I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.
The exclusive communities you mention only have value because of the hype and FOMO and high dollar amounts that people see being made on sales of "exclusive" NFTs or some such. Same as many of the many crypto pumps, same as the dotcom bubble, same as tulips. Same as it ever was.
Yeah, but this actually works.
Like it or not, people are already using their wallets as their username. And they're trading cryptographic assets. And everyone can see it because it's public.
This isn't theoretical.
I've been to PGP key-signing parties. I can assure you that this is not that.
Exchanging public keys worked for decades before blorkchains were even a word.
How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information.
So how exactly is that different from using my google account to login to some webservice?
Yes, and what maps that to your physical identity? How is that any different from showing someone a public key you just generated with GPG?
For what it’s worth, I recently read Moxie Marlinspike’s essay on web3, and I think he crystallised one of the most interesting insights I’ve ever heard on that topic:
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust.
I think he’s correct, and the cryptocurrency of the future – the one which actually takes off as a medium of exchange – will do exactly what we’re arguing about here. It will use purely cryptography as its mechanism, instead of large groups of servers acting as the gatekeeper. You’ll be able to send money to someone with purely a public key, no servers required, just you and them as peer-to-peer. And, as a corollary, you’ll be able to prove your balance with only a key and the encrypted data of your past transactions. I’ve barely stopped thinking about my envisioned implementation for the past couple of weeks.
that's a very very liberal equivalence to make. decentralized authority in practice is just a collection of servers in aggregate that come to consensus according to a certain protocol.
I can't use blockchain to pay pretty much any vendor I buy things from without an intermediary - the intermediary requires me to log in to a website and unless I'm willing to go through a lot of trouble (more trouble than dealing with PGP) an intermediary will also be storing my wallet and have "physical" control of all my "coins." Blockchain works to the extent that you aren't really using blockchain but simply a trusted intermediary.
If you're actually personally managing your wallet keys it's worse than PGP. With PGP if you lose your key you just say so and people figure it out, you have to go to some key signing parties. With Bitcoin if you lose your key you have no money, end of story, no recourse.
PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?
Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...
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I thought the whole point of decentralisation was that you couldn't be banned though.
I do that without any involvement of a blorkchain on a daily basis. Everytime I use my ssh key to connect to a server that knows my public key.
Can someone provide me with a clear example of this being implemented? AFAIK accessing blockchain from a traditional client(website/app) still requires going through a central node.
Did something change with 'Web3'? Pardon me for not being up-to-date but it's like one day I woke up and Web3 is all over the place it seems like well-coordinated, heavily funded campaign. How else can we explain this seemingly sudden trend of Web3?
I assume it would make the application much simpler because there would not need to be any or very little user-account management, no sending bills or charging credit-cards. Just gimme them bitcoins. The user-state could be stored on the client-machine, unless they especially want to pay for us backing it up on the cloud. Still it could be backed up anonymously, identified by the wallet.
No more hacking, if there were no user-accounts or passwords there would be nothing to hack.
Sure, you can publish your wallet address and tell them to send you money. How do you give them access to your content after they have sent their money? How is Bitcoin helping compared to you publishing your IBAN account number and asking for money to be sent directly there?
I wouldn't need to "send bills" because I wouldn't know who my users are. Except that when they login with their crypto-id my application will do work for them, because they have crypto-paid for it.
I wouldn't need to charge credit-cards since they transfer the bitcoins to my account. I only need to know their id and that they have paid me a specific amount of crypto, and that id has used a certain amount of my application.
There needs to be the infra-structure associated with crypto-currency, but not much else. That would make things simpler, I assume. That's my point. Crypto can presumably make payments and user-accounts management simpler. The less you know about your users, the less there is to manage.
The webshop exposes some way of receiving value tokens, be that USD, EUR or BTC, and has some way to tell which user transferred how many tokens.
So technically there is no difference.
The difference is, I can be pretty sure that EUR won't lose 20% of their value overnight.
If you want to accept bitcoin, you run a piece of software and write a few lines of code.
I am okay with that.
Want to accept lightning (bitcoin over a low cost and high speed payment network)? It’s an api call to generate an invoice and another api call to see if that invoice has been paid. Again you can run everything yourself or use a managed service. Bitcoin make programmatic payment processing SO MUCH EASIER than traditional payment rails.