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Comment by i_hate_pigeons | Hacker News Reader

I don't really know much about web3 or what it will happen in the future, but these same debates happened ith other techs before which are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this here.

People like pointing out echo chambers all around while they are also in one.

Remember all the feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers! web2.0 s just ajax requests!

If people dump money into it, then something is likely to come out whether is better or not than what it was before. Maybe is worse, or maybe something will be built on top of it that will be better or some othere political event might make it relevant. Who knows

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It’s called survivorship bias. Most things that people called bullshit we don’t remember because they were bullshit so why would we remember.

Now “crypto” is a little different because the the promise (not always followed though on, it’s still negative sum) of money to anyone who can bring themselves to believe. Like many bubbles and ponzi-like schemes before it’s primary functionally is to promote itself, and damn that’s one of the few things it’s really good at.

"but these same debates happened ith other techs before which are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this here"

They really didn't. In my 20+ year tech career I have never seen any new technology prove anywhere near as divisive as web3/crypto.

Before we mostly had to deal with people emotionally invested in a new thing, now they’re all financially invested as well. It makes for a different conversation.

Yes: the financial aspect definitely seems to have changed this — I share Simon's impression, and what this reminds me most of wasn't tech but the adjacent stock market circa late 1999/2000. If you knew a day trader at the time, they would be hyping up random stocks talking about how it was a sure thing to be the next Pets.com but if you asked them any questions at all it immediately became apparent that they had no idea about how that company worked, what the competitive environment was like, or how they could possibly become profitable. Some of them made fairly large amounts of money talking things up and selling before the inevitable drop but quite a few others were left holding the bag.

That level of confident ignorance is the prevailing tone of the cryptocurrency world: everyone talks about changing the world but it's extremely hard to find someone who actually understands the details of the business they're trying to get into or why it works the way it currently does, but they don't let that stop them because they've already bought in they stand to lose potentially quite large sums of money if they can't find buyers.

> feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers!

Unlike the crypto ecosystem, those offered a tradeoff of higher cost and less control for greater convenience and ease of management. Which was hugely successful.

They're also not ... hegemonizing? in the way that cryptocurrency seems to be advocated.

My main point being that such tradeoff wasn't obvious at the time, and also the cloud offering back then was very inferior to what it has evolved into and that we are familiar now

I'm not saying the same will neccessarily repeat with so called web3, but we might be at a similar stage - in this case the sensation(?) of ownership of one's content is a desired attribute at the expense of efficiency in computing/processing terms for some use cases

it's pretty much the wild west now and not fully understood, but if it attracts investment with time something might come out of it.

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