinks the world can get there either.

> I’m curious what has led you to the opinion these people are wrong? I’m interested to know about histories of the web that reflect a philosophy of scarcity.

It's hard because a "philosophy of scarcity" is pretty ill-defined. As early as 2016 [1] Berners-Lee was pushing the W3C to standardize web payments. And HTTP status code 402 Payment Required was in the HTTP spec since at least RFC 2068 [2] in 1997. So at least since then someone thought that the internet would be used to facilitate payment.

But that's enough uncertainty for me to comfortably say that the internet was not designed for (or even against) post scarcity in mind. Therefore there's no ideological connection between post-scarcity and the net or the web.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/blog/wpwg/2016/12/16/web-payments-tractio...

[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2068

You’re making the argument that if the web has a payments API/protocol then the community building the web can’t simultaneously aspire toward a future of abundance. That doesn’t make sense.

Some items, like tickets to the World Cup, are scarce. A payments API/protocol allows scarce items to be sold online. Presence of the API/protocol doesn’t prevent simultaneous distribution of abundant items online, or imply creators of the web are anything but pragmatic. Even the Free Software Foundation is pragmatic about people charging a fee for GPL software (e.g. sell a DVD with the software), as long as the GPL licensed source code is included. FSF hopes you’ll give away the DVD, but understands if you choose not to.

It seems like the idea that people are working toward abundance really bothers you. How come?

> You’re making the argument that if the web has a payments API/protocol then the community building the web can’t simultaneously aspire toward a future of abundance. That doesn’t make sense.

Oh I'm not saying folks cannot aspire toward abundance. I'm only saying that the technology didn't have abundance in mind when creating the net or the web.

> It seems like the idea that people are working toward abundance really bothers you. How come?

I'm not against that at all. A lot of arguments against Blockchain technologies seem to be that "the web used to be about abundance and Blockchain tech is against that so it's against the idea of the web as a whole." It's an argument designed around a narrative of a rug pull (e.g. it used to be abundant and now it's not) as opposed to a more realistic narrative that "we wish to bring the web to an abundance state and Blockchain technologies don't share that wish" which is an accurate but much more mild claim. I just want it to be clear that there was no solid historical basis for abundance in computer networking so that activists do not change history for stronger claims and that such claims (for or against abundance mind you) are ideologically motivated.

Web3 has grown synonymous with blockchain. The things I really value in web3 are non-blockchain distributed systems. IPFS, Gun.js, heck, even BitTorrent could be considered web3. Most problems shouldn't be solved with blockchains. Crypto is what makes web3 artificially scarce.

I don't know about the others, but IPFS uses Filecoin, which is blockchain based.

This is not exact. Filecoin is built on the top of IPFS!

https://filecoin.io/build/

Yes, but IMHO, IPFS without Filecoin doesn't really innovate in any meaningful way over previous CAS/DHT based distributed filesystems (Freenet, Tahoe-LAFS, etc). Filecoin lets IPFS claim that they have at least tried to solve the freeloader problem and incentivized people to actually store strangers' encrypted data long term.

What are your thoughts on Ethereum sharding and proof of stake for scaling transactions and lowering costs?

NFTs can also contain unlockable content which gives them utility, and more than one edition of a given NFT can be minted. Gas fees vary drastically depending on the chain.

Digital signatures could provide some sense of ownership, but how does that solve transferring value/payment, especially the common scenario of splits/royalty percentages on subsequent sales?

As a concept I don’t think they are going away, but their implementation will vary over time.

> None of this is about giving power back to individuals

Exactly, when people claimed web3 is about the individual and decentralization I knew 100% it is a power play being attempted by some stupid people who have no idea how the web works.

I've been noticing this web3 buzzword picking up steam on here for months now. And it all feels very manufactured (much how metaverse has been co-opted and tainted by Facebook). I suspect this web3 push is just cryptobros shoehorning their schemes into relevance.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=web3

On the other hand, if you're paying attention, you might have noticed a push back to web1 and even older tech. I hope whatever is next actually springs forth from that movement. Because a platform built around extracting wealth sounds horrible.

web3.js is the name of the Ethereum API since 2017.

First commit in this repo is 2014:

https://github.com/ethereumproject/web3.js/commits/develop?a...

It didnt become a marketing term until last year. At least, in public perception.

And the way "web3" is used by marketers today is disconnected from ethereum's api

It won't stay long. `web` marks a generally available, free stuff, which ETH isn't. Let's just stick with `crypto`, it suits better.

What a nice use-case for my recent web1* project, google trends for hackernews! Here's a comparison of "metaverse" vs "web3" over the past several months: https://jacksonkearl.github.io/HackerTrends/?query=%22web3%2...

* Not technically web1. It uses `fetch`, but it's a single 100 line HTML file. Web 1.5?

For me (Firefox 95 on Ubuntu 20.04), the bars appear to be hanging down from the top of the chart, instead of rising from the bottom; is that intentional?

Yep. (better on mobile where the bottom can get cut off)

Cool project.

what you are noticing is increased interest in permissionless data. But sure, reframe everything you think of as bad thought as manufactured.

Federation, Tor, IPFS, DAT, CDJS, BATMAN, etc are all technologies that are tackling the problem of data/network ownership in some form or another and have been doing it for years. The current and specific uptick in "web3" references appears to come from blockchain projects all vying to be the next big thing.

From the article: "...the most developed areas of web3, like decentralized finance (aka DeFi) where literally hundreds of financial applications have been built on top of Ethereum..."

There's web3 in a nutshell. Hundreds of applications built with the sole purpose of extracting wealth.

Web 3 is already being commandeered by hyper-growth marketing bullshit, cool ideas or not it will end up being just a slogan to try and hawk technology to people.

If permissionless data provides value it will prosper in spite of the marketing buzz. Same thing happened in Web2.0. There is no real delineation between Web1, 2, 3, it's just marketing.

> On the other hand, if you're paying attention, you might have noticed a push back to web1

Exactly. Quite a few devs are fed up with the unnecessary bloat/performance issues oftentimes associated with web2 and like to stick to the web1 approach when they can. And I think the overall sentiment towards web3 shows well here on hn

At the same time, most internet users don't care about decentralization in the slightest. Many can't even be bothered to adjust their browser's privacy settings or use an adblocker.

So, who really cares about web3? I don't know a single person who does

I think you hit the real point that the VCs gloss over and rationalize as “users don’t know they want it”:

> most internet users don't care about decentralization in the slightest.

Users do care about privacy and (shared?) ownership, but as long as those needs are catered in a “fair” way, decentralization doesn’t matter, esp to non-tech folks.

Now decentralization might be a way to force better fair behavior, but only if you know how to manage the tech. Also, 51% in PoW still makes it not really decentralized, nor is PoS.

People are right that Ethereum has used the web3 term for a while. The recent uptick is from Chris Dixon and other VCs doing a marketing push on it.

One thing that is confusing most loud supporters of Web3 are VCs and yet: "It all comes down to the database that sits behind an application. If that database is controlled by a single entity (think company, think big tech), then enormous market power accrues to the owner/administrator of that database.

If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database that is not controlled and administered by a single company, but instead is a truly open system available to all, then that kind of market power cannot be built up around a data asset" So why are they flowing billions of dollars into this ? If there is no locking what will create outsized returns for them?

The locking is in the company that controls the spec of the protocol and its reference implementation. It’s always been about getting as many people onboard as possible, this time the bait is decentralisation.

Could you explain that business model?

Find some problem that requires a ecosystem. Create this ecosystem and carry a large stake in it. Have the stake be a part of the ecosystem somehow. In the future, once the problem has a solution/ecosystem, start selling parts of the stake.

You do not need to make money from the product directly. Think for example if the Bitcoin creator would get 10 cent every time someone mentioned Bitcoin. Or the easiest business model of them all, sell ads on your org site.

> Think for example if the Bitcoin creator would get 10 cent every time someone mentioned Bitcoin

Eh, how would that work exactly?

> Or the easiest business model of them all, sell ads on your org site

That's great, but I can ensure you: none of us in the cryptocurrency ecosystem wants anything to do with ads. Also, can't really build a big business by having ads on your website.

There are casual games that are mostly funded by merchandise (Angry Birds). The game makes the brand popular, then they sell kid toys and clothing. I don't know exactly how you would get paid by just someone mentioning your trademark, but it might be your business innovation - as in order to reach unicorn status you either need to innovate in the business area, or innovate in the product area - you do not need to innovate in both! (heck it's probably enough to copy/apply an already successful business model on an already successful/invented product, but in a combination that no one yet has tried)

> I don't know exactly how you would get paid by just someone mentioning your trademark, but it might be your business innovation

If we're just making up "business innovations" willy nilly, why not just create a company that prints money from used t-shirts instead, I guess that would make a lot of money for the business.

> I don't know exactly how you would get paid by just someone mentioning your trademark, but it might be your business innovation

Why not go bigger and get paid any time people say anything?

One company controls the specification and reference implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace and final result.

Outsider contributions are submitted publicly, while features developed by the company start in secret and can remain secret as long as possible. The company's contributions are rammed through while outsiders contend with endless bikeshedding with no guarantee they will get anything they need.

In the end there is no sensible reason for any other entity to partner with the controlling company. The partner finds they are prevented from innovating while being bogged down by the "process." The controlling party then seeks to cannibalize the partner's product during this time by shelving any of their unique features and ideas. Once the partner moves on, the requisite changes and fixes to the specification are magically pushed through.

I wouldn't call this a core business model as much as an enhancement to one. Fundamentally it's an attention grift -- a bamboozle of complex rules, procedures and processes, cloaked in goodwill, and furnished by a large interest and future hope at any given time.

Except all these things can be trivially forked. If you don't like how the VC one is doing things, just fork it. There are a billion forks of everything in the crypto space, for exactly this reason.

It’s easy to fork the code but not the user base.

yes, when was the last time you see google chrome forked and adopted a large user base? That is event with big VC money behind it Brave for example. Open source is now days used a marketing scheme to attract developers to work for free, and attract user to think that is open.

There are hundreds of open source projects that implement a social network.

So does that mean I can be the next Facebook with one click of a deploy button ?

Facebook wasn't the first social network. Not even close. Facebook succeeded because it did very similar things to the prior ones, but a little bit better than them in just the right ways. That is the essence of a fork.

There are a "billion" forks in the crypto space, but have any surpassed the original project in quality or adoption?

Sushiswap did for a bit, iirc. It's doing quite well either way, though.

>One company controls the specification and reference implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace and final result.

Google Chrome for example

Google doesn't control the w3c. And Google Chrome is severely limited in what they can push due to threatened/actual anti-trust litigation. Their whole "privacy sandbox" thing is being done under the scrutiny of quite a few governments in addition to practically every digital advertising association on earth.

True. But they can implement non-standard things. And they're not compelled to implement the standards. And sometimes they don't.

but they are not company people?

company does not own anything nor database?

I think just coins?

Because coins are not regulated like stock. An IPO is not something you can do anyway you want.

Wouldn’t an open database lead to loads of ACID issues or is the point of blockchain to prevent that

It’s a very limited database that is very slow and scales poorly.

The currently most popular implementation of this "open database" (Bitcoin) is indeed slow and scales poorly. But if you start looking into the new ideas, you'll find there are plenty of still decentralized blockchains with much faster confirmation times (even as low as 5 seconds) today.

Which coins have confirmation times that low with the volume of Bitcoin?

The volume has nothing to do with the confirmation time, it's a constant no matter if it's 1 or 10000 transactions. Avalanche, Algorand, Polygon and more fits the bill of very fast transactions, in case you're interested in looking into the matter further.

Nothing can promise constant performance at infinite volume. 10,000 transactions are a tiny number for most modern and popular products these days.

5 seconds is a long time, especially when a normal modern tech stack can do the same things in milliseconds. I'd also love a reference showing that any of these chains can handle 100k requests per second with a latency of a few seconds. I've never seen it.

The amount of space in a Bitcoin block is around 7 TPS.

Other blockchains make decentralization tradeoffs to process more transactions on-chain per second. For example, Ethereum requires better hardware: larger storage, better CPU and more memory. Solana makes even larger tradeoffs: expensive server hardware costing up to $25000, making it pretty much a central service controlled by the few.

The key innovation of Bitcoin is the decentralization; almost anyone can participate and no one can control it. Sacrificing this for negligble is not worth it. Especially since there are smarter ways to scale the system. Even if you could improve throughput by 100x by making the system slightly less decentralized you would still not reach VISA levels of TPS.

The correct way to scale these systems is using off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network. This way you can process millions of transactions per second.

Not only that, but every operation would cost fees, right?

Good luck convincing people that every time they logging into their account or literally do any action will cost them some fees. Refreshed the page? Oops that'll cost ya!

No you see they will have a cache in front of it.

And then eventually that cache will be a database.

And then eventually that database will have some additional data.

And then eventually we will back to where we are today.

Further, open databases will potentially make it harder for iterative change on that data.

Structures and versioning become harder when that is distributed at the protocol/standard level. Right now the web is already distributed, the protocols/standards are open and versioning data/content/apps/endpoints on top of that is easy, but updating protocols/standards takes time. Apps are a second layer to that, versioning is harder as you have to roll out updates and the OSs/standards they are built on are the slower changing part, web3 is even harder as updates and versioning of the protocol/standards AND the data/content on top will need to propagate and there may be pushback and splits/forks as we are seeing ETH being difficult to change core protocols/flows. There may be innovations on this as we go but also turbulence until that is realized.

For some areas like personal data and ledger data not changing much is good. For anything beyond that it makes it harder to change. Versioning and iterative change is already difficult in some cases when a company has full control over the structures. Getting multiple companies to agree on standards is harder, especially when that impacts revenues on those systems. The same will happen with web3 maybe more intensely. Right now even open standards are actively killed off because they share data. Right now "web2" could have shared databases, and there are some, but companies push away from that and actively look to own data which is a problem. However the same will happen with web3 at additional levels including the protocols/standards now.

What may happen is APIs public facades/interfaces/signatures are more atomic/stable and less changing which is always nice to have, with the guts of the structures being more keyed/document data formats. I am always a fan of iterative change that doesn't nuke the public interfaces/facades unless absolutely necessary. It may lead to "cleaner" more generic public interfaces potentially, but it may also lead to stagnate iterations and infighting like current web standards. In a way, web3 is more about standards than what is built on it. Standards can be flexible or not, both with their pros and cons.

In a way with cryptocurrency, the real goal of the investors of web3 is recreating the web with a sort of toll system, that can be good and bad but their aim is collecting on actions on new protocols/standards.

Taking control away from companies for important data like personal data and shared public data may be good, but there is also some trouble ahead and many things to work out. The same type of sharks that capture that data are looking to go lower in the stack and control that area, and extracting fees/tolls on the movement in that structure even if it is an open database. There are pros and cons to all of this.

> In a way with cryptocurrency, the real goal of the investors of web3 is recreating the web with a sort of toll system, that can be good and bad but their aim is collecting on actions on new protocols/standards.

One could argue that today's web is a combination of ad-based revenue and tolls run by (near?) monopolies: app stores, marketplaces, ect... The crypto-like alternatives such as substack and patreon are growing though and will likely have a niche even if/when crypto fails. The centralization of those crypto-like alternatives is a risk though. I recall one substack author giving email-export as a rationale to choose substack but that's a feature that presumably could just be turned off whenever.

What makes these alternatives "crypto-like" other than being less centralized? Are they even less centralized, other than being platforms owned by smaller corporations that choose to (for now) exercise a lighter touch?

Because experienced VCs know web 1.0 also started with decentralized / libertarian ideals, but ultimately early players built walled gardens and gatekeeping around the "world wide web".

They don't want to miss the web3 boat, and they're betting the web 1.0/web 2.0 playbooks still apply.

Agreed. Most of the decentralization talk is Kabuki and it's still about controlling the platform.

Indeed, a world ruled by feudal lords and corporate fiefs still possesses as little liberty as one ruled by a centralized empire.

Less liberty really as the ability of corporations to intervene in your life far surpasses the capacity feudal states had on a day-to-day basis.

Upvoting for the use of kabuki in explaining the melodramatic pantomime of crypto hype, if only we were all more artisanal in building out this nascent blockchain tech. Imagine if tcp/ip were invented today with all this pre-marketing by VCs

My theory:

Some people believe that this type of decentralization could be a force that can't be stopped by traditional companies and want to get in as soon as possible so they don't end up on the losing side of history.

Of course, rich people simply diversify their assets and crypto is just one of many bets they do, so it's not 100% sure this will happen.

I wouldn’t think too far into this. All that is required is the application of experience and appropriate cynicism. The tech isn’t even relevant and neither is the reality.

web3 is a marketing term and is easy to leverage hype on as it implies progression and a new arena of opportunity.

By the time anyone has peeled off the marketing and realised it’s the same old bullshit people will be too far in to admit it and death march over the horizon.

What happens when I the company create a databse (let's say facebook) and Developer A create more compelling application that facebook company?

1.Where is the controlling part. 2. what facebook internal advantage/motivation to create and hire more engineers and give dopemine to more people?

Saying company facebook own coin which has no value what does this even mean?

Explain to me.

In theory, these web3 platforms would still need to function as a business to continue existing. Moving the platform onto a blockchain removes the need for centralized servers, but it necessitates massive amounts of distributed compute power to keep it going.

Every blockchain project knows that they need to incentivize their miners somehow. This is usually a combination of fees from users and new tokens minted via built-in inflation (yes, inflation ironically powers much of the crypto space and will continue to do so for a long time).

So I always aks:

1) What problem are these web3 platforms solving?

2) Who are they solving it for?

3) Are those people actually willing to pay the blockchain premium to use a web3 platform over a centralized platform?

The theory, of course, is that blockchain will evolve over time to become less resource hungry and therefore cheap enough to compete with incumbents, but that's a long way away. Many projects have started cheating by smuggling centralization into their architecture but emphasizing their blockchain and hoping nobody cares enough about the difference.

But where do VCs come into the equation? They're not setting up the mining operations that will power these businesses and collect the fees in the future. They're investing in tokens that will ostensibly be used to pay the miners in the future.

The whole game is about introducing artificial tokens, quietly giving a huge number of those tokens to founders and early investors (in exchange for actual money, of course), and then hyping the platform to the moon so everyone can cash out their tokens to a new wave of speculators.

> introducing artificial tokens, quietly giving a huge number of those tokens to founders and early investors (in exchange for actual money, of course), and then hyping the platform to the moon so everyone can cash out their tokens to a new wave of speculators.

In other words a Ponzi-scheme

It's a ponzi-scheme if there's no value behind the hype. it's not inherently a ponzi scheme. It's the same way in the current private equity start-up world just that only VC's and connected individuals are exposed to the all the risk and all the profit.

> It's a ponzi-scheme if there's no value behind the hype

But what's the value ?

I am still after a few years now trying to understand what it actually is.

There isn't any.

Some coins, mebe there's some lulz??

But that's it.

Yer lulz worth that much to you?

Yeah, it turns our that VC speculation is a load of BS too, and that this is the latest way they're trying to end run around the SEC.

You could say that there is value behind a Ponzi scheme as long as there are more people willing to get onboard the Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme can make a few "early adopters" rich

1. Because it's a ponzi scheme and they get to get in on the ground floor. See: https://mobile.twitter.com/intangiblecoins/status/1473302581...

2. Because they're rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to protect their assets from the government

Perfectly summarized.

The only thing more annoying than libertarian crypto bros is progressives who don’t like crypto because people have made money off it or they see it as inherently right wing technology (the Soviet Union said that about computers originally, you can see how that worked out for them)

Maybe so, but they’re not in this thread.

Criticising the whole shebang as a bunch of charletans pitching snake oil to the gullible isn’t “progressive”, it’s common sense.

Everyone loves to say their politics are just common sense but characterizing all of crypto as “rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to protect their assets from the government” is an inherently political narrative and it simply isn’t true.

There’s also a big difference between valuable emerging technologies that have a lot of speculative investments & charlatans selling snake oil vs “the whole shebang”.

The post I was replying to was asking why some VCs are pumping so much money into crypto. I'm not characterizing all crypto supporters as libertarians, just the VCs who pretend that they're investing in it because they want decentralization and open democratized platforms that are owned by the users.

Ahh yeah I misread that a bit. Still I don’t necessarily think that’s accurate even regarding the VCs. Their investments and goals sort of run counter to the libertarian types in the crypto community who tend to be focused more on monetary policy or privacy concerns. If anything what the VCs are doing imo is subverting cryptos ability to meet any of the goals of libertarians by focusing most of the development effort in crypto on centralized platforms that look a lot more like traditional tech companies.

This rather parochially presupposes the whole world operates on the same basis as the two-bit low-grade binary oppositional shit-flinging that passes for political discourse in the USA, or even cares much about it.

Fortunately, that isn’t how this works. Since I don’t live in the US or read its tattered, overwrought media except by accident, I can comfortably say “what political narrative are you on about mate”, and make my analysis free of whatever baggage that entails.

Which leads me back to saying, no thanks. What’s being peddled here creates no fundamental value, so the only beneficiaries are middlemen, their equivalents, and their proxies.

Repeating a narrative that was crafted with a particular political intent is furthering that intent regardless of how you’re thinking about it internally. And unfortunately us Americans are really good at exporting our shittiest ideas everywhere else (especially Western Europe) so it still has meaning regardless of where you live

Except I'm not "repeating a narrative", I'm drawing my own conclusions.

The assertion that anyone who disagrees with (whatever) must have been brainwashed by something they read is pathological for debate.

Honestly, I though NFTs were just a tax loophole to begin with.

Almost all web3 projects issue their own tokens. Before they allow you to buy any of these tokens, they reserve part of the supply to the dev team and VCs. The rest of the supply is issued to the community.

If the project/token is successful, the monetary value of the token rises, which funds the development teams and helps VCs to get a return.

So as always, big capital gets the early access, and us mortal do not.

Still, for a serious project it's not as bad as it sounds. It could still end up meaning the project is 75% community owned, rather than the 0% in a fully central organization.

You should apply scrutiny though to the "decentralized" claim. Most web3 projects aren't very decentralized at all.

Consider a few simple examples -

It is possible to buy crypto purely peer to peer e.g just 2 people posting on a forum. Yet, most people buy it on an exchange and pay the transaction fees.

It is possible to set up a wordpress server on your home PC or a cheap VPS, yet most people buy it off wordpress.com

It is possible to replicate an ETF with relatively low effort by just looking up their holdings every month and rebalancing, yet most people pay the ETF fees.

It is possible to make great coffee at home yet people go to coffee shops.

---

The main idea IMO is just relying on people to be willing to buy into whatever new thing has a lot of marketing and hype behind it. They consistently do. Even if web3 is a truly open system, people will remain too apathetic to learn how that system works - they will just go to the most popular platform and pay the fee.

---

The other angle IMO is that banks and tradfi in a lot of places really do suck hard. They don't need to innovate at all and rarely do. The only reason they don't have competition is piles of red tape, regulation, lobbying, corruption etc. All it takes is someone to make a half-decent website/app that makes things a little better (e.g Robinhood) and crypto is a way to do that while getting around all the old regulation.

> The main idea IMO is just relying on people to be willing to buy into whatever new thing has a lot of marketing and hype behind it. They consistently do. Even if web3 is a truly open system, people will remain too apathetic to learn how that system works - they will just go to the most popular platform and pay the fee

Then why not do it on web2? Web2, as it relies on trusted authorities, is fundamentally cheaper to run than web3.

> It is possible to replicate an ETF with relatively low effort by just looking up their holdings every month and rebalancing, yet most people pay the ETF fees.

ETFs rebalance without incurring capital gains, which is a massive advantage.

> Then why not do it on web2

Because you need something new and abstract to attract the rubes

> If there is no locking what will create outsized returns for them?

Controlling consensus through proof of stake would give them an advantage.

Yeah, from the perspective of someone joining a project rather than creating it, why wouldn’t you use ones that explicitly prevent any kind of outsized return for the creators?

> Frankly, it is all too much for me.

Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypto, but I definitely don't need to read the same rhetoric from 100 people a day.

Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

Crypto seems to attract a lot of high minded hot air as far as social media goes.

> Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

And the order of operations. Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it. The crypto community has been putting the marketing before the building.

It's probably uncontroversial to say although cryptocurrency -could- do great things, right now the bulk of trade in the first world is speculation. Meanwhile there are television ads in the US aimed at football fans telling them how they can trade cryptocurrency. WTF does the average football fan need with cryptocurrency?

This is such a good point. "Web 2.0" didn't really emerge as a term of art until there was a need to describe the widespread adoption of UGC, REST, & AJAX and blockbuster web applications like gmail replacing desktop applications.

I was actually thinking the opposite. I seem to recall talking about Web 2.0 and AJAX, SOAP, etc. before most apps were built using those technologies. We were using AJAX minimally, CSS was a thing, but UGC was still a few years away, from what I recall.

I read an article recently which claimed that the majority of transaction volume is not speculation, but scams, fraud and similar. Like e.g. pyramid schemes.

And that is where an average football fan needs crypto, to provide more monetary volume for scams and speculators manipulating the marked to siphon of.

Or at least that was the take of the article, I'm not completely sure in either direction.

The difference between "speculation" and "scams, fraud, and similar" is in the eye of the beholder. Lots of people find all crypto to be a giant scam, others find all of it to be a potential investment (hopefully with the understanding that the long-tail of individual investments in the space will go to zero).

> The difference between "speculation" and "scams, fraud, and similar" is in the eye of the beholder.

The definitions of those terms really comes down to intention: a scammer is selling something they _know_ does not deliver what they're promising while a speculator should be making good-faith claims. This line gets blurry with optimism but most of the cryptocurrency speculation which called out is indeed misrepresentation of what a potential buyer would get, such as claiming that an NFT conveys ownership when it does not.

Just FYI - that is a _deeply_ unconvincing argument where you are effectively saying "sure it's a scam (the one you know), but I have since updated _my_ definition of scam; and let me tell you - it sure did make me some money and avoid a lot of cognitive dissonance!"

Like calling a pyramid scheme a reverse funnel system.

> Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it.

I don't like the Web3 hype either but generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand, through a landing page capturing emails or pre-payments, or other such ways of gauging demand.

It just seems that Web3 fanatics took the marketing side too far that they've forgotten they actually have to build a product (that solves an actual problem, not yet another coin) for which the marketing will be used.

> generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand

I don't agree this is the common wisdom, and it's kind of a surprising take to see on this website specifically.

It's what I commonly see on startup fora including HN, reddit, IndieHackers etc. There's books about this method like Lean Startup, Mom Test and so on.

The advice to build first and market later is actually advice that is much maligned in my experience, as there are too many stories of engineers who build and then find out they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it.

> they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it

Or more likely, there was no demand for their product to begin with.

Indeed, the worst is when they don't actually solve any problems whatsoever, they treat it as a way to have fun building the product, using new technologies, new architectures etc.

There's nothing wrong with building to learn but the problem arises when engineers think building automatically leads to business success; the two are often entirely disjointed. WordPress is maligned as well but it's wildly successful for Automattic.

The approach to validate ideas with conversation with your target market when you are unsure if anyone will buy.

But in this case you need to validate it by building it and proving it can be done. The market is already prepped.

> in this case

In which case, Web3? If so, I don't think the market is prepped at all, I don't really see people using it for what proponents say it'll be used for. If some other case, please elucidate me, I'm not sure what you're referring to otherwise.

The market is ready for a product that hasn't come, so build it.

Maybe it's not common wisdom in general, but it is a pretty common viewpoint in the startup world. Building products is expensive, and startups can't afford to build something no one wants. It's pretty much universal advise that finding an initial market fit should be the first priority of any new startup.

Literally making a sale before the product exists is the extreme end of that philosophy. Whether or not this is good advise, or even possible, probably depends a lot on the domain. For most domains though, there is some degree of market research that can and should be done before investing in product development.

I've been on this website a long time and I suppose the userbase has grown quite a bit. I don't assume everyone has read all of Paul Graham's articles or even know who he is, but are you familiar with how YCombinator works?

Enough money to survive on ramen for a few months and build a demo. Get feedback from users and iterate over and over.

I know multiple people personally who have been through YC, and I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

Not every company that goes through YC are at the same stage. I've heard of companies joining YC despite already having over a million in ARR because of how valuable the YC network is.

YC invests 125k in each team, which is certainly enough to last more than a few months eating ramen if you are building the product yourself.

Also, trying to sell a product using a demo is not exactly the same as selling a finished product. At 0-1 stage, you can bet the demo hides the rough edges to some degree.

I would say selling using a demo falls somewhere on the sell-before-build spectrum, but one point I was trying to make is that it is not necessarily black-and-white.

The point is that YC's model contradicts what you said. It's relatively inexpensive to build an initial version of a product. Build something as quickly as possible, get user feedback, and keep iterating.

I can guarantee you won't find anything Paul Graham has written about doing a bunch of marketing analysis as a first step.

I said market research, not marketing analysis. I don't mean focus groups and A-B tests and ad words.

No YC company is literally in stage 1 of its existence. First you need to get into YC, and you probably won't if you don't know anything about the market you are trying to reach.

> Enough money to survive on ramen for a few months and build a demo. Get feedback from users and iterate over and over.

This is indeed the original idea behind YCombinator. That was a very long time ago. Things have changed, both with the YCombinator company and the ethos of this web community.

Really? Some parts of this website used to push that hard back in the "MVP" phase. And I've been here nearly as long as you (I made an account much later after lurking for years) -- what was that start-up that was a website that literally fed into an excel spreadsheet, to fake having a real product?

The growth hacking stuff took that idea even further, and for quite a while was all over this website.

That said, I disagree with said "wisdom", I just find it interesting that we've got diametrically opposed views on how this website perceived it!

I’ve been in a company that did this (market first, build second) and it was an unmitigated disaster, and I never want to go near someone who does that ever again.

It makes more sense if you think of these token sales as Angel/Seed rounds that are fully open to the public.

Non investors never got access to these rounds before and never saw just how many companies are raising them.

This environment is foreign to most but would be familiar to well known angel investors constantly getting pitched new opportunities.

Market-then-build is a fallacy that makes a compelling story but few, if any, real world examples.

That’s kind of the conundrum of web3. It’s all marketing, no build.

The crypto community does what every startup should do. They find the customers before they start building i.e. they build community first and in effect build products.

To say that things aren't being build in the crypto community is simply flat out false.

It's one of the fastest developing industries and more and more talent are leaving their previous jobs or industries.

Talent is pouring in because free money is gushing out from the mother of all bubbles. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Applies to me - leaving enterprise infrastructure for crypto. I think the tech is mostly useless, but the hype is real, the VC dollars are real. I want to try to capitalize on this.

if you believed it was a bubble you wouldn't leave your current job.

I think the current token prices are a bubble, but I think the space itself is here to stay.

Wish you luck on making piles of cash.

It’s here to stay? Care to share your thoughts?

if the space is here to stay so is the token price, in fact we haven't even begun seeing the gains as almost no one is in this field yet.

Do you get paid to write these fluff pieces?

Talent doesn't have problem making money, talent is attracted to interesting problems and id attracting the money. Wonder at what point you will concede that you are wrong about this if 13 years isn't long enough to prove its not a bubble.

> Talent doesn't have problem making money

No where else in my career have I seen senior level engineers earn 7 figures.

> talent is attracted to interesting problems and id attracting the money

First part is fair, top engineers are passionate about solving challenges.

Second part not so much. How can you explain that “interesting problems” is an efficient capital allocation strategy?

Money is interested in making more money. Here’s an alternate hypothesis: Every few decades a bubble appears. VCs which know their history dust off their bubble playbooks and enter close to the ground floor. But this time is different because they also got to dust of the century old playbook on unregulated financial markets.

> 13 years isn't long enough to prove its not a bubble.

Your argument is upside down. BTC has had 13 years and is complete failure. ETH came out 6 years ago but so far the DeFi space has not provided a single useful application that touches the real economy. Today we have a basket case of post-ETH decentralized compute and storage platform options that have not produced a single killer app.

Your argument is upside down. If ETH had launched in 2020 instead of 2015, we could argue for more time to try out a product market fit. But the more years of r&d without a killer app, the more confidence that it’s a bubble.

If BTC is your idea of a failure, being the catalyst for a +2 trillion dollar industry, then i guess failure isnt bad at all. Again you are just claiming things ignoring everything else. Lifes too short for haters. good luck

Your arguments, much like your head, are full of hot air.

Ahh the last stage of loosing an argument. Personal insults. As I said, good luck.

I have no problem handing out personal insults to those who deserve them. Especially fraudsters.

A lot of VC firms just raised huge funds that likely have a ~10yr lifespan, and they're going to need to invest that money, so I think this whole web3 thing could actually last a long time. Retail traders buying fractions of a single bitcoin and all the memecoins will likely get squashed though.

The reason you see this is that the entire “web3” landscape is controlled by VCs. Also the underlying infra this stuff is running on isn’t very decentralized at all and with proof of stake it likely never will be.

If you want true decentralization you’re going to need a combination of Bitcoin/Lightning Network/side chains to recreate a lot of what has been built out on other more centralized platforms. But VCs don’t want to fund this because there’s way less potential upside for them.

Or just bitcoin cash!

Have you seen the one with Matt Damon hawking a crypto site? How much must it cost to get someone of his caliber to star in your commercial?

To get George to do those expresso ads it costs 18 million.

To get Matthew mcconaughey to drive 3 million.

As for Matt Damon. cryto.com gave 1 million to water.org and Matt said any money he makes will go to water.org and that's worth millions. My guess 4-5 million on the highside but probably 3 to 4 million

To be fair, it's not a bad target market. Look at FanDuel and PokerStars and such. For many watching, it's just a new kind of gambling. The decision many are likely making is to throw their money at bitcoin instead of placing a bet at an online sportsbook. The feeling of "investing" in crypto versus outright gambling is a nice little story to tell oneself, even if it's not particularly true.

> Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

This is the tell for me that most of the people promoting it are just trying to find buyers for their tokens: there's tons of marketing for things which either don't exist at all or offer a worse experience than the status quo, and it's very rare to find someone who clearly understands the problem and how we got there. For example, we started with a more decentralized web than we have now — any conversation about how to go in a different direction needs to be based on the economic factors which produced the current state.

Their MVP is a slide deck, or a sales website.

An interesting quote I heard was something along the lines of: any action you take that doesn't cost fees on your wallet is probably not actually running on web3. A lot of stuff you see is just pretending to be web3 but not actually decentralized.

Yes — between the people who only work with a handful of company's APIs or which are still completely dependent on the real web, it seems a lot less decentralized than, say, Tor.

Web3 is federated, not decentralized. The distinction is significant.

I like this distinction, but I will note that not all web3 is federated or decentralized. It has been become more of a marketing word for projects which both do and don't adhere to the foundations.

That's a problem I see, too.

A lot of things are far less decentralized/federated in practice then they claim to be.

It's not uncommon that some of the points why something is federated or even decentralized are only there in hypothetical scenarios (let's say in theory) which just don't happen in practice. Not because they technically can't, but because there are no marked dynamics insensitiveing it (probably more the opposite).

Many of the protocol level 2 scaling like rollups are far more centrally controlled than they lead you to believe

Can you give a specific definition of federated in this context? To me, federated means that autonomous entities can talk to each other if they agree on a protocol. E.g. making a phone call between different carriers, or, uhh, the internet.

Here are the definitions from an older comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640046

Great explaination. I like “web3 is distributed not decentralized”

For the federated and decentralized info: Is it like Sia coin and file coin are operated on its own protocol/nodes. Both are decentralized but it’s federated in the sense that sia and filecoin don’t talk to each other?

> decentralized - disparate nodes communicating directly using agreed upon conventions. There is no centrally managed network. Think in terms of snail mail, IPv6, or phone numbers. This could be as simple as people using an agreed upon application to abstract away the transmission concerns but that application does not route traffic through a third party server.

This definition really doesn’t sit right with me. IPv6 and phone numbers have central authorities. I can’t just configure my cellphone to receive calls from a number that I wasn’t issued by my carrier. Nor can my carrier issue me a number from another country’s number pool. To me, the phone network is a great example of a federated network. IPv6 is similar. I think snail mail is probably the best example of something that is truly decentralized. Sure, there are authorities that chop up plots of land and give them names and numbers, but no one prevents me from asking a friend to put a letter in the mailbox of 123 Main St.

Please correct me if I’m missing some key semantic argument(s).

Decentralized trust is another way of saying a grapevine. Grapevine communication (or trust) is only useful in specific circumstances, and is often actively detrimental.

Why are so many people just going along with these concepts as if they make sense? It's like nobody's using their brain.

I thought the whole web of trust concept was proven unworkable/unscalable with PGP?

Most of crypto still seems like a solution in search of a problem. Or they are solving the problems that people don't have. The primary problem that most crypto systems seem to be trying to solve is "How can I make the founders as rich as possible?"

There's a small number of grifters leading a very large number of naive tech types who genuinely believe they're about to make a bunch of money on this thing they don't quite understand but must be legit or there wouldn't be so many people working on it.

I think there's a class of crypto believers who see "Web3" as a political movement, a way to dilute or break the power of institutions like e.g. the fed, Facebook, etc. To them, the grapevine is a secret sauce that will magically eliminate centralized power.

Which is ironic when you think about it. Those are the aims of Anarchist political philosophy, which is often anti-capitalist. So you could say Web3 is the "Capitalist-Anarchist Internet"

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of AnCaps among Web3 advocates. I know there are also leftists who think it will challenge capitalism. Both parties are wrong to think a technology alone can make the changes they're looking for.

Same.

I actually see a lot of comparison with the "firehose of falsehoods", which is a known propaganda technique.

I'm actually worried about people picking it up and getting suckered in without knowing anything on the technical side.

I do keep wondering if it's worth being first on the scene with a new idea

People pushing image NFTs will likely be keen to promote anything that can ding an argument against the naysayers, especially if they're cryptographically compensated somehow (whatever the web3 version of affiliate links is, is it airdrops?)

Might be some free real estate to be had if anyone's got any png-less ideas

Side comment I do realise I probably come off super naive to people who have already learned all this. I am trying! I've not come across a less newcomer friendly community since I started tinkering with Linux 20 years ago haha. "You just don't understand" is almost as much a web3 catchphrase as wagmi

Admittedly Linux is now my sole non-mobile daily driver, maybe I'll get there with web3. Having had a tinker I do like the idea of the tech, I've just not had the "click" into how it's actually usable (for me) yet

/blog

I'm creating an NFT project that's doing something I've never really seen other projects doing in any capacity, and can confirm it's pretty hard doing something against the current perception of what is possible with the tech. It's been disheartening sometimes tbh because of the stigma the tech has currently, and I've been called a scammer more than a few times simply because I'm creating a project that utilizes NFTs, by people who only know of the current "link to png on cloud storage and nothing else" model that is most common.

Oh well, I just hope that when I release my project next month that I can prove that it's an incredibly unique experience that some group of people find it to be an exciting product.

It's just a grift that people want you to buy into. That's why they're so invested in talking about it. If the technology was good, it'd practically sell itself.

This is often not necessarily the case. For web3 - I'm still waiting to figure out what problem it can solve meaningfully.

If you want to retain your sanity and finances, unless someone can explain in one sentence a clear and obvious use for the technology, all of crypto can be explained as unhinged speculation and rug pulls. We're over ten years in at this point with insane investment and nothing has appeared.

My guess is that this is where the next financial crash will come from since it's totally unregulated and the "shadow banks" were mostly banned after 2008. All the shadow money just goes to crypto.

We're over ten years in at this point with insane investment and nothing has appeared.

You can't dismiss the $69 million Beeple sale as "nothing". Truly, it is a watershed moment in human history.

That's more or less what the GP said. "If the technology is good" applies both to how well it works, but also how useful it is. Neither of those has a good answer yet. But the best way to see it being useful is to actually create an MVP and show it in practice, not through fancy words.

Was talking about "it'd sell itself". Good technology often doesn't sell itself.

> I'm still waiting to figure out what problem it can solve meaningfully

Money laundering and other criminal behaviour.

Many of the things we spent decades trying to remove from the financial system will come roaring back in. Of course it will come courtesy of young, wealthy, educated IT guys who are the least exposed to any financial shocks.

If you want to hate on crypto, that's your prerogative but stop using the old, tired, false argument about money laundering. It is easier to launder money through the legacy financial system than through cryptocurrency. In fact, financial institutions and businesses do it all the time.

> It is easier to launder money through the legacy financial system than through cryptocurrency

I work for a bank and this is a flat out lie.

We have a significant number of controls (regulated by government agencies) for managing money laundering risk. We try to identify source/destinations who hide behind shell companies through beneficial ownership methods. We enforce domestic and international sanctions. We identify and provide data on suspect fraudulent transactions to authorities.

None of this happens with crypto. None.

And yet the vast majority of money laundering still happens through traditional banking channels. If crypto was such a panacea for laundering all the traffic would have switched over by now.

a) At some point you have to re-enter the traditional banking system. People after all want to do things with their laundered money like buy yachts, cars, companies, football teams etc. And so if you are sophisticated at money laundering then crypto is largely unnecessary.

b) Traditional financial system is 1000s of times bigger than crypto so of course you will see proportionally more money laundering happening there.

The issue is not how many ineffective pro-forma controls banks have. It's whether they stop the activity. Even the Economist agrees that money laundering through the lagacy financial system is out of control.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/04/12/t...

As someone who's out here building a web3 site (and is a heavy twitter user), I agree completely. Most of the twitter talking heads also have no clue what they're talking about, waxing on about grand visions when the first set of pragmatic implications are already here, basically (metamask/web wallet login).

Do you have a tech blog or anything folks could keep up with?

Preferably RSS based but I'd sign up to a mail list

Unfortunately not, I only really blog about philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. I have very little I consider "blogworthy" to say about the web3 space, other than technical documentation; I build it and leave exploration and design to the product guys.

It's honestly difficult to discuss ideas in the space outside of specialized discord channels given how divisive people on social media like twitter have been on the subject. Wallet based authentication is amazingly simple to work with and provides a great developer and end user experience, but you only really hear about it in passing and it gets overshadowed by the noise. Same with using NFTs for novel purposes; you can use them as essentially authz tokens for specialized services. I've been working on an NFT project exploring these concepts and am quite happy with the end results.

The phrase "stock touts" comes to mind.

Instead of unfollowing I've found that muting specific terms or words to be fairly useful at tuning the signal

Don't want to appear as spammy, but please have a look at my project finclout.io. Here people are incentivised to moderate and curate content. Thus supporting the build-up of trust and clout. The incentivces are coming through the monetary policy of the participating proof-of-stake chains, so it's not necessary to put money in to get money out. It's simply taking some of the economic value away from Google/FB. If you look at their insane profit margins, it's worthwhile to attack.

scanned your home page, have no idea what this is or how it can help me

Noted. Will put an example on the page. That might make it easier. The main value proposition is that if you are investing, then you can earn extra money by providing context on recent news for other investors. Currently this is done for free on other social sites.

So a platform for pumping/selling your picks?

Quite the opposite.

> It's simply taking some of the economic value away from Google/FB. If you look at their insane profit margins, it's worthwhile to attack.

I believe that you believe that Google/FB are competitors to your finclout.io.

But I think you are very confused about your business model versus Google/FB. Neither of them are doing what you do - you are competing with blogs and social media groups/channels that curate investment advice.

Yes, that is correct. finclout is not directly competing with GOOG/FB from a business model but from an attention perspective.

But /how/ are you stealing attention from Google & Facebook? The most overlap I can think of is a FB group being replaced by your website.

perspective of a not terribly interested party:

* two years ago: "bitcoin! bitcoin! bitcoin!" - tech community: "bitcoin is a pyramid scheme and also bad for the environment."

* a year ago: "crypto! crypto! not bitcoin, there's others and also fintech loves blockchain!" - tech community: "nope, still a pyramid scheme, financial community goes whereever there's hype and $$$, they couldnt care less about 'tech'"

* 6 months ago: "nfts! nfts! look there's an actual thing associated with it!" - tech communuty: "but you don't actually own anything. obvious speculation scam"

* 2 months ago: "web3! web3! it's vague! except it's all about those things above we just make it less obvious and more buzzwordy!" - tech community: please leave

Want to share where I can read the unified opinion from the "tech community"? I'd consider myself as part of the tech community, but never said anything of those things, are you sure you can speak for everyone in the community?

> Want to share where I can read the unified opinion from the "tech community"?

a good place to start would be the majority of replies on this thread

HN is such a small slice of the "tech community", if we see the definition the same way (people who work in "tech"). I don't think you should take anything you read here as "majority of people in tech thinks like this", because the size is so small.

My experience is that the ratio of crypto skeptics here on hn more or less mirrors that of any non-crypto focused tech community (ex: coworkers, SIGs, etc)

What other online tech communities are there out there that I can check out? If you say this is such a tiny one, I’d love to see the “bigger than HN” community you must be referring to.

Reddit, Twitter, other social media.

But then there are (believe it or not) communities outside of the internet as well. Actual people working actual jobs in real life.

Twitter is an “online tech community”? I think we have different definitions of the term.

To elaborate, I think there’s too much non-tech people on social media for you to say that it’s a better representation of the “tech community” than HN. HN has at least some self-selection towards people who are interested in tech, whereas Twitter/FB/etc has way too much noise from non-tech uninformed crypto fetishists to say it’s representative of the “tech community”.

(That is not to say that non-tech people’s opinions don’t matter, or that twitter/FB/etc are not good places in general, but the subject of this thread of discussion is “what the tech community thinks of crypto/web3” and I don’t think “everyone on twitter” is great to use as a counter-example.)

Here on HN. The comment count vs upvotes for posts like this speaks for itsself

It feels like something or other cryptocurrency related floats on the front page of Hacker News every other day, and discussion about it is welcomed. I would call that the opposite of "please leave".

edit: whoops - misread.

[original] That simply isn't true. There has been consistent and widespread criticism of crypto enthusiasm on the majority of stories posted here recently.

What simply isn't true? I said discussion about it is welcomed here, and you're telling me that critical discussion is "consistent and widespread". It sounds like we agree.

ah, indeed I misunderstood. cheers!

The current state of web3 reminds me of people building new game engines well before any reasonable game could be built on the platform. This happened a lot in the 90's/2000's in the Interactive Fiction community. Smart people would find IF, play a bunch of games, build a game or two, then decide the existing platforms "didn't fit their style or the kinds of features they wanted" and start discussing how _they_ would do it differently.

None of those platforms ever saw the light of day. The few platforms that _did_ see success were the ones that were built quietly, the platform designer also became its first author and created a viable, interesting game in the platform to prove its value.

I think the proponents of web3 need to stop marketing/pushing it and just go build something. If/when you have something clearly viable, then the rest of us will take a more serious look at what you've invented.

And your users/customers can't just be crypto adherents. That's always going to be a limited subset of Internet users. You have to build something _easy to access_ with _clear benefits_.

Until then, it's just more vaporware.

A lot of them are happening right now. The most interesting thing about Web3 is just how much stuff is being built. Really innovative financial models, huge DAO that are beginning to work, NFT communities that actually help people.

It's happening right now, just join the discords.

Mind sharing which discords to follow?

Isn't it funny that all of these conversations around federated data are happening on discord? I'd love it if Discord was indexed by search engines so I didn't have to fight to find that conversations that I am interested in.

The tech is so open that we need exclusivity clubs

Any discords you would recommend? Interested in DAOs creating real value, not arguing about NFTs vs jpegs. :D Thanks!

Isn't it all always happening right now?

> It's happening right now, just join the discords.

This phrase is comical. Decentralization is happening, join us in centralizing

This comment is akin to saying “you use an iPhone, therefore you can’t hate capitalism”

One can form part of the status quo while building a better future.

It's not that the discords and the discussions there shouldn't exist at all, but surely you could get those people who actually know about the tech have those discussions on a platform that better suits.

Discord is a non-starter for wider usage.

List any usage that goes beyond crypto users. No one cares about DAO's or NFT's (scam).

Give us a real world application that millions of non-crypto users would benefit from?

> The most interesting thing about Web3 is just how much stuff is being built

The amount of stuff being built is really not interesting.

> Really innovative financial models

None of those financial models are innovative

> NFT communities that actually help people.

Yeah, right.

> It's happening right now, just join the discords.

Yup. The regular cultist words. "Just google it"

I read this as yet another article stating how great web3 is going to be and how important the decentralization aspect is, without making it clear exactly why this is the case, and what concrete examples of things we'll be able to do with it (that we're unable to do today) are.

Web3 sounds to me like one of those soap opera startups PG talks about. They sound like a great idea when you propose them, but do people really want them in reality?

It was "sitcom" startups[0], something like "uber for dogs". I guess some of web3 qualifies, but I don't think something like Ethereum would fit that category at all.

0 - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

With web3, there is no deplatforming, no moderation, no accountability. There is no responsibility.

That’s what they really want. They want a system that, in their minds, won’t be subject to regulation or social pressure.

They are still mad that Reddit blocked certain groups. That parler got banned from public clouds.

Those are the things that made them “wake up” to the need for web3.

Deleting data and social accountability are important features that they find abhorrent.

> With web3, there is no deplatforming, no moderation, no accountability

A collection of NFTs got deplatformed, moderated, and even accepted accountability yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714296

That is what the reality will be.

But the image that is being communicated is Web3 is decentralised and impervious to the kinds of moderation we have today.

That only works because of the “web2” aspects of the current NFT implementation. The actual content is simply hosted on a traditional web2 service. Once the data moves to a distributed store, it becomes a much more intractable problem that depends on a lot of traditional “centralized” parties. Random network participants will become liable in lawsuits for storing/replicating blocks of data, which will lead to all sorts of compliance issues, which will result in what we have today: centralized services operated by experts on behalf of the lay customer.

So, either nothing changes, or something changes. You can’t have it both ways.

From the article in that thread:

> “We were not aware of the likeness laws in NFTs as the market is not regulated,” the post reads.

Hahahahaha. This is the dumbest excuse, you are not immune to existing rules just “because crypto”. The likened laws don’t need to mention crypto specifically to apply, did they even stop to think for a single second before they did this?

If the crypto community wants to be taken seriously and not constantly regarded as a joke, they ought to do themselves a favour and at least try to be a bit competent.

Yes, I don't want twitter users to determine who can use the internet and who can send/receive money. That's a job for governments, not self-important people with blue check marks next to their names.

P.S. you can have moderation without censorship. That's how Mastodon works.

This article is filled with absolutely 0 reasons why Web 3.0 should be taken seriously.

All it says is: Web 3.0 matters because I say so. And we will prove it,

Yes.. and?

the hn crowd really needs to stop amplifying these authors with buzzwords in the title sort of things.

Yea and whoever owns this domain needs to hand it over to someone who produces H.264-compressed videos.

It really sounds like the big data, machine learning, AI and enterprise blockchain craze from 5 years ago. Where those things were used for the most stupid things just so the marketing department could put it on a powerpoint slide.

But big data and AI have real usecases. For example AlphaGo, GPT, protein folding, better photography, etc.

Big data, machine learning and AI are massive sectors of the tech economy today. The only thing you demonstrate is that there is a difference between aggressive marketing leeching of the core idea and the motivations behind the core idea itself.

HN meta: funnily enough, I made an extension that highlights keywords on HN and I added "web3" to the list this morning after reading this 3-week old comment: "It feels as if 5 similar articles [about web3] reach the HN top page every day like this. The same arguments are made, the same rebuttals are made, the same comments are made ad nauseam, every single time, with no apparent conclusion. Are we officially living in a simulation? What's happening?" [1]. 2 hours later, I refresh the frontpage and here we go.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29484941

Also if you looking for recent past threads about web3: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&query=web3

You're not kidding. I could swear I've read some of the comments in here, word for word, in past web3 posts. I wasn't even sure it was a new post at first, the comments (and the replies to those comments!) have been so similar.

Matt Baer, developer / owner of Write.as, has a competing and differing vision of web3 (perhaps better labeled "web 3.0"):

https://write.as/matt/what-would-a-real-web3-look-like

It'd be preferable for users and developers to gravitate towards a web built on community standards, rather than one built on an exploitative ecosystem. Dave Winer notes "web3 is venture capital wanting a new bubble to inflate so they can get the kinds of returns they used to get." (https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1475876218905976843)

The problem with this "web 3.0" proposal is that the tech is web 2.0. RSS, diaspora, pump.io and friendica have all been around for ages.

The real problem is a lack of incentives for those in power (generally those with large marketing departments) to adopt or support them. We see this every time a major service slowly kills off their API. Data portability and interoperability are nice for gaining adoption, but the first thing you kill when it outlives its usefulness to the centralized entity.

And the average user doesn't care about this, and probably also doesn't want to do the research to understand decentralized federation. People already unlearned that gmail is distrinct from email, and here we ask them to yet again anchor their trust in even smaller entities than your average email provider to curate their social feed and keep their instance up.

It is a much better vision of the future of the internet than web3 - even through web3 sells the blockchain as the magic silver bullet to these issues. But it will fail for the same reason.

Let's say all crypto goes down in value 10% year after year in 2022 indefinitely.

This shouldn't necessarily affect the value or necessity (or lack thereof) of Web3. Can Web3 practically succeed under these conditions?

Unfortunately after engaging with many in person and on this forum, I've yet to hear a coherent strategy or purpose for Web3 that doesn't rely on centralized entities at any part of the chain, or rely on crypto going up.

Consider that lots of companies have relatively small market caps relative to their profit mandate, and yet they still provide a crucial value to their customers.

GE with a workforce of over 174,000 employees sells 75 billion dollars in goods and services, yet has a price to sales ratio of 1.37.

> Unfortunately after engaging with many in person and on this forum, I've yet to hear a coherent strategy or purpose for Web3 that doesn't rely on centralized entities at any part of the chain, or rely on crypto going up.

Did you want to respond to the person? Or just chime in with a random anecdote about GE.

This argument is simple, but forgets that the Internet has essentially had permission-less databases before, notably in IRC, XMPP, and email. Anyone can run an IRC or XMPP node, anyone can run email. The protocols are open and free (as in money) to use. But time and again the masses of Internet users choose centralized alternatives.

It's interesting to see this already playing out in the Web 3 space. Users concentrate transactions on a few (< 50) sites. The space is considered investable by VMS because they expect companies to be able to create lock-in similar to what Slack did with chat or Facebook did with Web forums.

I think the argument made implicitly is that with web3 you could actually monetize your contribution. If you run an IRC server you (usually) only have cost. One part of web3 is tokens so you can actually earn some fake money by running an IRC server.

I think if you look at the economics of that though I don't think it will turn out in your favor. You are either making 10ct a month from it or you'll have to heavily invest in hardware to (potentially) turn a profit.

The reason some of that works now is because we have an inflated price of tokens and people are speculating on it going up. But that makes it not an appealing service for you to pay for.

And all of that forgets that the vast majority of people is not willing to pay anything to use a service. No matter how often web3 people will yell "If you don't pay for it, you're the product".

I remember so much of the time I spent on IRC and XMPP overlapped with the period in my life when I had the fewest financial resources. It would have been net negative for me if the popular chat spaces had been accompanied by any kind of toll.

Big plus to this point. The idea behind web3 seems to be "the web, but everything is an attempt to gauge people for money now".

How is that better? Who asked for more money to be involved everywhere? I just want an open space to hang out with people and share ideas and data, I don't want everything to become a gated community.

The worst part to me is how it would change the content. If we were all getting paid for this conversation it would not be the same conversation as right now + getting paid.

So often my opinion on a topic is so different than the opinion I think will get the most upvotes.

It is really why I think the whole concept is doomed to fail.

That is another insane aspect, correct. There's a big overlap between crypto advocates and people who feel very strongly about freedom of speech, but in reality the world they'd build would involve a lot of self-censorship for financial reasons.

Freedom of speech only for those that can afford it.

Also Web3 is inherently centred around usage models. One token for each comment or channel.

But a lot of people hate that model and much prefer the "all you can eat" monthly subcription approach.

There is no Web3 yet.

Web 2.0 was a buzzword created to describe a group of technologies that made web pages behave more like desktop applications, AFTER those technologies had come to prominence.

Web 1.0 was a bunch of communication protocols for publishing network accessible documents.

In both cases, the technology preceded the revenue models, and indeed there are a number of disparate revenue models which publishers and developers choose when creating websites, web applications and mobile applications.

Web3, however, is an attempt to turn the blockchain, which is a revenue model, into a platform to supercede Web 1.0. It is not in the same evolutionary path as the "first 2 webs" (if you could call them that), it's just a PR driven money grab.

One key difference I see is that web 2.0 kind of just emerged and we looked around ourselves and said "Hey, this is different. It's basically version 2 of the web, web 2.0". It happened, and we observed it, and gave it a name, which was then hyped and buzzworded.

Web3 seems to be going in the other direction: people have a vision for what the next paradigm shift might be, gave it a name, and are pushing it forward but it's not quite here yet. It might not get here, and if it does it might not be in the form that proponents are hoping for. Magic 8-ball says "situation hazy, ask again later"

If we do get a newly decentralized Web3, I suspect the pendulum may then ultimately swing back yet again to centralization with Web4, and so on. So it goes.

Web3 doesn't mean anything, it's just the adopted jargon of a couple of groups with different visions for what it means.

I fear more posts relating to said nonsense will only legitimize those topics in the eyes of the uninformed.

I think it's really easy to be doubtful about web3, especially given how much BS is floating in the space, and the high amount of pure speculative trades having been made so far.

I still believe that there's something there, but I'm not sure what it is. I am also unsure that the current wave of companies will be able to find it.

The different between the early adoption of web2 and this current web3 cycle is that web2 brought a proper value to its users. I still fail to see how web3 is providing value at all.

Perhaps specific aspects of crypto (e.g. NFT used for real estate transactions) will be the killer app?

In many countries real estate transactions are validated by a notary elite that has a lot of political clout. Technical superiority is not even a factor here.

Which countries?

> Perhaps specific aspects of crypto (e.g. NFT used for real estate transactions) will be the killer app?

I consider myself to be very good at security, offsite encrypted backups, managing private keys, and other opsec details.

But there's no way I'd ever want the ownership of my house or cars or other property controlled by an NFT. If something happens to my private keys, am I stuck with the house forever? If my private keys are stolen, does someone else suddenly own my house because they have the NFT?

In a hypothetical world where NFTs were the token of real estate ownership, governments would simply step in and make sets of laws to override and re-issue the NFTs according to legal outcomes. They would store the overrides and other information in a centralized database that they control, and everyone would be bound to respect the overrides in the centralized database. So the NFT becomes a gimmick.

> But there's no way I'd ever want the ownership of my house or cars or other property controlled by an NFT.

+1. My dad died in 2015 and the lawyer who held his Will had apparently gone out of business in the early 00s. I spent a lot of time in the probate courts but was eventually able to gain access to the assets so I could clear the estate, settle his debts, and put him to rest. Arbitrated reversibility and sanctioned transfer of title is a feature, not a bug...I feel that point often gets lost in the web3 debates.

The author struggles to make the point that Web3 has value. Isn't "another opportunity for grift" a source of value for grifters?

Or even mention the “value” of the many DeFi apps that are available on the ethereum blockchain. What do they do?

My real question is: why would an investor want to put money into a company that doesn’t “own” the data from their customers? Do they even _have_ customers? What is their business model?

I know, I know - they make commissions on all those billions of transactions that will happen on the blockchain. Right? Is the value simply coming up with new ways to add cost to transactions?

I’m lost. Even when web2 was in an eyeballs race, I understood that you could monetize eyeballs with advertising (in what I considered a worst-case model). And SaaS was an obvious model, even if Marc Benioff seemed to yell about it a lot.

What is a web3 business model outside of currency exchange?

On a very small scale I am working on a next-generation web for myself and people immediately around me.

My #1 principle is cost minimization so that I don't need to worry about what it costs to run.

Futurists circa 1970 expected that people would be getting their news from something like cnn.com in the Early 1980s

https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/summer-reading-2013-the-in...

In some sense it came true in that you could access the AP newswire on Compuserve and the Source and that there were teletext services in Europe.

All of these faced bad economics. The cost of CompuServe was astronomical. The only one that came close to mass market was Minitel in France and that was because the phone company saw they could save money on directory services.

The web came along because technology had progressed an order of magnitude past feasibility to the point where people could publish stuff on the web and not worry about what it costs. That act of closing the circle and making it financial sustainable really trashed it.

He's a VC, he needs to project that they invest in things that have value. They're part of the grift. I have 0 faith in anything coming out of a VC's office to be beneficial to society. An interesting business? Sure! But in the long run it will not be a good thing.

That guy usually writes some good articles and seems to have some sense but since the NFT grift hit it big the blockheads have really gone down a rabbit hole.

> financial applications have been built on top of Ethereum that all share the same database and users can move from application to application, keeping their data (and their login credentials stored in their wallet) as they go.

Does anyone have examples of this in the wild? I often hear data portability listed as one of the great benefits, but I don’t have a grasp on what that actually means.

In my mind, the data needs to be structured to be useful, otherwise other DAPs wouldn’t be able to act on it. Who defines the structure? And who manages changes?

Some examples of dApp data sharing in the wild:

For example if you have Ether, you can use a decentralized exchange (e.g. Uniswap) to swap it to stablecoins like USDC and DAI, deposit that USDC and DAI into a collateralized lending market (e.g. Compound), then deposit your deposit tickets into a stable pair exchange (e.g. Curve) to earn maker fees when others trade against your liquidity, while ALSO earning interest fees that accrue to the underlying. This is possible because these contracts are all able to share data about token balances with each other.

On a side note, DAI is actually a great example to illustrate this kind of data sharing, because behind the scenes, DAI is itself a synthetic asset backed by yet other assets. DAI backing even includes derivative assets that themselves represent claims on liquidity denominated in yet other assets in external contracts (e.g. UNIV2WBTCETH). The tangled web of assets backed by other assets is insane, honestly, but it's all made possible by contracts sharing data with each other.

As a second example, you could take some bitcoin, bridge it onto Ethereum (using e.g. the REN network), and deposit and earn interest on it on a collateralized lending platform. These actions all require data about ETH balances and token balances to be portable across dApps, and in this case even portability across the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.

A non-monetary example of data portability within Ethereum is the Ethereum Name Service. Like DNS, the name database is public and can be queried by other dApps. As a bonus, names in ENS also follow the ERC-721 token standard which provides a standard way to share data about who owns which names, so it's theoretically possible to write contracts that themselves write derivatives on name ownership, for example to give someone a collateralized loan backed by the value of their ENS name, or to have a contract that owns an ENS name but that requires a majority DAO vote in order to manage the name or transfer ownership.

In summary, for the most part dApps are purposely written in such a way that they can be easily integrated with other dApps using open standards and without asking permission, which is why the space sometimes gets a "money legos" moniker.

The data structures that allow these apps to pass data between each other are defined by the ERC-20 and ERC-721 token standards, which list standard method interfaces for smart contracts to store and query each others' token balances, and I believe were officiated as standards by the Ethereum Foundation. These standards are currently widely supported across all Ethereum smart contracts that involve tokens.

Thanks for the examples.

The monetary case seems like the natural first step. The name service case seems more interesting. It isn’t a financial instrument, so it demonstrates DAP utility for non-financial application.

You referenced a few standards that the DAPs adhere to, which lines up with assumptions I’ve had about the data schema management. In a generalized sense, it seems that community members, or a governing body, will propose changes, and if the community accepts them, the changes will be implemented into the network.

It seems to me the name service case has parallels to identity management through protocols such as SAML and LDAP.

But I’m still trying to wrap my head around examples I’ve heard such as building DAP social media apps that allow users to move their data to another DAP social app. Thinking of the social media sites we have today, they all consider their profile structures and models proprietary, as market differentiators that set each one apart from their competitors, and make up the “secret sauce” that gives social value to their users.

How would a DAP be able to maintain similar differentiators? Or is the expectation that only certain things such as basic profile information be stored on the blockchain, able to move to other DAPs, while other proprietary functionality is managed elsewhere?

Well, decentralized exchanges usually maintain their moat through liquidity (the catch-22 of attracting liquidity to a new dex without users, and attracting users without liquidity).

Ethereum Name Service maintains their moat through legitimacy. You could copy paste the contract and start issuing .eth names of your own, but the ENS team is generally trusted by the community and thus their specific instance of the contract (at their contract address) is already widely integrated into products.

You're right that social media dApps perhaps don't have a "moat" like that, which may be part of why we've seen so many of them blossom and fail, while none of them really catch on like with other types of services. Though that might be just as much due to the fact that social media is a low-value service compared to money transfer, and blockchains just haven't become scalable enough yet for a meaningful part of the social media stack to be run cost-efficiently on the blockchain.

Personally I've always been less sold on cryptocurrency networks as a host for social media, as I believe traditional decentralized web2 schemes like ActivityPub (Mastodon) still have a long way to race in that regard before the scheme needs to be complicated with a blockchain integration.

What I do believe will happen is similar to you explained, where just profile info (and maybe a profile image hash) is stored on the blockchain while other data is stored off-chain. Ethereum Name Service already acts as a profile service in a lot of ways as it already has records for your twitter handle, github handle, etc. as well as support for custom records. One global name standard like ENS would for example allow you to pick your Mastodon profile up and move it seamlessly to another instance, with the authorization of that cross-server move handled by the blockchain.

This is the most elucidating comment I’ve read in regards to real-world examples of crypto projects. Thank you.

Do you by any chance have a blog, or could you recommend some top resources to learn from?

It makes me happy to hear that my comment was appreciated. Anon account here unfortunately, but if you come up with any questions, the ethfinance community's daily thread on reddit is full of friendly and very knowledgeable people!

I would start with learning the basics of how Bitcoin works if you haven't already. There are some heavily watched YouTube videos you can find that do a good job of it. Ethereum is more or less the Bitcoin idea but with smart contracts (basically, it lets people run custom software directly on the blockchain).

If you're a programmer, you could try looking at some beginner Solidity tutorials.

Sorry, I feel like that might be the best I can really do here. Good luck!

"Permissionless data" is actively harmful to people who do not want their data put into an immutable datastore. It smacks of "moderation-free content" which is simply a nonstarter.

If web3 is truly about privacy and data portability, then 90% of the people working on DeFi should shift their efforts to making a better browser, possibly one that incorporates IPFS natively and quickly.

I don't like how the extreme hatred toward Web3 has spiraled into "I see no practical application for decentralization". Crypto and blockchain aside, how can you not see the utility in an open firehose database/API without gate keepers?

Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain.

Because the only reason I can imagine someone wanting a open database without gate keepers is for something the society I've aligned with has decided is illegal.

At the end of the day, I guess I trust the goverment I vote for and the banks I decide on more than a distributed group of strangers. Do you have an example of a DB that was unfairly limited by a gate keeper?

Facebook, Twitter or any walled garden. I can't build any app I want on top of those without risking it being limited, restricted or shut down... If they even provide an API at all.

So don't build on FB and Twitter? You do realize you can build an application and very easily host it for the world to access on AWS/GCP/Azure - unless you're doing something illegal or highly unethical the cloud services aren't going to kick you off. It sounds like you're saying you want to build a social media app but you don't like the fact that social media is dominated by a handful of companies (because the majority of users want to use their product already).

> Get censored off Twitter without breaking the law.

"Just build your own Twitter!"

> Conservative Twitter gets kicked off hosting services.

"Just build your own hosting services!"

> People talk about the importance of Web3 for openness and censorship resistance.

"Web3 is a grift, and if its not its for illegal things then you're only getting marginal value as compared to using FB or Twitter! So just build your own Twitter!"

I'm getting dizzy.

> At the end of the day, I guess I trust the goverment I vote for and the banks I decide on more than a distributed group of strangers.

This is a pretty ignorant take on how blockchains work. Feel free to have your opinions, but if you really think that billions of dollars is secured in Bitcoin simply because "a distributed group of strangers" are trustworthy, you've missed the entire point and you don't actually understand how it works. "Trustless" is a 'buzz word' you might want to put a lot more respect on - and maybe first learn what it actually means.

Come on, I read the original bitcoin paper upon its release xD I shortened my original post, but had explained that in the UK the Land-registry has started using a blockchain for record keeping. It worked well and is a good solution, but only whilst they stay as the sole writer. A distributed registry of home-ownership would have many risks, the largest being a sybil attack. Which Bitcoin is also liable to, where your coins are essentially protected in the trust of strangers all acting in their own interest. I can't really respect "trustless" given its an oxymoron really meaning "trust a mass of unknown people to act in their own interest".

Putting that aside, let's deal with the original quoted issue. I am privileged enough to be in a place where I trust my government, and by extension agree with their rules. The "trustless" setup of Bitcoin has meant that CP can be hosted comfortably within it (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268). A system with a liable entity would be able to solve this, Bitcoin cannot. I don't feel ignorant to think this is an issue?

You can have plenty of knowledge about Bitcoin, but your original comment about 'trust' reflects none of it. As you know, you don't 'trust' the group of strangers who run Bitcoin software to ensure the security of the protocol - that is in fact that opposite of the intention and for the most part the result. So yes, you failed to demonstrate any knowledge of how blockchains work and now you are introducing a red herring to the original argument.

By the way, Bitcoin does not have that problem because the story you linked is about a wild fork of Bitcoin which is unsustainable anyways - not even counting the fact that BSV is not intended as a file hosting service. Perhaps see what IPFS or other file hosting coins and protocols do to stop that problem. And as hard as it is to swallow, there are plenty of other ways to obscure the uploading of illegal data across all sorts of centralized services - but we don't just get rid of the internet.

So far you've just said I'm wrong. Let me try clarify. The value of your coins relies supposedly on your ability to exchange them, which in turn relies on the miners following the protocol in self-interest which happens to line up with your interest. That sounds like you're trusting the miners to continue mining the fork you prefer?

The miners are interested in making money. Why would they mine a fork which the large majority of users and traders value at $0?

The issue is that decentralization is orthogonal to the supposed problems to be solved.

There's an easy counter to "I see no practical application for decentralization," which is to provide an example of that application.

I'm not convinced that Bitcoin or currencies are a practical application that results in net gain (economic or otherwise) to humanity. The internet was obvious from day 1, even if the actual end applications ended up quite a bit different.

> how can you not see the utility in an open firehose database/API without gate keepers?

This is what I don't see. The "gate keepers" are often a positive, not a negative. And it's hard for me to imagine what sort of database is being held back because of gatekeepers.

The gate keepers are preventing me from building the kind of apps I want. Just the other day people here reminisced about the days when Twitter used to have an open API and how bad it is that they shut it down.

I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

I was thinking about this, not sure if entirely the same.

For example the YT dislikes going away. What if you got people to install a chrome extension where it tracked urls with upvotes/downvotes (game system). The database is shared between installed apps no central db... would it work?

I could be far off with the intent of the application but another example is mesh networking where it is nice to not have a central pipe but is it going to be as good, particularly the case of cross continent.

This is the kind of thing that inspires true Web3 people (not the grifters selling their OpenSea NFTs). If you dig into the problems that arise when implementing those systems you talk about and what happens when data of value can be contributed, you start naturally running into the solutions that Blockchain developers have been working on for years.

> I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

So. Where's blockchain-powered Twitters and Facebooks then? For all the talk about gatekeeping and decentralization no actual apps appeared that would in any way support your words.

There's Bitclout (Re-branded to "DeSo"/diamondapp.com) but it suffers from the same blocksize debate as anybody. No way to stay sync'd if it actually became popular, which it didn't because every new user had to learn how tell real accounts from fake lookalikes.

I don't know and who said anything about blockchain? I'm just telling you what I want. I have no interest or obligation in proving anything besides that.

Okay. "Blockchain and crypto aside", where are the fully decentralized Facebooks and Twitters without gatekeepers?

Why would I know? No-one has built it yet? It's not technically possible? There's no demand for it?

You seem to be insinuating something so please elaborate.

> Why would I know?

You're the one proclaiming and wanting things.

> No-one has built it yet? It's not technically possible? There's no demand for it?

Yes, yes, and yes, to varying degrees? You're so close to getting it.

Yes, and none of this changes the fact that I still want it. Now you hopefully get it as well.

This isn't what users want in general, and you don't need crypto to get it. What you're asking for exists with things like mastodon. No one advocating how/why they think crypto will succeed when things like mastodon failed. Hell, RSS failed. The average user wants easy to use, easy to connect, free, and fast services. Crypto fails at all of these.

The narrative driving Web3 is that people don't want to be treated like cattle. Or in your parlance, "the average user." Just because people are slow to wake with the contracts they made with centralized platforms doesn't mean they are so dull as to not care when they finally figure it out.

People want things to be cheap and convenient. Convincing yourself otherwise is a mistake.

False dichotomy. Convincing yourself that all blockchain will ever be is data posted in Bitcoin PKscripts is embarrassing.

I never said anything about crypto. I said that you should _not_ conflate decentralization with blockchain and yet people attack me as if I was advocating for crypto. This just proves my original point that people hate crypto so much that they automatically attack decentralization in general.

Or maybe you didn’t communicate your point effectively.

My point holds for non crypto decentralization as well. Consumers choose against, no matter how much tech people like us want it.

Ok, so what? I still want it. Is everything that hasn't reached mass adoption a failure?

There’s a difference between personally wanting it, and mass appeal with a prediction of mass adoption.

> I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

I'm still not clear how this would work.

In a web 3 twitter clone that prevents one from ever being "restricted, limited or shut down", where does the crypto-tweet live?

Where is it stored?

How well does this scale?

What does it take to crypto-tweet (do you have to pay some crypto currency to have it be out there)?

What happens if you want to redact it later?

What is the energy cost of putting a crypto-tweet out there?

What would be the overall energy and storage costs be across all devices for a single crypto-tweet?

What would the costs be if this was to scale to 1% of Twitter (Twitter is 6k tweets/s so this would be 60 crypto-tweets/second)?

If the above doesn't reflect the proper design of a crypto-twitter, what would that look like? One of the classic system design questions is "how would you implement twitter" and so that's something that nearly every software developer has thought about at one point or another... and so if I've got the wrong questions fro crypto-twitter, how is it designed and what are the right questions to ask about such a design?

If I may summarize the typical response?

TBD

To start you Tweet off chain, and you only verify on chain. Most of the skeptics here seem to take pride in their shallow understanding of blockchain - most of these questions are posed with some idea that people want to post a million tweets a day on the Bitcoin blockchain. People smart enough to answer your questions don't actually hang out here - I would know, because I hang out with them where they are welcome.

And yes, those people also make a distinction between themselves and the average grifter - something HN fails miserably at.

Ok so if the data is off chain for the tweets, that off-chain resource becomes the gatekeeper, doesn't it?

I am becoming convinced that there may be value somewhere in this open database, but I'm also convinced that 99% of the people advocating for web3 and making a ton of "money" on current token speculation do not know what this value will be.

The most convincing application I can think of is a PGP for the modern world that everyone can use without hours and hours of tech training. But I think there will be more.

I'm not entirely sold.

Application data...

Let's say there's a Great Open Database of microblogging. This is somehow distributed across multiple systems, and sized so that it can handle the load, and provides a query language to make that database useful... Shoot, let's spin up a couple clusters of CouchDB and go from there and build a microblogging platform on top of that?

Does it solve the problem? It's trivial for anyone to spin up their own clone of a CouchDB - just replicate it. You want your own uncenersoable copy - its yours. And yes, there are numerous problems with this that as you pull the thread get to the point of "at some point, you're going to have to trust some central authority"

That might be where you're getting to the "PGP for the modern world" - though I'm going to contend that every solution has a similar problem of getting the average person to treat their keys securely... and that means having one copy and getting ransomeware or having key stealing malware has become much, much more problematic than it is in today's world. I believe that that social / computer literacy problem needs to be solved for the average person before one can reasonably move forward with PGP for the modern world.

One base case that seems reasonably compelling is a distributed key store to manage public key exchange without concern of ever being trivially spoofed. I don't think anyone really knows what the right balance of on and off chain data transactions is - it depends a lot on chain efficiency and what can simply be done peer-to-peer.

I'm thinking broadly, but the idea of exchanging keys on a distributed system and then engaging in services using those keys peer-to-peer is appealing. You can audit all the software, and you use zero centralized third parties. I think it brings back a DIY attitude to the internet.

If you're tempted to lecture me on your thoughts about what 'normal people' want and how its not what I just said, I would pre-emptivly argue you do not consider that normal people often co-opt what the inside few value first, and that if a system like this remains niche I would still value it. Web3 on this site is too much about dunking on grifters and too little about focusing on what the grifters are stealing.

Let's assume that Ethereum gets properly sharded, and web3 solves all these technical challenges somehow, because that's supposedly where Ethereum is headed.

Why would I as a user prefer Twitter or prefer web3 decentralized microblogging?

With Twitter, even with minimal gate keeping, I still get a spam/scam message only once every month or so.

But minimal gatekeeping is soooooo much better than email, where I get so much spam email that it has made the service worthless without spam filtering, which has an error rate for finding spam.I literally only read my personal email messages once every week or so because it's such a chore to get through all the craft spam, much of it from places where I once bought a single item.

So as a programmer and creator, sure, you prefer the ability to not be locked out. But as a user of Twitter, I vastly prefer all those programmers being locked from access. It's the only thing that keeps it sane and almost-useful.

One application I recently heard of that might be relevant: using wallets as crypto for the average person, finally allowing more secure and better website login. If everybody has wallet, it might finally solve the problem of scattered passwords everywhere for every site, with many users reusing site password.

> Why would I as a user prefer Twitter or prefer web3 decentralized microblogging?

I'm even going to ask "why do you need web3 for decentralized microblogging?"

What problem does this future tech solve that Mastodon does not currently solve? What is the current solution lacking and is easier to solve in a hypothetical web3 world?

The "use wallet for login" I contend has an even bigger problem than "reuse the same password" for the average person.

Losing a device with a wallet (e.g. phone) becomes an even bigger issue.

Wallet stealing scripts/malware would compromise even more of a person's identity.

Additional difficulties in being able to recover an account if a person loses access to their wallet (e.g. drive failure).

I believe that existing password management systems do a better job of this for the average person and it would be better to have people use those than trying to get everyone to have a crypto wallet.

That has the added advantage that password management systems work wherever there's a password rather than a mishmash of "this site uses this wallet" and some sites will never get to the point of using a wallet for account management (compare how many have a 'login with apple' even though that's been around for a while and is pushed by Big Tech).

I never said anything about crypto so I don't feel qualified to answer your questions. I'm talking about decentralization in general and what I want to see. Blockchain is probably not the tool for that, which was also my original point (don't conflate decentralization with blockchain).

What is lacking in the current decentralized technologies? Mastodon has been around for half a decade, is actively supported, and is part of the Fediverse.

One of the difficulties that I have is that the decentralization proposals don't seem to offer anything over the existing solutions out there aside from the "I want to build it again."

Don't get me wrong - building it again is a legitimate reason. There are several services out there that I'd like to build again... though I also want to do it because I feel that there's a problem that the existing solution doesn't properly solve or has a less than optimal underlying model for my use case.

So, I return to the question of "what is this going to do better?" This can help lead to feature discovery of existing platforms (the "wait, it does that too?"), the addition of missing requirements to those existing platforms, or the beginnings of a paradigm shift for how one works with such services.

I want to know what's missing so that I can work on the making it better. I don't see what is currently missing in the current (distributed) solutions.

> I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

I'm not at all convinced that technology from "web3" or ethereum or whatever can actually do this.

Please don't tell me it's coming soon or just a matter of time. That's been said for ten years.

Read my original comment again. I'm not advocating for blockchain or crypto. My point was that you should not conflate decentralization with these buzz words and dismiss it by affiliation. I don't know when this is coming or if it's coming at all but it's what I want.

Apologies, I misread. Indeed, the future you want is here now and you can start today. For real. The decentralized version of the internet exists in many forms. Pick one and build your thing.

> I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

What is stopping you from storing HTML/CSS on torrent/IPFS/github/pastebin?

This stuff exists - right now. Your version of it just adds an unnecessary barrier to entry.

What is "my" version? I haven't said anything about implementation. IPFS is a great example of what I'm talking about.

Because they keep talking and talking and all we get is get rich quick schemes involving blockchains and crypto.

Where are the applications?

It blows my mind how many people keep dismissing decentralization because of problems in the NFT space.

We're not.

We don't need blockchain for decentralization. That's what we're dismissing. Blockchain is a set of cancer cells that have metastasized into the existing zeitgeist surrounding decentralization efforts. It offers nothing, and just poisons our existing work.

If you're not than I haven't referred to you :)

To all the people that downvoted my comment, do you think that decentralization is inherently connected to the Blockchain/NFT? If true, mind explaining?

Just shouting "BUT DECENTRALIZATION!" bears as much sense as "BUT BITCOIN".

Decentralization doesn't have inherent value, and has a whole host of problems that cryptopeddlers don't want to either acknowledge or pretend to solve.

> Decentralization doesn't have inherent value

I think that when building the internet and the web, decentralization was assumed to have a lot of value, do you disagree with that?

> decentralization was assumed to have a lot of value

It wasn't inherent.

The value was "in the case of global nuclear war it would be nice to have independent centers that could still continue to operate in the aftermath". It was a solution to a very specific (though thankfully theoretical) problem.

"web3" offers no such problem, but loves to scream "but decentralization!".

Anything "web scale" without gatekeepers is immediately colonized by criminals, neo-Nazis, redpill edgelords, pedophiles, and all other such manner of people who are always looking for a new place to exist after being kicked out of every other one.

Unmoderated discussion doesn't scale. The noise floor rises faster than the population of the service until it collapses under the weight of the trolls.

Moderation and filtering can happen on the user application layer with the underlying data still being open and accessible. Right now the gate keepers are Big Tech deciding who and when someone or something can access the data.

Personal spam control has its own issues. Managing the filter can end up consuming all of your time on the platform and that effort has to be replicated for every user. Worse, public perception will be that your platform is unusable because the horrendous first impression it makes.

So maybe you decided to make public filter lists, but then the people making the filters end up being the defacto operators of the platform and you're back to square 1.

I mostly meant the app you're using to access the data doing the moderation for you.

I don't think we would be back to square 1. We would still have the possibility to create new clients and build whatever applications we want without being under the mercy of Big Tech holding the data hostage. Sure, maybe one such app talking to the open platform would become dominant and the de facto operator but at least it wouldn't have the power to restrict, limit or shut down other apps.

> We would still have the possibility to create new clients and build whatever applications we want without being under the mercy of Big Tech holding the data hostage.

How does this improve on a self hosted blog with RSS feeds and associated aggregators?

How does what improve? I haven't said anything about implementation.

All theories are good until they come into contact with reality.

"Everything will be magically good and people will live in love in peace once there's a decentralized open database with bo gatekeepers" is just as valid a statement if you "don't say anything about implementation".

Not sure what your point is. You've been arguing with me against something I don't understand this whole thread so let me make this clear: I (me, personally) want to build apps on open and unrestricted APIs. I don't know how or if this will happen. I don't claim it will change the world and I definitely don't think it involves blockchain.

Now, can you stop being obnoxious?

> Not sure what your point is.

My point is: You keep saying things without offering anything concrete. When people ask you concrete questions you hide behind "I never said aything about implementation"

> I (me, personally) want to

I also want many things.

Why would I need to offer anything at all? People ask irrelevant questions thinking I'm advocating for a crypto future.

> I also want many things.

And how would you feel if people started arguing saying you don't actually want those things? That's what you are doing.

No. The base layer remains open and decentralized, and the user layers dictate their own rules on what's allowed. It's not personal spam control, that term doesn't even make sense - that would be akin to each user viewing everything and deciding if its kosher or not, except they've just viewed everything, so its not a filter at all.

Its quite obvious that user services would form their own communities around their moderation styles, and its not like all data needs to be posted on chain anyways.

Web3 is like a solution in search of a problem, except worse, because the solution does not actually solve the problem.

If the proponents could catalyse their solution into anything more concrete than “Something something crypto currency” we might even be able to figure out what their proposed solution actually is lol.

> Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain.

Well it’d be easier if crypto wasn’t every second word out of someone’s mouth when they talk about “web3”. The technology to do pretty much everything “web3” promises already exists, and works better than it’s crypto-equivalent. The Local-First software movement is a good example of this.

If the proponents of “web3”actually cared about decentralisation/federation/user controlled data/etc they’d be pushing *actual solutions” instead of recruiting for yet another crypto Ponzi scheme.

Worth noting, however, that I’m not saying there aren’t improvements to be made, but I have yet to see any demonstration that the crypto space can contribute anything actually meaningful to this space.

So what is the solution to posting sensitive information on an open platform where people can easily lie or cheat? Your version of Web3, despite its head start, is no better off than the so called 'grifter version' (grifters dog piling innovation doesn't tell you anything about the legitimacy of that innovation; see "Dot-Com Bubble"[1]).

Let's start you off with the very basics; a low stakes example. What is a solution to email spam? You incur a small cost to honest senders and a large cost to mass senders. We'll call it Hashcash[2], and as a user you will only accept emails from senders with a header including your email and the date, which hashes to a sufficiently small value of your choosing, the smaller, the harder it was to send. Every sender gets a linear increase in amount of work to send, but for normal email users sending one email at a time its a small constant, while mass senders increase this value for each recipient. Because of the economics of spam email, where the profit is made off a few gullible recipients while the majority ignore it, Hashcash makes spam emails a losing strategy, at least in this simple example. This is an economic solution, and it is also exactly what the primary cryptocurrency does.

Bitcoin is primitive, and its data throughput reflects that. I won't be shilling or giving you tips, but imagine a blockchain system which ensures openess (no Infura Problem[3] as is common in Ethereum sized blockchains) and a scalable model for pricing and putting data on chain. It may be more expensive or slower than a federated system, but a system with the proper economic incentives and deterrents is now capable of doing something a centralized or federated system cannot: hosting data for which there is massive economic incentive to distort without a profitable way to actually do so, or more specifically, a predictable cost of attack that rises with subsequent block confirmations (just like Bitcoin's security model). Now you can price your data, and wait the amount of time that correlates to the cost of attack that would not be worth the money it takes to cheat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

[3] https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-...

I wish I could separate decentralized database from volatile investment. I understand that it can provide an incentive to get paid for essentially hosting part of the database. Is your average person benefiting from this or did we just give most of the centralization to mining farms where electricity is cheaper?

Is web3 crypto money? Is it peer to peer? Is it blockchain?

Does the blockchain really make sense for something like a HN clone or an instagram?

If I were trying to proselytize web3 I would be promoting tech demos and convincing people why it is better. Like the Rails blog video that blew all of our minds in the past. We all wanted to use Rails after that. The benefits were clear.

Decentralized cryptoapps may have a point, but somehow "web3" proponents forget that there there can be decentralization without crypto at all.

Web2 succeeded because Web1 protocols haven't been developed to withstand abuse. For instance, the email protocol (Web1) hasn't got an extension that would enable receiving emails only from authorized senders. As a result, email is heavily abused by spam and phishing to a degree that only a handful of large email providers can effectively deal with it. The centralization of email services is typical for Web2.

RSS (Web1) hasn't got an extension that would enable access restriction and following. As a result, centralized proprietary ad-driven social networks (Web2) took over.

HTTP (Web1) hasn't developed a micropayment mechanism. As a result, the current internet is monetized through all-pervasive ads (Web2) with all the terrible destructive downsides that come from ad-driven media.

Email isn’t web1. It isn’t web-anything.

The post this post links to a few times [1] is the more interesting one:

https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto...

Still, it's unconvincing to me.

It argues web3 is about permissionless data. The problem with that is we already have permissionless data -- you can put almost any kind of data you want on a server and encourage people honor it. What they actually want is shared data, governed by rules that hard for anyone to change, and use that as scaffolding to build systems around consequential data. That's kind of interesting, but what happens when the rules conflict with reality. E.g., when the blockchain says you own the land but the law says someone else does? Now you could agree to make a blockchain database is the authority on something, even contractually, which would help it harmonize with laws to a decent degree. But that would be an individual decision and doesn't preclude scams, fraud, people acting in bad faith, etc.

Ultimately blockchains about data of any consequence will have to comport with applicable laws and regulations, just like everything else. The lack of flexibility likewise makes blockchain pretty useless for softer things, like social networks. (It's kind of silly to even bring up social networks in this context, but the post brings up Facebook.)

When thinking about web3 I try to maintain a mental distinction between the enthusiasm for new ways of building applications, and the technical capabilities available to do so now.

To the extent there is something “there” in web3, I think it is mostly the former—the enthusiasm.

I saw someone write that there is a whole generation that grew up in a web dominated by Facebook, YouTube, etc. and they are hungry for a new way of doing things that feels free. I grew up with the original implementation of the WWW so I feel a lot of empathy for this point of view. It felt incredibly exciting and free.

That said, the “web3” technology so far seems to be a dumpster fire. NFTs are packed with wash-sale scammers, and smart contracts are super inefficient, or break in expensive ways, or both. Although to be fair the early Web 1.0 was largely a dumpster fire too. :-)

I think there is a big risk that the enthusiasm gets coopted by “solutions” that are in fact still centralized and just the old rulers in new clothes. I have to say that seeing so much boosting from rich established VCs does not seem like a good signal in that regard.

When I see someone whose job it is to centralize huge control and rewards on behalf of their investors shouting that web3 is freedom from control and centralization… I start to feel dubious.

I think the VCs are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It makes sense to invest in "web3" because of the potential power law returns if someone figures out how to make something useful. However, I think we've had enough time to evaluate enough of these technologies to claim that the emperor has no clothes. It may take a few years but I think every single web3 investment will have to be written off as a complete loss. There is just no problem being solved there that couldn't be solved more efficiently elsewhere.

> However, I think we've had enough time to evaluate enough of these technologies

"We" (humanity) started working on networking/the foundations of the internet in the 1970s, and it wasn't until late 1990s that it actually became mainstream and started providing a solution to "real" problems we had at that time. What makes you confident we can judge cryptocurrencies in just ~12 years instead of ~20 years it took for the internet to take hold?

> There is just no problem being solved there that couldn't be solved more efficiently elsewhere.

How about a network where anyone with a computer could transfer X amount of something to someone else, without having to rely on a single 3rd party? You'll say that it's not a problem in practice, but the same thing was said about email in the past.

Even in the early days of computing, there were obvious benefits to networking computers. The work wasn't done for no reason, there was clear value in coming up with all of these protocols. The main reason it took so long for general adoption was the fact that computers were not in most family homes until the 1990s. The barrier to adopting the internet wasn't the inherent value of the protocols it was the cost of the machine to the average consumer.

I'm confident in saying this because we are further along in the computing adoption cycle and we haven't really come up with anything useful.

Your point about transferring something to someone else without a third party ignores transaction costs. Who cares if you need a third party if you are purchasing something legally and the cost to transact is low?

I mean, if I want to send you some money, and let's say you are just in Canada (I am in the United States), my options are limited and many are super expensive... and almost all of them take forever. The only cheap, easy, and fast way is PayPal (or their subsidiary Venmo), which I don't think anyone truly likes (evidence for which is easy: find literally any thread on Hacker News about them that isn't using their existence to defend why cryptocurrencies are unnecessary).

Other than PayPal, Bitcoin (or Ethereum and Avalanche or what have you) is much easier than all of these systems, and while it currently may or may not be as cheap, it was frankly a "first draft": the subsequent protocols the community is using are all (incrementally) cheaper and the ecosystem has even been succeeding at improving the overall scalability. If you tell me your Bitcoin address--no matter where you are in this increasingly global world--I can reliably send you money.

The best case scenario I can see is that cryptocurrencies push the US banking system to adopt something like the British "Faster Payment Services". If anyone begins to gain adoption they will be outcompeted by incumbent banks. It has never been the case that banking has been limited by technology for quicker and cheaper transactions in the US.

The value prop here is the “without a third party” bit I presume? That seems more like a political or ethical preference rather than true value. Email allowed you to instantly and perfectly send a message anywhere at any time, and you could cut down on machine and paper/ink costs. Genuine value.

Ironically, the crypto way of doing transactions is more like the fax machine to Venmo’s email. The former is slow and more expensive, while the latter is instant and free.

Edit: I’d also like to point out you still have a third party in crypto. It’s just that the third party is the entire network rather than a single company.

If you compare email to snailmail, the same argument could be made. That it's over the internet is just a preference, why care about email when normal mail works perfectly fine?

"Without a single 3rd party" is a technical feature, one that allows people to transfer money anywhere, for any reason via any device connected to the internet, without having to open up a bank account. According to the last numbers I've read, the number of "unbanked" people is above 1 billion in the world, some in my family is included there. For them, cryptocurrencies gives them the opportunity of sending/receiving currency cross-border much easier than what Venmo/Paypal/Transferwise/WesternUnion ever been able to provide (and trust me, we've tried most platforms).

The Bitcoin way of doing transactions is indeed slow and expensive, but there are many alternatives out there, if you care to look for them.

> Edit: I’d also like to point out you still have a third party in crypto. It’s just that the third party is the entire network rather than a single company.

Yup, that's why my comment includes "single 3rd party", not just "any 3rd party". Everyone who understands blockchain understands that there are 3rd parties involved, not everyone seems to understand the difference between multiple and single 3rd parties though.

"If you compare email to snailmail, the same argument could be made. That it's over the internet is just a preference, why care about email when normal mail works perfectly fine?"

This is nonsense. Email is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than snail mail. Talk to any business owner who made the switch from physically mailing bills to emailing their clients invoices and ask them how much time and money they saved. The value proposition for email is obvious.

Talk to 8 year old me who made the switch from physically mailing letters to my grandfather to emailing him.

> This is nonsense. Email is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than snail mail. Talk to any business owner who made the switch from physically mailing bills to emailing their clients invoices and ask them how much time and money they saved. The value proposition for email is obvious.

Sure, now it is obvious, same with the web. But it wasn't always obvious to everyone, although it was obvious to some at that point in time. Email didn't become mainstream as soon as it appeared, and same with multiple "obvious" technologies. Something doesn't become obvious until it is, but at the beginning, there are always people who don't see the value even though many would say it's obvious.

My gradma never understood the value proposition of the internet, even though even her neighbor of similar age did and countless others do understand the value proposition.

If you ask "why care about email when normal mail works just as fine" then "because you always get it quicker" is a much better answer for "well there are edge cases where an unbanked person might actually have access to a local cryptocurrency speculator offering them spendable cash for less commission than Western Union or the local hawala service"

Computer networking already had value in the 1970s (and before)!

The people who are advocating web3 are not the people who were part of building web1 & web2 (whatever those even mean). They're people who are idealistic & seem to disregard (or are ignorant of) the effort in building infrastructure at scale. Building things is hard. Building things that scale even harder & anybody who has worked at a company that needs to scale knows there are trade-offs between security, centralisation, reliability & making things work for the user in a nice way. Web3 is a moot point until somebody actually brings something real to the party. Otherwise, IMO, it's a hype train.

EDIT: Ironically, web3 also seems to be able to rip the environment a new one. Which is pretty funny given the demographic of its fans.

I've been building for the Web since 1994. I advocate for Web 3.

No offense, but my intention was to say people who built the web (infrastructure/protocols), not building for the web.

There's basically one protocol that constitutes the web, http.

Distributed wireless infrastructure is very real and a pretty clear use case of web3. Helium Network sells wireless routers, and distributes rewards to routers that provide coverage to the network. Tokens are used to purchase network bandwidth. They have nearly 400K hotspots worldwide. It's also not using the energy-intensive Proof of Work consensus algorithm that you're referring to.

The single important question about web3 is: will it be free? Can app devs just start building without paying the blockchain / network fee? The same for users; can they just use apps for free?

If not, the question is: do you pay with data, and go free, or do you pay with real money and prices skyrocketing due to endless speculations?

And second, will it be easy?

Everyone forgot the key to HTML / blogs / youtube / social media was anyone could join and start doing stuff on a Sunday afternoon.

The author has a famous quote: in the future you’ll have to pay to work. His partner Albert is pushing for the universal basic income. This pictures me a future: a playground for those who willing to pay to work, for the rich, for those pursuing wealth. The rest should rely on the UBI.

I’m ok with that. A win-win for both sides. But let’s finally put the cards on the table.

IMO, pay with money. End of story. Expecting services for free got is into this horrible advertising model that turned us into the product rather than customers. There are people promoting gasless, free to use chains. That model is flawed. Financial incentives is what finally made decentralized networks a real thing. For a good explanation as to where we're going with this, read "Who Owns The Future."

Excluding people without money sounds like the opposite direction the internet should be headed :(

You're forgetting about the part where the same system can provide those people with an income. Excluding people from the global financial system, imo, is the opposite of where we should be headed. The notion of paying people for their contribution to the network, no matter how small, is discussed in "Who Owns The Future"

How do you make money on web3 without the upfront loading of cash into a crypto wallet?

In the existing state of things, you can get involved in a community that "air drops" a token, you can run a network node, you can play a P2E game, or you can sell NFTs that don't mint until sold. But this is super early. "Who Owns The Future" describes a model of revenue sharing that will require extremely cheap micro transactions.

This is where all blows up. Where there is absolutely no free tier. That won't be digested outside the crypto community.

I see web3 / crypto is a playground for few, with their rules / utopia, but let's just call it crypto, not web3. Web3 should be universal and free, as its predecessors.

It sounds to me like what you are suggesting would be taking the awful inequality we're already suffering and would transpose it to the web. Why would we want that?

You can't provide services for free without exploiting people. I recommend reading "Who Owns The Future" for a for discussion on inclusion.

Doesn't need to be free. Could be public and tax-funded.

App devs can build any app they want on top of these web3 protocols, but their apps may have to pay a fee to interact with those protocols. The fee incentivizes the actors that host (run nodes for) the protocol. That fee may or may not be passed on to users. It's a bit like paying a microtransaction for certain HTTP requests. The amount of times that a user has to pay a fee can be minimized through various pieces of technology like rollups (read about zk rollups and optimistic rollups if you're curious).

The linked post in TFA (which is essentially the OP's main argument in favor of web3) describes how the PC won, even though it was deficient in almost every dimension (worse CPU, worse memory, storage, etc) than existing mainframes, except for one dimension: price.

It then goes on to describe how blockchain is essentially the same thing - it's a "worse" database in every way, except one: it's not controlled by a single entity

The problem with this analogy is that price is a very very different and meaningful dimension than something like memory, or storage. making something cheaper is different than making something faster. Making something faster doesn't make it more accessible. The PC was more accessible than any other computer out there.

To compare price to "being controlled by a single entity" is totally wrong. Sure, the data is "accessible" in that it's public, but to use the technology is actually way more expensive than a traditional database. in fact, calling blockchain better while ignoring the price of storing data in the blockchain is like, exactly the opposite reason why the PC won!

I'm actually pro making data way more accessible, and I wonder if there's a web3 app out there that isn't some sort of financial instrument, and not about hoarding tokens in the hope that the price for them goes up, but actually about distributing data ownership in a way that people who didn't "get in early" can actually have a seat at the table.

> If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database that is not controlled and administered by a single company, but instead is a truly open system available to all, then that kind of market power cannot be built up around a data asset.

But it's a crap database. It's incredibly slow and incredibly expensive. The benefits we get from using a slow, expensive database need to be absolutely enormous for this to turn out to be worthwhile.

If you read the post he recommends from his partner, that is covered in detail by comparing it to the PC, which compared poorly to mainframes, but was cheap. And, that Clayton Christenson remarked that having a singular facet that is unique and very different, is a good starting point for a revolution.

This is not very convincing though, because the cheap, but otherwise poorly-specced PC could do something useful, e.g., run spreadsheets. "Web3" can't do anything useful yet that's not already predicated on its own value, that is, sure you can "transfer value" with Bitcoin or Etherium, but that's predicated on those "tokens" actually having value. Its value is built on itself. The PC on the other hand had fundamental value.

HN wasn't around when Web2.0 became a thing, but I don't remember Slashdot being filled with constant articles justifying Web2.0. I'm am just forgetting or were we as a community a lot less divided about it?

It was less divided, but that was at least in part because "Web 2.0" was about the web. This usage of "web3" to mean crypto/blockchain has nothing to do with the web, and therefore feels completely absurd to me.

Web 2.0 was a label created to describe an emergent trend (ajax, rich ui, rounded corners, drop shadows) that was well underway by the time the label was popular.

web3 seems to be attempting the reverse: popularize the label first and hope the trend follows.

I think there was less to be divided about. Back then, the best the evangelist could do was create a blog and try to game SEO to get noticed. They could post on a few popular forums, but discoverability was limited and algorithms designed to pump engagement didn't exist because social media platforms were in their infancy. It's a different world today. The barrier is lower. Blogging influentially is as easy as posting a medium article and pushing it on the social media platforms. So specific voices which tend to be controversial are getting way more amplified. Then the algorithms just creates echo chambers to keep the users engaged to pump up the ad revenue.

That being said, Web 2.0 had two primary themes and business value propositions. It was social media/ads, and e-commerce. Those were pretty clear and there was no confusion about how money would be made. Out of those was born what I like to call Web 2.5, where basically every industry was getting SaaSified in one form or another. Out of this was born big data and the emergence of the most recent ML hype due to the need to create these algos to maximize ad driven profit.

Crypto/Decentralization/Web 3.0 has a much much more challenging road ahead to get mass adoption. Outside of the obvious scaling issues decentralization brings about, decentralized apps have a much less clear path to monetization. That's in essence why they need to create their own economies with tokens and crypto. Really for "Web 3.0" to be successful, we are looking towards a whole scale reimagining of how economies function. This is entirely different than using the internet to create analogs to real world things like stores or newspapers.

The value proposition of social media was abundant, and the path to profitability was clear. Ditto for ecommerce platforms. Ditto for the majority of SaaS applications.

I think the fundamental divide here is talking about Web 3.0, (or ICOs, DApps, DeFi, NFTs, or w/e the "use case" of the day is), generally seems to be avoiding talking about the true value proposition of decentralization, which will face such tremendous resistance from powerful world governments, that it's akin to a war being fought to creating a new world order and evolution of how human society is shaped. The stakes are much higher and failure is much more likely.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the most successful projects just end up being centralized layers on top of the protocols and all they really end up doing is usurping the place of some existing Web 2.0 platforms due to some network effect pushed forward by a few key influencers. That's essentially what happened with TCP/IP and HTTP. I don't see why it will be any different this time.

“ If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database that is not controlled and administered by a single company, but instead is a truly open system available to all, then that kind of market power cannot be built up around a data asset”.

When I use a service I hardly think which fat cat I’m feeding. It just has to work good and fast for me.

public data isn't going to keep things decentralized because data isn't the only thing that matters, if anything it matters less and less. Core part of what large internet services do is process data and provide services built on top of a lot of compute.

We have big internet companies because processing that amount of information is computationally expensive and thus centralization is the economic solution. Not even traditional p2p solutions have yet been able to compete with large entities, and 'web3' with its crypto solutions is substantially worse because it's computationally more expensive by design.

Not to mention there's also the fairly obvious point that a lot of those companies exist by processing data that is inherently private because users demand it to be so. Nobody is willingly going to put their chat messages on the blockchain to be read by the public.

I'm flabbergasted over the web3 term, and that anyone is using it unironical. The web2.0 term, went from something that was a bit awkward but ok in the beginning, to something that you want to laugh at people using. Then someone takes that, adds one to it, and thinks it's a good name for their tech?

In fiction, Hiro Protagonist got in early and bought some prime real-estate in the metaverse. Many IRL did the same with Bitcoin and made a killing. If you think all the lucrative web2 properties have already been claimed, then it makes sense to create virgin territory in web3 and stake a claim.

Hiro delivered pizzas and lived in a storage unit with a roommate. His metaverse "wealth" was essentially worthless to him in real life. Real-life real estate is valuable because they're not making more land. Virtual real estate does not have that limitation.

(Also IIRC he helped create the Metaverse, he didn't simply buy in early.)

"bought in early" by investing his time.

Web3 will succeed if it succeeds in creating artificial scarcity - just as Bitcoin has succeeded in doing. I am pessimistic, but there are lots of people who think otherwise. I do think that it will have a "real-estate" aspect to it soas to have scarcity of place.

Here's a thought: can we repurpose all the Bitcoin computation to doing something useful like rendering the metaverse?

I posted a while ago a comment that large tech companies and their investors are not really motivated for decentralized systems, but that they have to tell the markets they are. Otherwise they will face increasing regulatory and liability pressure due to how they wield control and power over their platforms and customers / users (products). On the one hand they want to be shielded from the effects of running large, centralized systems, but on the other hand, they don't want to give up their walled gardens, customer lock-in, captive audience, no right-to-repair benefits. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29449724

We already have Web 3.0.

It consists of walled gardens of pushed content where acquiring a user means capturing a user by making it as impractical as possible to leave.

But no one shouts about this. The 'new' web should be about optimism, growth, right? That's what justifies future 'value'.

Web 2.0 peaked a little more than a decade. An era of 'pulling', actual recommendations from people, of bigenoughtopaybills for heavy content but sufficiently decentralised to have competition.

It is easier than ever to do something and that's what petrifies incumbents into closing their gates as tightly as they can. For you are the treasure they hoard.

Web3 is nothing but an echo chamber. A very empty echo chamber, so it echoes pretty nice. I'm back to the worldwide web.

Perhaps you mean World Wide Web. ;-)

Perhaps I do.

Yes the marketing is annoying, but have you actually experimented with the world of Web3. Have you played with defi, bought in early any gaming tokens? The fact that all of this can happen on-chain where it's completely transparent is really unique. It's why there has been so many companies explode into the 50M-100M revenue range in 2021 - https://consensys.net/reports/web3-report-q3-2021/

No, can't afford it

Can we stop talking about web3 unless we're talking about an actual spec, service or product?

Why? Web3 is an idea/concept, much like the web itself or the internet (neither are "an actual spec, service or product"), but we can still discuss the web and the internet no?

The Web and the Internet are the sum of it's protocols plus the infrastructure build on top of it plus the untangible social effects it has. This is true for Web3 as well, but the protocols are in their infancy, the infrastructure is sparse and the sociale effects (as of now) concentrated in the blockchain space. The parent comment wants to discuss those three topics (maybe minus the social implications) with regards to what amounts mostly to a buzzword right now, precisely because Web3's protocols, infrastructure and social implications are far to under developed to warrant serious discussion concerning long-time stable solutions to real-world problems. I sympathise with earlier comments, that would like to seperate Web3 from blockchain and crypto-coins precisely to discuss the possible merits or protocols actually fullfilling what the crypto space right now fails to deliver on.

Sorry, there are none. Only premined ICO scams, crypto speculation and NFT scams/speculation.

The linked post[1], ironically, really helps to cement why I consider web3 to be interesting technologically but mostly nonsense from a product perspective.

> As a first approximation all the big powerful internet companies are really database providers. Facebook is a database of people’s profiles, their friend graphs and their status updates. Paypal is a database of people’s account balances. Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials and purchase histories. Google is a database of web pages and query histories.

This is profoundly, naively, staggeringly wrong. The products that these companies provide to users[2] are not "the databases" - they are "the ability to do useful, meaningful, real-life impactful things". Facebook is not valuable as a service because of its database - it's valuable because I am able to interact with that database in ways that result in other people seeing the thing that I posted. PayPal is not useful to me because of those recorded balances - it is useful because merchants and financial institutions respect those balances are being equivalent to money. And so on - Amazon is useful because things actually show up at my door, Google is useful because it can use those links/queries to serve me the page that I was searching for.

This is, ironically, why many claims of web3's supremacy fall flat. As this[3] long-but-very-worthwhile rant about NFTs in gaming makes clear, simply claiming "ownership" is almost meaningless for anything other than simple financial transactions (which, I callously suspect, is 99% of what web3 is actually intended for anyway). If you want to say that you "own" a video game gun, that's all well-and-good - but to actually use it in a new game, that requires implementation effort from coders and artists, balancing, support, etc. In fact, the pleasant-sounding ideal of "own your digital assets anywhere!" is nonsense - it's meaningless to _own_ something if you can't actually _do_ anything with it. Ironically, it is actually _better_ for the customer to have their data/assets/what-have-you in a single database owned-and-operated by a single company - because then there is a reason for that company to continue to provide support for interactions _with_ that data.

Don't get me wrong - the commodification of customer data by Big Tech enrages and unsettles me, too, and I feel uncomfortable with the fact that we mostly rent internet services rather than owning them. But I've yet to see a convincing argument that Web3's notion of "ownership" actually results in anything tangible, anything other than bragging rights. If there's a way of effecting that ownership such that you can actually _do_ something with it (other than selling it), I'll be interested.

[1] https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto...

[2] Obviously, those databases are valuable to advertizing, targeting, marketing, etc. companies, but I'm focusing on the customer experience here. You can't build up a valuable database if you cannot attract customers - and, anyway, isn't one of the whole points of web3 that customer data _isn't_ for sale? (A likely story...)

[3] https://t.co/0X0mMRFD2O

Appreciated your third paragraph and 3rd link. I'm struggling with my own articulation about how NFTs dont intrinsically themselves add value and yet are being treated/described as such, and this helped clarify it a bit for me.

Honestly, the linked article about NFTs in Video Games was what really helped me with my articulation. It's long, but I really recommend it.

The situation makes me sad, because I think that Web3/NFTs/etc. are some really interesting technologies, and I really align the aims that they _claim_ to be supporting (whether all proponents actually _do_ support those aims, or are merely claiming to do so in order to make a quick buck, is a different question). But the implementations that exist, and the environmental damage that they currently cause, make them utterly unsupportable to me.

That's just so blatantly and obviously false it's rather remarkable that he wrote it.

Absolutely nothing stops companies from becoming the dominant providers - aka big tech - that utilize said database at the application layer. Indeed that's exactly what will happen. You don't need to own the database to build a big tech monopoly on top of it. Microsoft didn't own the primary distribution channel for Windows 95, and they didn't own the hardware it ran on either. Google (search, circa 1999) didn't own the Internet, or the PC, or the operating system, or the cable line, or the telecom infrastructure, and so on. Consumers develop preferences, companies develop advantages (through superior products or other means), and the market dominance centralizes to one or a few providers. That's always inevitable short of government intervention. You don't have to own the database to build a monopoly on top of it. The better products (or via other leverage points) will win out and dominate and will be extraordinarily difficult to compete with, their advantage will become entrenched as their product gains in complexity and capability (ie competing with Google in 1998 was far easier than it would have been by 2012, as they scaled their capabilities and made enormous investments globally); the cost to keep up the with the winners soars and few will try (see: lack of dozens or hundreds of new competitors to Uber and Lyft, few are even trying at this point, the potential competition gives up for obvious reasons).

Say hello to Coinbase & Co. We've already seen this process in action in crypto, many times over.

I agree that statement around market power is wrong. What I'm hopeful about, is that Web3 increases the amount of the stack that is open to anyone to build on top of. That will hopefully increase competition and decrease rent-seeking by whichever dominant players emerge.

Build something! All this talking makes me suspect this just to increase the hype around and price of various crypto currencies.

I see a few ways where blockchain/token/NFT/DAO technology/structure makes sense for enterprises - unfortunately I can't elaborate.

In the U.S., VC's are the only ones that can contribute and speed up projects, since the SEC has no safe harbors that allow smaller startups to innovate. So either do not innovate or try with the worry of the SEC killing your project. It's best for smaller projects to not allow any U.S. investment, but even then you may have a problem.

It kind of seems as if the U.S. is protecting Wall Street from Web3 under the guise of protecting retail investors. There are a lot of players that are currently collecting "Economic Rent" that may be displaced by Web3 innovation.

But there is also a lot of hype and streams of B.S. on twitter, where I had to unsubscribe to a few of the gurus, and wondered if all they did is produce fodder for the masses Aping into Crypto, so they can be brought to slaughter.

Cheers

Open food facts is an example of an open database that doesn't need snake oil to thrive. If you really want to decentralize access to data then the focus should be on open source and publicly available data dumps.

https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data

> It all comes down to the database that sits behind an application. If that database is controlled by a single entity (think company, think big tech), then enormous market power accrues to the owner/administrator of that database.

This is entirely a false premise. Market power accrues to the popular, no matter how structured.

Global finance will eventually be eclipsed by large-scale economic planning systems. It will probably take a couple decades for finance to go the way of alchemy, but the signs of its irrelevance are there: hilarious schemes like SPACs, DeFi, NFTs. Totally divorced from the underlying economics.

Interesting take. I’m not sure many would agree with you. Care to expand or point us somewhere where your ideas are expanded?

I'd be interested too. I've seen takes loosely along these lines before, but my familiarity is pretty shallow and I don't remember specific sources. There's a line of thought that traditional pro-capitalism analysis of the "economic calculation problem" would tell us that a massive corporate retailer like Walmart should be mired in inefficiency compared to retailers with more localized authority (e.g. regional or franchised chains). Since that's not what we see, something must be missing from the analysis. For example, some have proposed that technological advancements (in fields including telecommunications, logistics, and accounting) have made centralization radically cheaper and more effective since the 1980s or so.

I was being provocative -- finance will not totally disappear, but it will play a greatly diminished role in human economies. Successful national economies will adopt a tech-driven, centralized approach to economics. The global, eternally-fungible USD, and all the problems it brings, will cease to exist.

Non-transferable, expiring, digital currencies may be employed in limited domains, for example "food credits" or "fuel credits". This means that free markets will still exist much like today, you can shop for whatever food you want, but you now can't use your "food money" for e.g. financial speculation or buying a new car. This unlocks UBI as a practical solution to many societal problems. You can give everyone $250 foodbucks a week with 1 month expiration and not worry about massive financial fraud & waste. Price mechanism still works, food industry is still competing for your foodbucks which would be converted into some other representation of economic value upon purchase.

Libertarians will lose their minds at this, but frankly the nations that adopt a centralized tech-driven economy will vastly outperform those still based on legacy financial systems. In fact, they already are beginning to. There is so much waste in the current American economy and yet most Americans are still struggling to pay rent and put food on the table.

The alternative future is the one described by DeFi/web3 crowd, which is essentially based on a deep misunderstanding of what finance and money is about and how they relate to the actual economy. They tend to view economics as a subset of finance ("fix the money, fix the world") when really it's the other way around, and finance itself is nonessential.

What an articulate description of your views. Thank you!

I know it was only a subset of your comment, but I’m very curious how an expiring subcurrency would function in an real economy.

How would you propose regulations work for a food credits “black market”, e.g. I will pay you 150 general-purpose capital credits for your 200 food bucks?

Would non-digital cash be completely done away with? What about objects of value that could be given to others? Would the transfer of expiring assets for non-expiring assets be prohibited? What about favors and more subtle ways of transfer?

How would food credits be legitimately redeemed? Would a small shop that complies with policy be able to instantly convert a food credits profit into capital that they could use to expand their business?

All of these limited currencies would exist on a centralized government platform; no physical currency.

There would be no third-party ability to create/transform these currencies. So all swaps/trades would have to be done on the official platform or via its APIs, which you could of course integrate into third-party websites. The govt could even run markets (with tariffs to discourage volatility) to swap between different currencies.

Frankly, >90% of the tech infrastructure is already here in America between corps like Amazon and Stripe. We just need to go the extra mile to "nationalize" these corps and integrate them into one huge economic system. A monumental task, to be sure. But the road is already being paved by less liberal nations.

I think you are right and I think China is leading the way here.

Before I heard about web3, I started thinking about some of the same questions that are trying to be answered by web3. How can I start using systems where I own my data and control access to it via tools? Is it possible to shift towards tools that can use my data in a common format but allow me to switch tools? What should be free and what do I pay for? What is identity - how do I prove that I am who I say I am? Those are the questions I had before hearing about web3, so to me it has become an umbrella term to loosely define the conversation space about these questions (and many other related ones that I didn't originally have).

Forget the nonsense words for a second, if someone showed up offering you an "investment" that could double your money overnight, you ALREADY know it is a scam.

How does shouting "blockchain" a lot make it somehow less scammy?

I get the ideals of DeFi, but it all runs on physical sandblasters, in brick buildings, built inside nation states.

It's a nice LARP, but it isn't real, until you can somehow decouple it from the planet and our ecosystem.

Enough already, flag this crap off the site.

My beef with posts like this is that they think it’s sufficient to make an abstract claim without offering specific supporting examples of the differentiation they’re claiming exists.

I wrote a post trying to unpack the abstract claim using specific hypothetical scenarios [1]. I’ve never seen a single pro-Web3 post engaging at the same level of specificity.

[1] https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/why-web3s-shared-data-across-...

This seems fine. Fred’s up-front about this being a belief and a bet, not an eventuality. That’s what I expect from investors, and what they should be - along with having basic accounting sense.

The crux of web3 is the UX, last mile, and/or listing problem: even if you, hypothetically, could find a decentralized solution for every centralized one, the last interface to this mechanism will be centralized.

Your UI (e.g. mobile app) is centralized so the best UI will eventually win because most end users care about UX or will enter this interface because they see a well paid ad. If this UI (e.g. a decentralized search engine interface) wants to censor some content then it will win over the decentralized protocol behind it.

Why would UI need to be centralized? Even in normal SPAs the client is making most of the work, the UI is fairly trivial to decentralize and there were a few examples on hn already.

This is very simple: imagine you have decentralized Uber/Lyft so now all the logic occurs in a decentralized way.

Now, Uber^2 publishes a great mobile app, the mobile app is obviously centralized and they can decide to use or not and how to use the decentralized mechanism because they are the winners as the UX.

Isn't this obvious?

Oh you're thinking that centralized apps would always produce better UX for some reason? I think centralized apps are making UX necessarily worse, because they implement dark patterns in order to milk their users, while in a decentralized ones you can just make your own. For example, matrix vs discord, one I can customize and interact with however I want the other is garbage and if I change anything I will get banned.

The topic at hand is mainstream adoption and I think empirically the world disagrees with you.

I'm sure you believe mainstream adoption is a consequence of a software having good UX and being very useful, I don't.

Mainstream adoption is independent if the app is centralized or not. You are ignoring the people who use Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, etc. People care about the brand offering not if they are decentralized or not.

You're right that the UX layer could be centralized. However, the data that the UX is built on would not be centralized. In the Uber example, it's as if the ride-hailing backend were available to anyone.

The centralized UX could censor transactions like you say, but the barrier to entry is low for another UX, built on the same decentralized data, to emerge and challenge the centralized UX. That's because the data is available to everyone.

> but the barrier to entry is low for another UX

I don't agree. I think excellent UXs have a super high barrier of entry. Look at apps such as Google Docs, TikTok, etc.

A company could build an UX without even thinking about being decentralized and users will care about the UX but not about "decentralization politics". If an excellent decentralized UX is built, you just copy the interesting parts and add you proprietary ones, sell you brand and success!

Google Docs - not just a UX, built on the Google ecosystem with its existing network of users and massive amounts of data

TikTok - not just a UX, but a massive social network, again with lots of data.

In a decentralized world, there will be a decentralized social network like TikTok. The UX would interact with that social network; it wouldn't create the social network itself. To give another example, it's as if Facebook's social network was open to anyone to build a UX on top of and interact with. Much lower barrier to entry.

Web 3.0 is either snakeoil, or a ponzi scheme. Or both.

We'll all know soon enough. After all, it's not like any actual engineers are going to have a say in this: just the donors and their retainers.

Just relax and let it play out. The author is right. Web3 needs to deliver a killer app. Something with broad consumer appeal that would not be possible with web2. Something your mum would use.

If such a thing is never delivered, skeptical you was right and you can have your "told you" moment. If it does get delivered, you were wrong, and we may be at the start of something drastically new.

As tens of billions is flowing into these projects, either outcome is going to be very interesting.

> users can move from application to application, keeping their data (and their login credentials stored in their wallet) as they go

"Keeping their login credentials in their wallet" was already possible a long time ago with client-side TLS/SSL certificates. But web developers didn't want to change from the classic implementation of plaintext passwords.

Porting personal data from one service to another is a problem, so I'll give the author a point for that.

I agree with the comparison to the early web, but this is 1999, not 2003. I'm sure we'll find actual applications for blockchain tech eventually. Some will even be matured versions of what exists currently in DeFi and such. But just like every time people say, "This time it's different," it isn't. We're clearly in a bubble fueled by speculation and hype, and I expect it'll deflate eventually.

The saddest thing about all this is how much real improvement we could make to the world if nerd billionaires would stop chasing stupid ideas they don't understand.

It's like rewriting a codebase. You know it's just going to be expensive, time-consuming, introduce tons of new bugs, and may not even solve the customer's problem. But it feels good, so people bumble forward, confident in their ignorance of the real outcome.

The thing I find perhaps the most telling is what's missing -- namely the lack of discussion around the already-done implementations of the technologies that are being hyped as "web3" things; e.g. there is certainly quite a bit that could be learned from Second Life slash The Sims slash Roblox slash Minecraft, and yet, all hype and no grownup discussion of what could be learned here.

The legitimacy of a worldwide database can be solved if the UN decides to run a MySQL instance, creates APIs for transactions between individuals, and agrees on a worldwide legal framework for transactions. In the eyes of many this would look more legitimate than the "network of terrorists and CP". I don't think that argument is enough

There's already a worldwide API for transactions between individuals. It's called SWIFT.

It's not global though, countries like Iran have had banks disconnected, and subject to various political interests.

That's fair, but that seems like more of a feature than a bug. Why have a system we can't control if there's already one we can use for our interests?

the UN != NATO

Sure, but we != the UN. Why spend energy building something so Iran (your example) can benefit?

The blockchain can be interesting for a small part of a process that requires an immutable public history.

For everything else needed in a distributed internet we should look at the Bittorrent / Scihub / Pirate world that has been delivering distributed content and value for decades from day 1.

But that part will not make money to anybody, just value to a lot of people.

Is it time to start promoting this age-old and non-blockchain decentralized web? I saw an article that called it ''web4'', wouldn't that be a good buzzword to use?

As time goes on, the ever-evolving nature of the predictions about how crypto will change the world for the better keeps looking more and more like the ever-evolving nature of the predictions we were seeing 50 years ago about how the space aliens were going to come along and change the world for the better.

Granted, crypto has a bit of an advantage over the space aliens in the race to realize a transformative impact on the world, by virtue of the fact that it actually exists. That's not the parallel I'm trying to draw here. It's more... it seems that they're both a situation where people are really just attached to this one amorphous romantic idea, and the specifics really don't matter at all. Meaning they can be freely reconfigured, at will and without much limit, in order to ensure we're always talking about something that's off in the future rather than something we might expect to happen now, let alone in the past. Which, something like that is absolutely perfect fodder for daydreaming.

So then I ask myself, "Is kicking a ball through it a core part of the plan, or is this goalpost really just a thing that's fun to move around?"

Perhaps my problem is that there's not really any romance in my soul.

>That was also a time of great cynicism. We almost did not get our first fund raised. Nobody was buying the story we were telling.

Not sure I understand the parallel being drawn here when the market cap of crypto currently stands at over $2T. Clearly, plenty of people are buying.

This reads like an obligatory post on the topic with no real substance. I’m on mobile so it’s a good opportunity to succinctly express what I view as the major, near-future positives for Web3:

- identity and trustless SSO via things like ENS and “sign in with {client such as metamask}”

- data sovereignty, or at least less platform lock-in, especially for low/no code users

- grants, crowdfunding, and other financial support for useful open-source projects. This may be the most provably successful outcome to date in Web3; I’m confident I could cite enough sources here with a little homework.

I encourage all readers to disassociate (or rather decouple) the terms “cryptocurrency” and “NFT” from Web3. Web3, while still fairly nebulous, in my current understanding, is mostly protocol-level implementations of web paradigms incorporating decentralized technologies. Like any growing technology, there will be many variations, and the unscrupulous outliers should not overshadow the constellation of fascinating things humanity can speedrun with these new building blocks.

The SSO thing has come up before. Trustless, decentralized, immutable databases are essentially the exact opposite of what you want in an SSO system; it's hard to think of an application where blockchain technology has less promise than SSO, which is about fine-grained policy control, out-of-band account recovery (the hardest problem in SSO), instantaneous revocation, and centralization of controls.

Anytime the ENS sign in stuff is brought up, I feel obligated to point out the following:

Alex Van de Sande, the co-founder of ENS, posted in 2018 an interesting demo with UniLogin, "[Universal Logins demo for Ethereum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5t94cCg6XE)". [The project was abandoned in 2020](https://medium.com/universal-ethereum/out-of-gas-were-shutti...).

This is a hard problem that needs a fantastic solution. I don't think sign in with Ethereum is better than UniLogin. UniLogin was good, the team was smart, and this was still too much of a problem for them to feel like it was worth their time to solve.

Then there's the significant problem of state expiry. How do you log out? I don't see that they're really addressing this problem. Right now the EIP has the attitude to "push that problem down to the servers". Websites need complete solutions, not more problems. Others have already made progress down this road, and I don't see anything different from what has already been done before.

I feel sad that this beautiful thing has been usurped by shysters, grifters and scumbags. Web3 is decentralization. Not crypto, not blockchain, not your shitcoin, not your mining and most definitely not your NFTs.

We need to take it back for our children's sake.

I'm on board

How?

What is the name of this cognitive bias that shows up in all web3 conversations about how internet/web2 ended up being a success and therefore web3 will too? If X led to Y, then Z that (we say) is similar to X will also lead to Y.

Maybe hindsight bias? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

false equivalence

I heard somewhere that Web2 was “Do no evil” and Web3 is “Can’t do evil”.

Web 3.0 is either snakeoil, or a Ponzi scheme. Or both.

We'll all know soon enough. After all, it's not like any actual engineers are going to have a say in this: just the donors and their retainers.

Every commenter in this thread should disclose their web3 holdings as part of their comments.

I have a fairly large doge holding that I mined in the very beginning and haven't felt like dealing with.

I hate the name - were we not at web3.0 already? I am rooting for decentralized solutions, but I could barely muster the energy to look up what "web3" is supposed to be.

there are no practical use cases for blockchain outside of git

why not sell an existing service as a new one by swapping the current database for a private centrally controlled blockchain? Think of all the cheddar.

Wonder what Fred thinks about having a single-shared database (Ethereum) vs. having multiple shared databases (SOLUNAVAX).

VC: "The key innovation is this new database!"

Points to slowest / lowest throughput / most expensive database ever designed

Sigh.

Centralization of power and money is not a technical problem, and does not have a technical solution. Period.

I still don't get the economics of this. Who is paying for the hosting and maintenance costs?

Why does "Web3" need venture capital. More specifically, why are VC pushing for Web3.

I can only assume they have invested a lot in ETH mining because gas fees are insane

what's web3? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A blockchain of NFTs!

be wary of any person talking about you're going to have this big distributed consensus, based on some kind of buy-in to something, without first finding out who has the most buy-in, and just what it takes to overcome their %.

I think the focus on data openness is overly simplistic. Blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and Tezos are attracting a lot of brainpower and capital. This is occurring because of price action, for sure, but also because of their ability to allow actors to interact with each other in a way that minimizes the amount of trust required from any single actor in the system. They do this by distributing trust among different actors in the system via an economic game that incentivizes actors to cooperate with the rules defined by the protocol.

To put it another way, you're using software, cryptography, and game theory to minimize (not replace) the need for rules and rent-seeking middleman, banks for example. The promise is that this technology will mostly (not completely) replace these middlemen, thereby cutting down on the negative impacts of monopolies, and will democratize the creation and use of financial assets.

Some initial use cases:

Lending and borrowing. Solend automatically matches borrowers and lenders, allowing lenders to earn interest on any asset on the Solana blockchain. You can currently earn 6% on USD-backed stablecoins, and withdraw at any time. Compare that to your current checking or savings account.

Purchasing and creating ETFs. TokenSets allows you to create a financial instrument, called a Set, backed by any tokens you want, in any allocation. The protocol will automatically buy/sell the underlying assets for you. Then, that Set can be traded as well. The possibilities are endless.

Distributed wireless infrastructure. Helium Network sells wireless routers, and distributes rewards to routers that provide coverage to the network. Tokens are used to purchase network bandwidth. They have nearly 400K hotspots worldwide.

Some more links if you're interested:

https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/what-do-we-mean-by-blo...

https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/blockchain-tutorial/wh...

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4468835-solend-defi-lending...

https://www.tokensets.com/

https://www.helium.com/

> You can currently earn 6% on USD-backed stablecoins, and withdraw at any time. Compare that to your current checking or savings account.

Sure, I’m comparing an investment with high counterparty risk to an FDIC-insured savings account. Seems like apples and oranges.

It's true that there's currently some regulatory arbitrage, but it's more than that. Our financial systems and products have been slow to change and have unnecessary friction and rent-seeking. Companies with competencies in fintech, insurtech, and web3 are building newer systems that provide a better consumer experience.

Like getting rugpulled? Or getting hacked and having funds unrecoverable? I’m not quite understanding the better customer experience you speak of.

Rugpulls and other hacks are a risk, but will become less of a risk over time as the tech gets more stable, and third party insurance solutions like Nexus Mutual become more widespread.

The better customer experience in the lending example is higher yields on savings and checking accounts.

If you don't see the problem being solved, it's you.

My web goes to 11.

Accept nothing less.

I am looking for anyone interested in the domain Web3.net

I am the founder of OpenDomain- we have contributed domains worth millions to open source and other causes. All for Free.

I do not understand who benefits and in what way from any of this?

Could you help me out on this?

using a domain allows people to share information easier.

For example, if I wanted to tell a friend about the blockchain, I could share a link to a video I found helpful using email or Twitter.

By using the domain web3.net, we can create an wiki on everything about web3. We could all edit the wiki and learn from others.

I could build this site myself and slap some advertising on it, but I would rather follow the Wikipedia model. I want to work with lots of people that want to learn about Web 3

But we can do so much more than just a wiki.

I know how domains work, what I dont get is why donating millions worth of domains make sense.

Are you running a charity of some sort?

OpenDomain is a non-profit.

Some people contribute years of their time to help open source projects. OpenDomain does it by contributing domains.

The biggest issue I see for web3 and permissionless data is the same issue we complain about with the Facebook debate...

How do we manage the tradeoff between misinformation and censorship?

Permissionless swings the pendulum to one extreme which would seem to lead to an existential dilemma.

This is trying to solve a social problem (capitalism concentrates power and is anti-democratic) with a technical solution. Just provision services using tax dollars with democratically accountable boards and you get "permissionless data" by posting the database online with additional support provisioned on a sliding scale based on ability to pay with a large free tier.

because institutions lost their influence

no kids reads newspaper, nor they watch the TV, traditional propaganda has no effect on them

web3 would be a way to centralize everything again, so propaganda could be better targeted, opinions controlled, and easily censor-able

you lol'd at china and their social credit score system? don't be jealous, you'll have yours! but it wont be about being a good citizen, it'll be about being a servant consumerist

i see web3.0 as a way for the establishment to regain the influence they lost on their people

the boomers trying to stay relevant

the people late to the internet party, can't have a piece of the cake, so they want to force their way in

a way for societal scammers to keep doing what they love doing

NFT people? they can't wait selling art they bought for $5 from fivers and pretend you own a piece of a database they rent on digital ocean for $5 a month

lol, what a wonderful plan, definitely something China is jealous of, no wonder they are looking for ways to get the hell out of this planet and conquer the space

because there is one thing that would definitely kill our species, if the west tries to expand its shitty society outside of this dying planet

i mean, people dream of meta verse, how ridiculous, therefore i can be ridiculous with my posts too! who cares, we not looking for transcending humankind, are we? my bad my bad, i mean, you not even trying lol

A lot of HN hate on Web3... is the alternative to lay down and let big tech win?

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